The Last Love Song (101 page)

Didion in her yellow Corvette, Los Angeles, November 1970.
(Julian Wasser/The LIFE Images Collection/Getty Images)

Didion and Dunne, October 1972.
(Frank Edwards/Archive Photos/Getty Images)

Didion at home in Malibu, 1977.
(CSU Archives/Everett Collection/Newscom)

Didion on the street in New York, March 2009.
(Nancy Kaszerman/ZUMAPRESS/Newscom)

President Obama presents Didion with a National Humanities Medal at the White House, July 2013.
(Polaris)

Didion next to her typewriter in Brentwood, 1988.
(Nancy Ellison/Polaris)

Didion with Vanessa Redgrave in Didion's New York apartment, discussing the stage production of
The Year of Magical Thinking,
May 2006.
(Chester Higgins/
The New York Times
/Redux)

Dominick Dunne, Didion, and Quintana at John Gregory Dunne's memorial service at Saint John the Divine.
(Don Hogan/
The New York Times
/ Redux)

Didion, Quintana, and Abigail McCarthy, New York, September 1977.
(Don Hogan/
The New York Times
/Redux)

Didion in New York, September 2012.
(Teresa Zabala/
The New York Times
/Redux)

 

Notes

PREFACE: NARRATIVE LIMITS

“I used to say I was a writer”: Didion quoted in Carrie Tuhy, “Joan Didion: Stepping into the River Styx, Again,”
Publishers Weekly,
September 30, 2011; available at
www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/authors/profiles/article/48908-joan-didion-stepping-into-the-river-styx-again.html
.

“This book is called
Slouching Towards Bethlehem
”: Joan Didion,
Slouching Towards Bethlehem
(New York: Modern Library, 2000), xxv.

“This book is called
Blue Nights
”: Joan Didion,
Blue Nights
(New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2011), 4.

“generalizing impulse”: Susan Sontag,
Where the Stress Falls
(New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2001), 16.

“It occurred to me”: Joan Didion,
Political Fictions
(New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2001), 19.

“No one who ever passed through an American public high school”: ibid., 215.

“It is a truth universally acknowledged”: Jane Austen,
Pride and Prejudice
(New York: W. W. Norton, 2001), 3.

“All happy families”: Leo Tolstoy,
Anna Karenina
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995) translated by Louise Maude and Aylmer Maude, 1.

“We tell ourselves stories in order to live” and “doubt the premises”: Joan Didion,
The White Album
(New York: Simon & Schuster, 1979), 11.

“was meant to know the plot”: ibid., 13.

“love was sex”: ibid., 21.

“believe in the narrative”: ibid., 13.

“I watched Robert Kennedy's funeral”: ibid.

“conservative California Republicans”: Didion
, Political Fictions,
7.

“lucky star”: David Beers,
Blue Sky Dream: A Memoir of America's Fall from Grace
(New York: Doubleday, 1996), 17.

“John Wayne rode through my childhood”: Didion,
Slouching Towards Bethlehem,
27.

“supposed to give the orders” and “I did not grow up”: ibid.

“shocked and to a curious extent personally offended”: Didion,
Political Fictions,
7.

“characterized by venality and doubt”: Didion,
Slouching Towards Bethlehem,
27.

“I think people who grew up in California”: Barbara Isenberg
, State of the Arts: California Artists Talk About Their Work
(New York: William Morrow, 2001), 331–32.

“passive” and “strange, conflicted”: quoted in Didion,
The White Album,
14, 15.

“I want you to know, as you read me”: ibid., 133–34.

“I belong on the edge of a story”: Joan Didion in conversation with Michael Bernstein, the Revelle Forum at the Neurosciences Institute, University of California at San Diego, October 15, 2002.

She wrote to the magazine's editor: Joan Didion to Jann Wenner, January 7, 1976. Lois Wallace Literary Agency Records, Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin.

In a letter: Maryanne Vollers to
Rolling Stone,
January 18, 1979.

On another occasion: Lois Wallace to Morton Leavy, October 13, 1988. Lois Wallace Literary Agency Records, Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin.

“pretty cool customer”: Joan Didion,
The Year of Magical Thinking
(New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2005), 15.

“Clearly, I'd say anything!”: Joan Didion in conversation with Sloane Crosley at the New York Public Library, November 21, 2011.

“I am so physically small”: Didion,
Slouching Towards Bethlehem,
xxvii–xxviii.

“[W]riting … no longer comes easily to me”: Didion,
Blue Nights,
105.

“[T]here is always a point in the writing”: Didion,
Slouching Towards Bethlehem,
xxvii.