Marriage is for them as much a void as love and sex. In the everyday world there is a pervasive sense of impending peril. Dams may break, rattlesnakes may bite, fires and revolutions may break out, the plumbing may begin to take on a menacing life of its own. Yet personal despair in Didion's universe has wider moral implications. In one place she defines evil as the absence of seriousness, and she is a cultural critic in whose fiction every gesture in an unserious world is morally revealing. These gestures, full of fright, show something is profoundly wrong. The past has been forgotten. Humanity is corrupt, fallen, and doomed. What has been lost is forever irretrievable. It is no wonder, then, that pain and disappointment prevail.
Joan Didion was born on 5 December 1934 to Frank Reese and Eduene Jerrett Didion, a family whose roots in California's Central Valley go back five generations. She was raised in Sacramento as an Episcopalian and attended the University of California at Berkeley, where she took her undergraduate degree in ,1956 and later taught as a visiting lecturer. Winning Vogue magazine's Prix de Paris that same year brought her to New York.
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