Joan Didion was one of the greatest influences on my early journalism. An extraordinary writer whose vision saw around corners and through people to get to the core of things. What a talent she had. May she rest in peace with her husband and daughter.🌿
nytimes.com/2021/12/23/boo…
nytimes.com/2021/12/23/boo…
While Joan Didion led an incomparably full life, I am still deeply saddened by her passing. Thinking about how often I used her work in my writing classes and how her work was never dated. My two favorite photos of her, as she challenges her audience. 
I began my writing classes reading her essay "Why I Write" aloud to my students. Her descriptions, her structure, her thought process are all so compacted into that short essay that just encapsulates everything essential to writing in-depth journalism and fiction. What a thinker.
The White Album and Slouching Toward Bethlehem taught me, as a naturally introverted person, so much about interviewing people, so much about story and what readers must know. The Year of Magical Thinking told me about grief. Miami told me about the interstices of politics.
Joan Didion's death now, as everything is on a precipice around us, is emblematic of how things are. We are always suffering losses, now. Always.
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