Everybody wants to be Joan Didion. Even those brave few who play the dinner party game “Joan or Jones?” and self-identify as team Bridget secretly want to be Joan Didion.
Until her death last year at age 87, Didion was never not a role model, especially to a cohort of young female writers who tried, and still try, to replicate her detached, cool-eyed prose and proto-Olsen sister style. The photographs of Didion that grace tote bags and anchored fashion campaigns showed a wraithlike figure swimming in monochromatic garments, her accessories of choice a can of Coke or a cigarette. Here was living proof that the life of the mind could be unfailingly glamorous, that it was possible to straddle California cool and New York sophistication.
