Joan Didion

(1934 - 2021)

In the preface to her first nonfiction collection, Slouching Towards Bethlehem, Joan Didion wrote, “I am so physically small, so temperamentally unobtrusive, and so neurotically inarticulate that people tend to forget that my presence runs counter to their best interests. And it always does. That is one last thing to remember: writers are always selling somebody out.” She published her second essay collection, The White Album, in 1979.