Didion talks about the fears that harried the writing of ‘Blue Nights’
BooksNov 4, 2011
“Writers,” Joan Didion observed in 1968, “are always selling somebody out.” It’s one of those classic Didion statements, epigrammatic yet personal, a line that unpacks itself the more we consider what it implies. Didion may have been referring to journalism when she wrote that in the preface to “Slouching Towards Bethlehem,” but she was also, as directly as can be imagined, addressing herself.“My only advantage as a reporter is that I am so physically small, so temperamentally unobtrusive, and s
