Joan Didion’s needle-sharp eye never fails

Most collections of journalism are bad. There are two reasons for this: one is that they are usually incoherent and the other is that they are, perversely, far too coherent. The pieces are pulled from their original contexts — newspapers, magazines — and thrown together with others they have no relation to beyond a common author. But (the too-coherent problem) most authors only have one or maybe two ideas to work through, so you end up doing the intellectual equivalent of walking a dozen rounds of the garden when you had hoped to be hiking off into a grand new landscape.

I don’t know what Joan Didion’s one or maybe two ideas are, and I’m not sure she could even be boiled down to anything like that. In the essay ‘Why I Write’, from 1976, she describes her career as an act of obsessive compensation for a particular deficiency:

I knew that I was no legitimate resident in any world of ideas.