She seemed sometimes so sensitive that whole decades hurt her feelings, and the prose on the page suggested Valéry’s “shiverings of an effaced leaf,” as if her next trick might be evaporation. Then as the essays and novels and screenplays proliferated, she turned into a desert lioness of the style pages, part sybilline icon and part Stanford seismograph, alert on the faultlines of the culture to every tremor of tectonic fashion plate. “My only advantage as a reporter,” Joan Didion explained in Slouching Towards Bethlehem, “is that 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.” For awhile there back in the bliss of acid and guitars, she was practically counterrevolutionary, a poster girl for anomie, wearing a bikini but also a migraine to the bon- fires of the zeitgeist.
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