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Joan Didion told an interviewer in 1992 that she "started out thinking things were pretty coherent. Then I was surprised when they weren't. I decided I better tell people." Didion tells stories of disorder in minimalist novels, lyrical reportage, and personal essays. "We tell ourselves stories in order to live," she writes in The White Album (1979). In realizing this existential imperative, she probes the narrative borderlands. Didion confides in Slouching Towards Bethlehem (1968) that when keeping a journal she "always had trouble distinguishing between what happened and what merely might have happened, but I remain unconvinced that the distinction, for my purposes, matters." As a novelist she can go so far as to appear as Joan Didion in her own story. As a literary journalist, however, Didion practices what Michael J. Kirkhorn calls a "scrupulous professional self-consciousness." Didion's lapidary phrasing and acute sensitivity to any kind of cant, counterfeit reality, or political rhetoric informs her best work.
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