De Tenuissimis Clamavi

Wouldn’t you like to be Joan Didion? A lovely young woman whose every novel is hailed as superlative by the critics and whose every collection of essays is saluted as so much better than her fiction? Oh, to be married to an understanding fellow writer; to have an adopted daughter whom you love so much that you measure time and history by her ages (the new house you moved into when she was five, the terrible flood when she was 12); to be of good Western pioneer stock, yet equally at home in chic, sophisticated New York and eccentric, manic California; to be able to pack yourself off, when you need solitude for the writing of a book, to the luxurious Royal Hawaiian Hotel in Honolulu or to the childhood house in Sacramento, where your loving parents will still make you feel protectedly secluded in your adolescent surroundings.

In New York, even your daughter would be talking to Carl Bernstein; in Los Angeles, Janis Joplin and David Hockney would drop in at your house, and Roman Polanski would spill red wine on your white dress. When you were not interviewing or profiling Nancy Reagan or Eldridge Cleaver, you and your husband would be writing screenplays for Otto Preminger or Barbra Streisand (what matter if they never got made—the fun, as one of Miss Didion’s essays informs us, is all in the wheeling and dealing), and the Los Angeles Times would name you one of its “Women of the Year.” But, oh, the price you would have to pay for it! Sensitivity such as Miss Didion bulges and bristles with takes its toll, and she wastes no time in informing usofitin her new collection of essays, The White Album.

JS

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John Simon

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Wouldn’t you like to be Joan Didion? A lovely young woman whose every novel is hailed as superlative by the critics and whose every collection of essays is saluted as so much better than her fiction? Oh, to be married to an understanding fellow writer; to have an adopted daughter whom you love so much that you measure time and history by her ages (the new house you moved into when she was five, the terrible flood when she was 12); to be of good Western pioneer stock, yet equally at home in chic, sophisticated New York and eccentric, manic California; to be able to pack yourself off, when you need solitude for the writing of a book, to the luxurious Royal Hawaiian Hotel in Honolulu or to the childhood house in Sacramento, where your loving parents will still make you feel protectedly secluded in your adolescent surroundings.

In New York, even your daughter would be talking to Carl Bernstein; in Los Angeles, Janis Joplin and David Hockney would drop in at your house, and Roman Polanski would spill red wine on your white dress. When you were not interviewing or profiling Nancy Reagan or Eldridge Cleaver, you and your husband would be writing screenplays for Otto Preminger or Barbra Streisand (what matter if they never got made—the fun, as one of Miss Didion’s essays informs us, is all in the wheeling and dealing), and the Los Angeles Times would name you one of its “Women of the Year.” But, oh, the price you would have to pay for it! Sensitivity such as Miss Didion bulges and bristles with takes its toll, and she wastes no time in informing usofitin her new collection of essays, The White Album.