Podcasts about Didion

On this week's episode, I'm joined by New York Times film critic Alissa Wilkinson to discuss her new book about Joan Didion, We Tell Ourselves Stories. I mentioned the book in a newsletter a couple of weeks back, but I wanted to focus on the ways in which the political world has borrowed showbiz's penchant for image calibration, from the ways in which issues are decided upon to the means by which politicians decide which voters to target. Didion, of course, was a natural observer of these shifts, having spent years in Hollywood before becoming one of the nation's most interesting political observers. If you enjoyed this episode, I hope you both pick up a copy of Alissa's book and share this with friends!

New York Times film critic Alissa Wilkinson discusses her new book, "We Tell Ourselves Stories: Joan Didion and the American Dream Machine," which explores the California author's prescient understanding of how entertainment would colonize American political life. Wilkinson examines Didion's work through the lens of a Hollywood insider and cultural critic, revealing how she anticipated our drift toward manufactured realities and endless performance — from Ronald Reagan's performative presidency to modern reality television-style governance.

Joan Didion famously chronicled California's culture and mythology in works like “Slouching Towards Bethlehem” and “The White Album.” And it's Didion's relationship with Hollywood in particular that New York Times film critic Alissa Wilkinson explores in “We Tell Ourselves Stories,” her new analysis of the California writer. “The movies,” Wilkinson writes, “shaped us — shaped her — to believe life would follow a genre and an arc, with rising action, climax and resolution. It would make narrative sense. The reality is quite different.” We talk to Wilkinson about how Didion saw an American political landscape that was molding itself after the movies — and came to value story over substance. Guest: Alissa Wilkinson, movie critic, New York Times Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On female writers, sexuality, discovering Eve Babitz, and New York, with writer Lili Anolik. hotliterati.com

Joan Didion opened The White Album (1979) with what would become an iconic line: “We tell ourselves stories in order to live.” Today this phrase is deployed inspirationally, printed on T-shirts and posters, and used as a battle cry for artists and writers. But Didion had something much less rosy in mind: our tendency to manufacture delusions to ward away our anxieties whenever society seems to be spinning off its axis. And nowhere was this collective hallucination more effectively crafted than in Hollywood. Alissa Wilkinson examines Joan Didion's influence through the lens of American myth-making. As a young girl, Didion was infatuated with John Wayne and his on-screen bravado, and was fascinated by her California pioneer ancestry and the infamous Donner Party. The mythos that preoccupied her early years continued to influence her work as a magazine writer and film critic in New York, offering glimmers of the many stories Didion told herself that would eventually unravel. Wilkinson traces Didion's journey from New York to her arrival in Hollywood as a screenwriter at the twilight of the old studio system. Didion became embroiled in the glitz and glamor of the Los Angeles elite, where she acutely observed―and denounced―how the nation's fears and dreams were sensationalized on screen. Meanwhile, she paid the bills writing movie scripts like A Star Is Born, while her books propelled her to personal fame. Join us to hear Wilkinson dissect the cinematic motifs and machinations that informed Didion's writing, detail Hollywood's addictive grasp on the American imagination, and delve into Didion's legacy, whose impact will be felt for generations. Organizer: George Hammond   A Humanities Member-led Forum program. Forums at the Club are organized and run by volunteer programmers who are members of The Commonwealth Club, and they cover a diverse range of topics. Learn more about our Forums. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

W 2000 roku Joan Didion wystąpiła w programie telewizyjnym „In Depth”, do którego zapraszano autorki i autorów książek reporterskich. Formuła zakładała pogłębioną rozmowę o twórczości, a także pytania od telewidzów. Gdy prezenter zapowiedział połączenie z publicznością, zadzwoniła kobieta. Przedstawiła się jako „Eve Babitz, koleżanka z Hollywood”, po czym dodała, że chciała tylko powiedzieć, że „wspaniale ją widzieć na antenie i nie ma pojęcia, o co miałaby spytać”. Prezenter wyglądał na zdumionego, publika przed telewizorami zapewne również nie wiedziała, jak zareagować – 25 lat temu niewiele osób znało twórczość Eve Babitz, a jeszcze mniej historię jej relacji z Joan Didion. Autorka: Oliwia Bosomtwe Artykuł przeczytasz pod linkiem: https://www.vogue.pl/a/ksiazka-didion-babitz-lili-anolik-to-wciagajaca-historia-przyjazni-slynnych-pisarek-ktora-zmienila-sie-we-wrogosc

By Walt HickeyDouble feature today!Welcome to the Numlock Sunday edition.This week, I spoke to Alissa Wilkinson who is out with the brand new book, We Tell Ourselves Stories: Joan Didion and the American Dream Machine.I'm a huge fan of Alissa, she's a phenomenal critic and I thought this topic — what happens when one of the most important American literary figures heads out to Hollywood to work on the most important American medium — is super fascinating. It's a really wonderful book and if you're a longtime Joan Didion fan or simply a future Joan Didion fan, it's a look at a really transformative era of Hollywood and should be a fun read regardless.Alissa can be found at the New York Times, and the book is available wherever books are sold.This interview has been condensed and edited. All right, Alissa, thank you so much for coming on.Yeah, thanks for having me. It's good to be back, wherever we are.Yes, you are the author of We Tell Ourselves Stories: Joan Didion and the American Dream Machine. It's a really exciting book. It's a really exciting approach, for a Joan Didion biography and placing her in the current of American mainstream culture for a few years. I guess just backing out, what got you interested in Joan Didion to begin with? When did you first get into her work?Joan Didion and I did not become acquainted, metaphorically, until after I got out of college. I studied Tech and IT in college, and thus didn't read any books, because they don't make you read books in school, or they didn't when I was there. I moved to New York right afterward. I was riding the subway. There were all these ads for this book called The Year of Magical Thinking. It was the year 2005, the book had just come out. The Year of Magical Thinking is Didion's National Book Award-winning memoir about the year after her husband died, suddenly of a heart attack in '03. It's sort of a meditation on grief, but it's not really what that sounds like. If people haven't read it's very Didion. You know, it's not sentimental, it's constantly examining the narratives that she's telling herself about grief.So I just saw these ads on the walls. I was like, what is this book that everybody seems to be reading? I just bought it and read it. And it just so happened that it was right after my father, who was 46 at the time, was diagnosed with a very aggressive leukemia, and then died shortly thereafter, which was shocking, obviously. The closer I get to that age, it feels even more shocking that he was so young. I didn't have any idea how to process that emotion or experience. The book was unexpectedly helpful. But it also introduced me to a writer who I'd never read before, who felt like she was looking at things from a different angle than everyone else.Of course, she had a couple more books come out after that. But I don't remember this distinctly, but probably what happened is I went to some bookstore, The Strand or something, and bought The White Album and Slouching Towards Bethlehem off the front table as everyone does because those books have just been there for decades.From that, I learned more, starting to understand how writing could work. I didn't realize how form and content could interact that way. Over the years, I would review a book by her or about her for one publication or another. Then when I was in graduate school, getting my MFA in nonfiction, I wrote a bit about her because I was going through a moment of not being sure if my husband and I were going to stay in New York or we were going to move to California. They sort of obligate you to go through a goodbye to all that phase if you are contemplating that — her famous essay about leaving New York. And then, we did stay in New York City. But ultimately, that's 20 years of history.Then in 2020, I was having a conversation (that was quite-early pandemic) with my agent about possible books I might write. I had outlined a bunch of books to her. Then she was like, “These all sound like great ideas. But I've always wanted to rep a book on Joan Didion. So I just wanted to put that bug in your ear.” I was like, “Oh, okay. That seems like something I should probably do.”It took a while to find an angle, which wound up being Didion in Hollywood. This is mostly because I realized that a lot of people don't really know her as a Hollywood figure, even though she's a pretty major Hollywood figure for a period of time. The more of her work I read, the more I realized that her work is fruitfully understood as the work of a woman who was profoundly influenced by (and later thinking in terms of Hollywood metaphors) whether she was writing about California or American politics or even grief.So that's the long-winded way of saying I wasn't, you know, acquainted with her work until adulthood, but then it became something that became a guiding light for me as a writer.That's really fascinating. I love it. Because again I think a lot of attention on Didion has been paid since her passing. But this book is really exciting because you came at it from looking at the work as it relates to Hollywood. What was Didion's experience in Hollywood? What would people have seen from it, but also, what is her place there?The directly Hollywood parts of her life start when she's in her 30s. She and her husband — John Gregory Dunn, also a writer and her screenwriting partner — moved from New York City, where they had met and gotten married, to Los Angeles. John's brother, Nick Dunn later became one of the most important early true crime writers at Vanity Fair, believe it or not. But at the time, he was working as a TV producer. He and his wife were there. So they moved to Los Angeles. It was sort of a moment where, you know, it's all well and good to be a journalist and a novelist. If you want to support yourself, Hollywood is where it's at.So they get there at a moment when the business is shifting from these big-budget movies — the Golden Age — to the new Hollywood, where everything is sort of gritty and small and countercultural. That's the moment they arrive. They worked in Hollywood. I mean, they worked literally in Hollywood for many years after that. And then in Hollywood even when they moved back to New York in the '80s as screenwriters still.People sometimes don't realize that they wrote a bunch of produced screenplays. The earliest was The Panic in Needle Park. Obviously, they adapted Didion's novel Play It As It Lays. There are several others, but one that a lot of people don't realize they wrote was the version of A Star is Born that stars Barbra Streisand and Kris Kristofferson. It was their idea to shift the Star is Born template from Hollywood entities to rock stars. That was their idea. Of course, when Bradley Cooper made his version, he iterated on that. So their work was as screenwriters but also as figures in the Hollywood scene because they were literary people at the same time that they were screenwriters. They knew all the actors, and they knew all the producers and the executives.John actually wrote, I think, two of the best books ever written on Hollywood decades apart. One called The Studio, where he just roamed around on the Fox backlot. For a year for reasons he couldn't understand, he got access. That was right when the catastrophe that was Dr. Doolittle was coming out. So you get to hear the inside of the studio. Then later, he wrote a book called Monster, which is about their like eight-year long attempt to get their film Up Close and Personal made, which eventually they did. It's a really good look at what the normal Hollywood experience was at the time: which is like: you come up with an idea, but it will only vaguely resemble the final product once all the studios get done with it.So it's, it's really, that's all very interesting. They're threaded through the history of Hollywood in that period. On top of it for the book (I realized as I was working on it) that a lot of Didion's early life is influenced by especially her obsession with John Wayne and also with the bigger mythology of California and the West, a lot of which she sees as framed through Hollywood Westerns.Then in the '80s, she pivoted to political reporting for a long while. If you read her political writing, it is very, very, very much about Hollywood logic seeping into American political culture. There's an essay called “Inside Baseball” about the Dukakis campaign that appears in Political Fictions, her book that was published on September 11, 2001. In that book, she writes about how these political campaigns are directed and set up like a production for the cameras and how that was becoming not just the campaign, but the presidency itself. Of course, she had no use for Ronald Reagan, and everything she writes about him is very damning. But a lot of it was because she saw him as the embodiment of Hollywood logic entering the political sphere and felt like these are two separate things and they need to not be going together.So all of that appeared to me as I was reading. You know, once you see it, you can't unsee it. It just made sense for me to write about it. On top of it, she was still alive when I was writing the proposal and shopping it around. So she actually died two months after we sold the book to my publisher. It meant I was extra grateful for this angle because I knew there'd be a lot more books on her, but I wanted to come at it from an angle that I hadn't seen before. So many people have written about her in Hollywood before, but not quite through this lens.Yeah. What were some things that you discovered in the course of your research? Obviously, she's such an interesting figure, but she's also lived so very publicly that I'm just super interested to find out what are some of the things that you learned? It can be about her, but it can also be the Hollywood system as a whole.Yeah. I mean, I didn't interview her for obvious reasons.Understandable, entirely understandable.Pretty much everyone in her life also is gone with the exception really of Griffin Dunn, who is her nephew, John's nephew, the actor. But other than that, it felt like I needed to look at it through a critical lens. So it meant examining a lot of texts. A lot of Didion's magazine work (which was a huge part of her life) is published in the books that people read like Slouching Towards Bethlehem and The White Album and all the other books. What was interesting to me was discovering (I mean, not “discovering” because other people have read it) that there is some work that's not published and it's mostly her criticism.Most of that criticism was published in the late '50s and the early '60s when she was living in New York City, working at Vogue and trying to make it in the literary scene that was New York at that time, which was a very unique place. I mean, she was writing criticism and essays for both, you know, like National Review and The Nation at the same time, which was just hard to conceive of today. It was something you'd do back then. Yeah, wild stuff.A lot of that criticism was never collected into books. The most interesting is that she'd been working at Vogue for a long time in various positions, but she wound up getting added to the film critic column at Vogue in, '62, I want to say, although I might have that date slightly off. She basically alternated weeks with another critic for a few years, writing that until she started writing in movies proper. It's never a great idea to be a critic and a screenwriter at the same time.Her criticism is fascinating. So briefly, for instance, she shared that column with Pauline Kael. Pauline Kael became well known after she wrote about Bonnie and Clyde. This was prior to that. This is several years prior to that. They also hated each other for a long time afterward, which is funny, because, in some ways, their style is very different but their persona is actually very similar. So I wonder about that.But in any case, even when she wasn't sharing the column with Pauline Kael, it was a literal column in a magazine. So it's like one column of text, she can say barely anything. She was always a bit of a contrarian, but she was actively not interested in the things that were occupying New York critics at the time. Things like the Auteur Theory, what was happening in France, the downtown scene and the Shirley Clark's of the world. She had no use for it. At some point, she accuses Billy Wilder of having really no sense of humor, which is very funny.When you read her criticism, you see a person who is very invested in a classical notion of Hollywood as a place that shows us fantasies that we can indulge in for a while. She talks in her very first column about how she doesn't really need movies to be masterpieces, she just wants them to have moments. When she says moments, she means big swelling things that happen in a movie that make her feel things.It's so opposite, I think, to most people's view of Didion. Most people associate her with this snobbish elitism or something, which I don't think is untrue when we're talking about literature. But for her, the movies were like entertainment, and entering that business was a choice to enter that world. She wasn't attempting to elevate the discourse or something.I just think that's fascinating. She also has some great insights there. But as a film critic, I find myself disagreeing with most of her reviews. But I think that doesn't matter. It was more interesting to see how she conceived of the movies. There is a moment later on, in another piece that I don't think has been republished anywhere from the New York Review of Books, where she writes about the movies of Woody Allen. She hates them. It's right at the point where he's making like Manhattan and Annie Hall, like the good stuff. She just has no use for them. It's one of the funniest pieces. I won't spoil the ending because it's hilarious, and it's in the book.That writing was of huge interest to me and hasn't been republished in books. I was very grateful to get access to it, in part because it is in the archives — the electronic archives of the New York Public Library. But at the time, the library was closed. So I had to call the library and have a librarian get on Zoom with me for like an hour and a half to figure out how I could get in the proverbial back door of the library to get access while the library wasn't open.That's magnificent. That's such a cool way to go to the archives because some stuff just hasn't been published. If it wasn't digitized, then it's not digitized. That's incredible.Yeah, it's there, but you can barely print them off because they're in PDFs. They're like scanned images that are super high res, so the printer just dies when you try to print them. It's all very fascinating. I hope it gets republished at some point because I think there's enough interest in her work that it's fascinating to see this other aspect of her taste and her persona.It's really interesting that she seems to have wanted to meet the medium where it is, right? She wasn't trying to literary-up Hollywood. I mean, LA can be a bit of a friction. It's not exactly a literary town in the way that some East Coast metropolises can be. It is interesting that she was enamored by the movies. Do you want to speak about what things were like for her when she moved out?Yeah, it is funny because, at the same time, the first two movies that they wrote and produced are The Panic in Needle Park, which is probably the most new Hollywood movie you can imagine. It's about addicts at Needle Park, which is actually right where the 72nd Street subway stop is on the Upper West Side. If people have been there, it's hard to imagine. But that was apparently where they all sat around, and there were a lot of needles. It's apparently the first movie supposedly where someone shoots up live on camera.So it was the '70s. That's amazing.Yes, and it launched Al Pacino's film career! Yeah, it's wild. You watch it and you're just like, “How is this coming from the woman who's about all this arty farty stuff in the movies.” And Play It As It Lays has a very similar, almost avant-garde vibe to it. It's very, very interesting. You see it later on in the work that they made.A key thing to remember about them (and something I didn't realize before I started researching the book)was that Didion and Dunn were novelists who worked in journalism because everybody did. They wrote movies, according to them (you can only go off of what they said. A lot of it is John writing these jaunty articles. He's a very funny writer) because “we had tuition and a mortgage. This is how you pay for it.”This comes up later on, they needed to keep their WGA insurance because John had heart trouble. The best way to have health insurance was to remain in the Writers Guild. Remaining in the Writers Guild means you had to have a certain amount of work produced through union means. They were big union supporters. For them this was not, this was very strictly not an auteurist undertaking. This was not like, “Oh, I'm gonna go write these amazing screenplays that give my concept of the world to the audience.” It's not like Bonnie and Clyding going on here. It's very like, “We wrote these based on some stories that we thought would be cool.”I like that a lot. Like the idea that A Star is Born was like a pot boiler. That's really delightful.Completely. It was totally taken away from them by Streisand and John Peters at some point. But they were like, “Yeah, I mean, you know, it happens. We still got paid.”Yeah, if it can happen to Superman, it can happen to you.It happens to everybody, you know, don't get too precious about it. The important thing is did your novel come out and was it supported by its publisher?So just tracing some of their arcs in Hollywood. Obviously, Didion's one of the most influential writers of her generation, there's a very rich literary tradition. Where do we see her footprint, her imprint in Hollywood? What are some of the ways that we can see her register in Hollywood, or reverberate outside of it?In the business itself, I don't know that she was influential directly. What we see is on the outside of it. So a lot of people were friends. She was like a famous hostess, famous hostess. The New York Public Library archives are set to open at the end of March, of Didion and Dunn's work, which was like completely incidental to my publication date. I just got lucky. There's a bunch of screenplays in there that they worked on that weren't produced. There's also her cookbooks, and I'm very excited to go through those and see that. So you might meet somebody there.Her account of what the vibe was when the Manson murders occurred, which is published in her essay The White Album, is still the one people talk about, even though there are a lot of different ways to come at it. That's how we think about the Manson murders: through her lens. Later on, when she's not writing directly about Hollywood anymore (and not really writing in Hollywood as much) but instead is writing about the headlines, about news events, about sensationalism in the news, she becomes a great media critic. We start to see her taking the things that she learned (having been around Hollywood people, having been on movie sets, having seen how the sausage is made) and she starts writing about politics. In that age, it is Hollywood's logic that you perform for the TV. We have the debates suddenly becoming televised, the conventions becoming televised, we start to see candidates who seem specifically groomed to win because they look good on TV. They're starting to win and rule the day.She writes about Newt Gingrich. Of course, Gingrich was the first politician to figure out how to harness C-SPAN to his own ends — the fact that there were TV cameras on the congressional floor. So she's writing about all of this stuff at a time when you can see other people writing about it. I mean, Neil Postman famously writes about it. But the way Didion does it is always very pegged to reviewing somebody's book, or she's thinking about a particular event, or she's been on the campaign plane or something like that. Like she's been on the inside, but with an outsider's eye.That also crops up in, for instance, her essays. “Sentimental Journeys” is one of her most famous ones. That one's about the case of the Central Park Five, and the jogger who was murdered. Of course, now, we're many decades out from that, and the convictions were vacated. We know about coerced confessions. Also Donald Trump arrives in the middle of that whole thing.But she's actually not interested in the guilt or innocence question, because a lot of people were writing about that. She's interested in how the city of New York and the nation perform themselves for themselves, seeing themselves through the long lens of a movie and telling themselves stories about themselves. You see this over and over in her writing, no matter what she's writing about. I think once she moved away from writing about the business so much, she became very interested in how Hollywood logic had taken over American public life writ large.That's fascinating. Like, again, she spends time in the industry, then basically she can only see it through that lens. Of course, Michael Dukakis in a tank is trying to be a set piece, of course in front of the Berlin Wall, you're finally doing set decoration rather than doing it outside of a brick wall somewhere. You mentioned the New York thing in Performing New York. I have lived in the city for over a decade now. The dumbest thing is when the mayor gets to wear the silly jacket whenever there's a snowstorm that says “Mr. Mayor.” It's all an act in so many ways. I guess that political choreography had to come from somewhere, and it seems like she was documenting a lot of that initial rise.Yeah, I think she really saw it. The question I would ask her, if I could, is how cognizant she was that she kept doing that. As someone who's written for a long time, you don't always recognize that you have the one thing you write about all the time. Other people then bring it up to you and you're like, “Oh, I guess you're right.” Even when you move into her grief memoir phase, which is how I think about the last few original works that she published, she uses movie logic constantly in those.I mean, The Year of Magical Thinking is a cyclical book, she goes over the same events over and over. But if you actually look at the language she's using, she talks about running the tape back, she talks about the edit, she talks about all these things as if she's running her own life through how a movie would tell a story. Maybe she knew very deliberately. She's not a person who does things just haphazardly, but it has the feeling of being so baked into her psyche at this point that she would never even think of trying to escape it.Fascinating.Yeah, that idea that you don't know what you are potentially doing, I've thought about that. I don't know what mine is. But either way. It's such a cool way to look at it. On a certain level, she pretty much succeeded at that, though, right? I think that when people think about Joan Didion, they think about a life that freshens up a movie, right? Like, it workedVery much, yeah. I'm gonna be really curious to see what happens over the next 10 years or so. I've been thinking about figures like Sylvia Plath or women with larger-than-life iconography and reputation and how there's a constant need to relook at their legacies and reinvent and rethink and reimagine them. There's a lot in the life of Didion that I think remains to be explored. I'm really curious to see where people go with it, especially with the opening of these archives and new personal information making its way into the world.Yeah, even just your ability to break some of those stories that have been locked away in archives out sounds like a really exciting addition to the scholarship. Just backing out a little bit, we live in a moment in which the relationship between pop culture and political life is fairly directly intertwined. Setting aside the steel-plated elephant in the room, you and I are friendly because we bonded over this idea that movies really are consequential. Coming out of this book and coming out of reporting on it, what are some of the relevances for today in particular?Yeah, I mean, a lot more than I thought, I guess, five years ago. I started work on the book at the end of Trump One, and it's coming out at the beginning of Trump Two, and there was this period in the middle of a slightly different vibe. But even then I watch TikTok or whatever. You see people talk about “main character energy” or the “vibe shift” or all of romanticizing your life. I would have loved to read a Didion essay on the way that young people sort of view themselves through the logic of the screens they have lived on and the way that has shaped America for a long time.I should confirm this, I don't think she wrote about Obama, or if she did, it was only a little bit. So her political writing ends in George W. Bush's era. I think there's one piece on Obama, and then she's writing about other things. It's just interesting to think about how her ideas of what has happened to political culture in America have seeped into the present day.I think the Hollywood logic, the cinematic logic has given way to reality TV logic. That's very much the logic of the Trump world, right? Still performing for cameras, but the cameras have shifted. The way that we want things from the cameras has shifted, too. Reality TV is a lot about creating moments of drama where they may or may not actually exist and bombarding you with them. I think that's a lot of what we see and what we feel now. I have to imagine she would think about it that way.There is one interesting essay that I feel has only recently been talked about. It's at the beginning of my book, too. It was in a documentary, and Gia Tolentino wrote about it recently. It's this essay she wrote in 2000 about Martha Stewart and about Martha Stewart's website. It feels like the 2000s was like, “What is this website thing? Why are people so into it?” But really, it's an essay about parasocial relationships that people develop (with women in particular) who they invent stories around and how those stories correspond to greater American archetypes. It's a really interesting essay, not least because I think it's an essay also about people's parasocial relationships with Joan Didion.So the rise of her celebrity in the 21st century, where people know who she is and carry around a tote bag, but don't really know what they're getting themselves into is very interesting to me. I think it is also something she thought about quite a bit, while also consciously courting it.Yeah, I mean, that makes a ton of sense. For someone who was so adept at using cinematic language to describe her own life with every living being having a camera directly next to them at all times. It seems like we are very much living in a world that she had at least put a lot of thought into, even if the technology wasn't around for her to specifically address it.Yes, completely.On that note, where can folks find the book? Where can folks find you? What's the elevator pitch for why they ought to check this out? Joan Didion superfan or just rather novice?Exactly! I think this book is not just for the fans, let me put it that way. Certainly, I think anyone who considers themselves a Didion fan will have a lot to enjoy here. The stuff you didn't know, hadn't read or just a new way to think through her cultural impact. But also, this is really a book that's as much for people who are just interested in thinking about the world we live in today a little critically. It's certainly a biography of American political culture as much as it is of Didion. There's a great deal of Hollywood history in there as well. Thinking about that sweep of the American century and change is what the book is doing. It's very, very, very informed by what I do in my day job as a movie critic at The New York Times. Thinking about what movies mean, what do they tell us about ourselves? I think this is what this book does. I have been told it's very fun to read. So I'm happy about that. It's not ponderous at all, which is good. It's also not that long.It comes out March 11th from Live Right, which is a Norton imprint. There will be an audiobook at the end of May that I am reading, which I'm excited about. And I'll be on tour for a large amount of March on the East Coast. Then in California, there's a virtual date, and there's a good chance I'll be popping up elsewhere all year, too. Those updates will be on my social feeds, which are all @alissawilkinson on whatever platform except X, which is fine because I don't really post there anymore.Alyssa, thank you so much for coming on.Thank you so much.Edited by Crystal Wang.If you have anything you'd like to see in this Sunday special, shoot me an email. Comment below! Thanks for reading, and thanks so much for supporting Numlock.Thank you so much for becoming a paid subscriber! Send links to me on Twitter at @WaltHickey or email me with numbers, tips or feedback at walt@numlock.news. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.numlock.com/subscribe

Dave and Alonso welcome New York Times film critic Alissa Wilkinson to discuss her fascinating new book about author Joan Didion, her encounters with Hollywood, and her understanding of how show-business became the dominant language of the 20th century and beyond. We Tell Ourselves Stories is on sale now. Join our club, won't you?

We began this episode talking about Joan Didion as a Hollywood figure and the importance of John Wayne, as well as her importance as a political writer with early strong conservative political views. Didion's portrayal of Hollywood and her lesser-known film criticism also came up for discussion, followed by a consideration of the work of the legendary film critic Pauline Kael and how Wilkinson, a film critic for The New York Times, decides what films to review or critique. Alyssa Wilkinson then spoke of what she views as the job of the film critic, and she spoke of her strong admiration for "Nickel Boys," which she called this year's best film. She and Krasny spoke of blockbusters, disaster and apocalyptic films, and Spielberg's "Jaws," and the larger question of the effect on our imaginations of the so-called Hollywood dream machine.Krasny and Wilkinson discussed villains and evil in contemporary films and Martin Scorsese's notion of too many films being like thrill rides and avoiding ordinary people and nuanced drama. They spoke, too, of the Oscars and discussed the history of the Oscars, and then went on to the impact of social media and streaming platforms and technology shifts and the question of misunderstood and too-long films and the tensions between art and commerce. They returned to Didion and her overall importance and concluded with a discussion of Wilkinson's view on faith and how she became a film critic and her film critic-filled Brooklyn neighborhood.

Writer Lili Anolik joins us on the podcast to discuss her new book DIDION & BABITZ

Staff writers and contributors are celebrating The New Yorker's centennial by revisiting notable works from the magazine's archive, in a series called Takes. The writer Jia Tolentino and the cartoonist Roz Chast join the Radio Hour to present their selections. Tolentino discusses an essay by a genius observer of American life, the late Joan Didion, about Martha Stewart. Didion's profile, “everywoman.com,” was published in 2000, and Tolentino finds in it a defense of perfectionism and a certain kind of ruthlessness: she suggests that “most of the lines Didion writes about Stewart, it's hard not to hear the echoes of people saying that about her.” Chast chose to focus on cartoons by George Booth, who contributed to The New Yorker for at least half of the magazine's life. You can read Roz Chast on George Booth, Jia Tolentino on Joan Didion, and many more essays from the Takes series here.  

Lili Anolik, author of the new book "Didion & Babitz," delves into the complex and largely unexplored relationship between literary icons Joan Didion and Eve Babitz in 1960s Los Angeles. Through newly discovered letters and extensive research, Anolik explains how these contrasting personalities — Didion's calculated reserve and Babitz's uninhibited sensuality — shaped our understanding of them and the era. Their story illuminates broader themes about women's voices in American letters, the nature of literary persona, and the price of artistic ambition.

A private diary of writer Joan Didion is due to be published in April under the title Notes to John. It will be the first publication of new material by Didion since she stopped releasing new work in 2011, a decade before her death. But should this raw account even be published? Writer and Didion fan, Edel Coffey, joined Brendan for more.

In a very Aquarian manner (two days late!!) Heidi and Ellen welcome the sign of Aquarius. This is the sign of group work. What are we building TOGETHER? How can we cooperate and collaborate? What problems can we solve by combining our gifts? How can we better share our resources? How can we heal, together?   They talk about David Lynch (who was actually a Capricorn born on the day the Sun entered Aquarius.)  Heidi read the poem Low Down Now by Brooke McNamara. We discussed the book Didion and Babitz by Lili Anolik. Movies mentioned: A Complete Unknown The Brutalist Andora A Big Pain Television mentioned: Designated Survivor Do you have a question you'd like featured on the podcast? Send a 1-minute audio and your birth information (date of birth, time, and place) to assistant@heidirose.com. Chart Your Career Instagram: @chartyourcareerpodcast To connect with the hosts, visit: Heidi Rose Robbins, Astrologer & Poet: heidirose.com, IG: @heidiroserobbins Ellen Fondiler, Career & Business Strategist: ellenfondiler.com, IG: @elfondiler Learn more (or sign up!) for The Next Chapter here.  

Complètement Foot avec David Houdret. En 1 seul mot cette année 2024 en football, c'était ___ ? Et cette année 2025 en football, ce sera ___ ? Meilleurs vœux pour 2025 ! Complètement foot - Débriefing des matches du Football belge, Football européen, Diables Rouges, de l'Euro et Coupe du Monde avec les Diables Rouges. Tous les matches de la Jupiler Pro League avec Anderlecht, Club Brugge, Charleroi, Standard, Antwerp, Union Saint-Gilloise, RWDM, Seraing, AS Eupen, KRC Genk, KAA Gent, RFC Liège, les Francs Borains. Mais aussi la Champions League - Ligue des Champions, l'Europa League et la Conference League avec le Barca, le Real Madrid, l'Atletico Madrid, Manchester City, Liverpool, Chelsea, Manchester United, le PSG, Juventus, Inter, Milan AC, Naples, Bayern Munich, Borussia Dortmund. Avec les Diables Rouges : Kevin De Bruyne, Romelu Lukaku, Eden Hazard, Thibaut Courtois, Jérémy Doku, Jan Vertonghen, Koen Casteels, Timothy Castagne, Wout Faes, Arthur Theate, Orel Mangala, Youri Tielemans, Amadou Onana, Yannick Carrasco, Leandro Trossard, Zeno Debast, Dodi Lukebakio, Johan Bakayoko, Michy Batshuayi, Lois Openda, Charles Dekaetelaere, Mike Trésor... Et aussi les plus grands joueurs : Lionel Messi, Cristiano Ronaldo, Kylian Mbappé, Karim Benzema, Mohamed Salah, Harry Kane, Bruno Fernandes, Erling Haaland... C'est le 1er talkshow radio du foot en Belgique. Le dimanche sur VivaCité, radio de la RTBF. Et plus si affinités. Avec David Houdret et la RTBF Sport. Nos consultants sont : Alex Teklak, Nordin Jbari, Clément Tainmont et Guillaume Gillet. Font aussi partie de l'équipe : Christine Schréder, Pieter-Jan Calcoen du journal Het Nieuwsblad, Guillaume Gautier du magazine Le Vif, Jonathan Lange et Christophe Franken de La DH Les Sports+. Merci pour votre écoute Complètement foot, c'est également en direct tous les dimanche de 20h20 à 23h sur www.rtbf.be/vivacité Retrouvez tous les épisodes de Complètement foot sur notre plateforme Auvio.be : https://auvio.rtbf.be/emission/1391 Et si vous avez apprécié ce podcast, n'hésitez pas à nous donner des étoiles ou des commentaires, cela nous aide à le faire connaître plus largement.

Maya Hawke performs Joan Didion's classic collection superbly. Host Jo Reed and AudioFile's Alan Minskoff discuss how Hawke pays attention to Didion's exquisite prose and captures her careful observations. Hawke gets Didion's measured pace and thoughtful tone just right as she conveys the much-admired author's idiosyncratic, elegant language. The audiobook vividly brings back the 1960s, when Didion, Tom Wolfe, and Hunter S. Thompson created "new journalism."  Read our review of the audiobook at our website. Published by Macmillan Audio.  Discover thousands of audiobook reviews and more at AudioFile's website.    Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On this episode, we were joined by Lili Anolik, contributing editor at Vanity Fair, and author of Didion & Babitz, a provocatively entertaining account of the feud between two key countercultural voices of the 1960s and '70s – the iconic Joan Didion and the lesser-known Eve Babitz. Lili spoke us to about her decade's long obsession with Eve Babitz, her scepticism of the Didion mystique, Pauline Kael, and the crucial role that Los Angeles played in the development of these two literary titans.Covering everyone from Charles Manson to Marcel Duchamp, Lili takes us headlong into two tumultuous decades, demonstrating why Eve Babitz considered Los Angeles in the 1970s to be the Moveable Feast that Hemingway and Fitzgerald experienced in the Paris of the '20s. Hosted by Ryan Edgington and Matt Hennessey. Produced by Lily Woods.

Lili returns to the podcast to speak about her popular new book, Didion & Babitz, detailing the lives of Joan Didion and Eve Babitz through never-before-seen letters. We chat about Timotheé Chalamet on Theo Von's podcast, Billy Joe from Green Day and Ryan Reynolds' hard launch, a dinner with Bret Easton Ellis and Naomi Fry, the psychology of having to be in charge, we rediscover her unique eating habits and love of Pepsi Zero, Joker 2, her thoughts on the American Psycho remake, when writers become characters themselves, would Eve have an OnlyFans if she were emerging today? Courtney Love and Madonna, when the hoarding goes too far, and, we must hate you if you want to make it. instagram.com/lilianolikwriter twitter.com/donetodeath twitter.com/themjeans howlonggone.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

California Sen. Adam Schiff officially took office this month. He discusses the prospect of a preemptive pardon from President Biden, and the future of Democrats’ relationship with President-elect Trump. Once “alternative” media figures like Joe Rogan, Steve Bannon, and Charlie Kirk are winning bigger audiences than legacy media and becoming the new mainstream. Through their writings, Eve Babitz and Joan Didion cemented LA in our collective imagination as a sultry hotbed. A new book explores their relationship and what it reveals about LA’s famous women. Gifting a holiday cookie box to loved ones? Consider adding spice, vibrant colors, and a bit of booze to your selection of treats.

Jovelyn Richards interviews New York  Times film critic Alisa Wilkinson in a new book, We Tell Ourselves Stories. Wilkinson discusses how Joan Didion's cultural influence through the lens of American mythmaking in Hollywood and Didion's writings spanning decades illustrated Hollywood's addictive grasp on American identity. The post Film Critic Alisa Wilkinson appeared first on KPFA.

Lili Anolik's Didion and Babitz takes a look at the fraught relationship between two iconic women of literature. Anolik joins us to talk about how she decided to tell this story, the literary landscape of LA, her influences and more with Miwa Messer, host of Poured Over. This episode of Poured Over was hosted by Miwa Messer and mixed by Harry Liang.                     New episodes land Tuesdays and Thursdays (with occasional Saturdays) here and on your favorite podcast app Featured Books (Episode): Didion & Babitz by Lili Anolik Hollywood's Eve by Lili Anolik Eve's Hollywood by Eve Babitz Slow Days, Fast Company by Eve Babitz I Lost it at the Movies by Pauline Kael The White Album by Joan Didion Play It As It Lays by Joan Didion Slouching Toward Bethlehem by Joan Didion Run River by Joan Didion My Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferrante Frank Sinatra Has a Cold by Gay Talese The Destroyers by Christopher Bollen Howard's End by E.M. Forster The Western Coast by Paula Fox The Lives of the Saints by Nancy Lemann

The woman who accused the mixed martial arts fighter Conor McGregor of raping her has won her civil case against him. He has been ordered to pay nearly a quater of a million euros in damages. Mr McGregor says he will appeal. Nuala McGovern speaks to Orla O'Donnell who is the RTE News Legal Affairs Correspondent.A BBC Panorama documentary is out today which asks: Why are more young women dying from alcohol-related liver disease than ever before? The BBC's Hazel Martin, who's 32, was diagnosed with the condition. She's been investigating how she became one of a growing number of young women surprised to discover their social drinking habits had put their lives at risk. Hazel joins Nuala as does Professor Debbie Shawcross, Consultant Hepatologist at Kings College Hospital. Journalist Lili Anolik had already written a book about obscure LA writer Eve Babitz when she read a letter Eve had written but not sent to her sometime friend, the literary superstar Joan Didion. Lili realised that the key to understanding Joan was held by Eve and vice versa and she joins Nuala to discuss her new book, Didion and Babitz.A new play at the Royal Court Theatre in London explores the impact of the child sexual exploitation and grooming scandals that took place in Northern and Midlands towns in England in the late 90s to the early 2010s. Emteaz Hussain, the play's writer, joins Nuala to discuss it.US pop star Chappell Roan has made it onto the shortlist for BBC Radio 1's Sound of 2025. Just a year ago she was a backing singer for Olivia Rodrigo – so what do we know about her? Laura Snapes, deputy music editor at the Guardian, joins Nuala to tell us more.Presenter: Nuala McGovern Producer: Emma Pearce

On today's pod we chat Ben's Eddie Vedder experience, Ione going to see the Pixies last week, Amanda De Cadenet joining RHOBH, “Didion & Babitz” by Lili Anolik, top secret projects in Taiwan, bootleg sweatshirts, Jesse Eisenberg's trauma tourism, remembering hearing the Strokes for the first time, whether Green Day are “hot”, Father John Misty winning over older female fans with his new album “Mahashmashana”, Schoolies Porn being shot in Surfer's Paradise, and lots more! Visit http://weirdertogether.substack.com for additional show notes and our weekly "Pick of the Week" free newsletter Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Ace interviewer Elodie Saint-Louis sits down with Lili Anolik to discuss Anolik's new book Didion & Babitz. Anolik talks about the complicated relationship between authors Joan Didion and Eve Babitz, their unique perspectives on the Feminist Movement, and how they were each consumed by and motivated each other. Anolik also tells the fascinating story of how she discovered the complexity of this relationship to begin with. If you're a fan of either author, this isn't an episode to miss! Produced by Elodie Saint-Louis and Mick Kowaleski Music by Duck! The Piano Wire

This week, Simi Botic—author, founder of Unmeasured, and my best friend—joins me to talk about PIVOT, a new zine of essays I compiled. After breaking my leg this summer, being stuck inside gave me time to put this together. Simi was the first person I sent it to, partly because she's a character in it and wrote one of the essays with me, and because she's always so gentle and supportive. I don't know how I got so lucky to have her as a friend but I did.In this, we talked about seeing each other through different phases. And about the uncomfortable feelings that come from revisiting our old work but try to do as Didion advises, "stay on nodding terms" with our past selves. PIVOT is one big nod to my 20's, including all the lessons I learned and the experiences that taught me them. Let us know if you listen. Show notes:- PIVOT zine is here - sign up for my paid Substack & we'll mail you a copy | LA launch party on 9/27!- My book on journaling | WRITE kit- Find Simi on the Web | Instagram | Podcast- Simi's class, Unmeasured- Find me on IG: @letitouttt + @katiedalebout | Substack- 5 spots left in the Creative Clinic: book a call with me here If you liked this episode, try out from the archive:Episode 455: Saying What We're Afraid to with Founder R29 & A Tiny Apt. Christene Barberich

Join us in this insightful episode as we explore the pivotal role HR plays in shaping and executing corporate strategy. Our special guest, Amy Jones from Didion, an esteemed MRA member company, brings her extensive experience and unique perspective to the conversation. We'll delve into how HR can drive organizational success, align talent management with strategic goals, and foster a culture of innovation and growth. Whether you're an HR professional, a business leader, or simply interested in the intersection of human resources and corporate strategy, this episode offers valuable insights and practical takeaways. Don't miss it!   Contact Your Host, Jim Morgan About MRA   Helpful Resources Get HR assistance however, wherever, and whenever you need it. Plan your organization's strategies for growth. Find, develop, and retain the right people to build a high-performing workforce.  

Evelyn had been talking about writing this book for some time with her publishers. Trying to write a biography of a person who's still alive is never easy, especially for such a vaulted figure as Joan Didion.  After her death, the book had a context of also trying to explain Didion's legacy in the wake of many articles that came out on Didion. Evelyn wrote this book because there was so much interest in Joan Didion, but also hype around her.Listen in to hear more about Didion's Contrasts and Transformations including significant connections between Evelyn and Joan.

Author and podcast host, Jacob Goldstein and I talk about "The White Album" by Joan Didion. As a San Diego born, New York City journalist, Jacob and I compare and contract Los Angeles and New York as described by Didion and ourselves. We talk about our nostalgia for the past and the uncertainty of the future as we stray on and off topic of this thrilling collection of essays by Didion. Jacob's podcast, "What's your problem? Live from Chicago" Featuring me: https://www.pushkin.fm/podcasts/whats-your-problem/using-ai-for-creative-workJoan Didion's "The White Album" https://www.amazon.com/White-Album-Essays-FSG-Classics/dp/0374532079/ref=sr_1_1?crid=22Q2GNU6OKWHC&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.wYfhcs52-wF2zEiWUY50tu24TD8EOCszh-OzXa7NSJ-TK4b8xm4TsVRNn6pnr0DWIZ87aqui_0h91nwHng_C16tBT662q7vjRr8JRSBCQkN-vBTpQEOfymlkjnFUurDSdRgoV5gn4yq7DZKwwJCPw-YQVsCY6yM8MtV1vvD3JMp_6EFxxC8D_Qd5xbKY2JQMDxC_Yz29nU8UhNSJMf6SELHMD7WQgOKQjtvXBVSG9Bw.s7-hrIzow4BSG1UA1-DZm9daYwLRkIdxyQSKBtBaBv4&dib_tag=se&keywords=the+white+album+joan+didion&qid=1720043002&sprefix=the+white+album+%2Caps%2C188&sr=8-1

In Evelyn McDonnell's The World According to Joan Didion, readers will find an intimate exploration of the life, craft, and legacy of the revered and influential writer Joan Didion. As a groundbreaking journalist, essayist, novelist, and screenwriter, Didion was a writer's writer—a keen observer of life's telling little details. Her insights continue to influence creatives and admirers, encouraging a close observation of the world by unsentimental critics and meticulous stylists. McDonnell is an acclaimed journalist, essayist, and critic herself. A native Californian, feminist, and university professor, she regularly teaches Didion's work and thus is well able to interpret her legacy for readers today. Inspired by Didion's own words—from both published and unpublished works—and informed by the people who knew Didion and whose lives she helped shape, The World According to Joan Didion traces the path she carved from Sacramento, Portuguese Bend, Los Angeles, and Malibu to Manhattan, Miami, and Hawaii. McDonnell reveals the world as seen through Didion's eyes and explores her work in chapters keyed to the singular physical motifs of her writing: Snake. Typewriter. Hotel. Notebook. Girl. Etc. Hat & Beard editor and fellow traveler Vivien Goldman introduced me to McDonnell's work a decade ago. Being a big Didion head myself, I couldn't wait to talk to McDonnell about this smart, elegant, and undeniably readable biography—the first published since Joan's death in December of 2021.

“What is it like to be a clinician with a patient who either comes because they're going to be dying or it happens in the treatment -  what is it like for the clinician? It's lonely in a way because there is a lot of parallel with what the patient is going through. To me, and as a field, I would like to think we could talk about this and write about it. My peer group at the time was terribly important to me - colleagues, people that basically would be with me in this. But in the end I was the one that went alone to the service at the funeral home and I went to my patient's luncheon, not to have the lunch but to talk to the family, and then I left - I didn't stay for the lunch, I thought that might be a little intrusive. There's nothing really to read about, talk about, pick somebody's brain about how do they experience this in their work or I don't really understand why we've been so quiet about this in our work.” PW   “You mentioned about being alone in it, and there is a way in which it's very true. I think a large part is that not many of our colleagues have had this experience. But on the flip side, maybe because I've worked with so many patients and I'm beginning to notice a certain consistency, but I've also had such an experience of close intimacy with these patients. There's a closeness that is to be had particularly in analytic work and work over time - but it happens quite quickly in the work with dying patients, and in that regard, I felt less alone in my work. In some ways in the rest of our work, because we maintain a careful distance in a way, a boundary with the patient, a frame - I feel with the dying patients, I feel like both of us are more in the room together.” MM     Episode Description: We begin with acknowledging the tension that exists between the literal and metaphoric aspects of the analytic relationship and how that is highlighted in the face of physical illness in either party. We focus on patients' illnesses both as they present upon initial consultation and when they develop in the course of treatment. Mark describes his years of work with cancer patients, and Peggy shares her experience with an analysand who, in the 6th year of her treatment, developed a terminal illness. We consider the emotional challenges associated with making home visits, the meaning of 'boundaries', feelings associated with fees, and the shared experience of love between patient and analyst. We consider the ways that the analyst's affective intensity may also be associated with earlier and feared illnesses in their own life. We close with considering the difficulties that our field has in honestly communicating this aspect of the heart and soul of psychoanalysis.   Linked Episodes: Episode 23: A Psychoanalyst Encounters the Dying – Discovering ‘Existential Maturity'   Episode 40: How Psycho-Oncology Informs an Approach to the Covid-19 Crises with Norman Straker, MD   Our Guests: Mark Moore, PhD, is a clinical psychologist and psychoanalyst who works in private practice in Philadelphia. He was the Director of Psychological Services at the Abramson Cancer Center at Pennsylvania Hospital from 2004-2014 where he supervised psychology interns and post-doctoral fellows during their psycho-oncology rotation and provided psychological services to cancer patients and their families. He is also currently a co-leader for a weekly doctoring group for neurology residents at Penn Medicine. He was the Director of the Psychotherapy Training Program from 2014-2020 at the Psychoanalytic Center of Philadelphia, where he currently teaches courses on Writing, Assessment, Core Concepts, and a comparative course on Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis. He was a recipient of the 2020 Edith Sabshin Teaching Award from the American Psychoanalytic Association, and he runs a monthly teaching forum for faculty at his institute. Dr. Moore's clinical work focuses on health issues, notably chronic illness, losses, and life transitions associated with cancer, and the fear of dying. He has written several book chapters on topics including the concept of harmony in Japan, cultural perspectives on lying, conducting therapy outside the office, the experience of bodily betrayal in illness and aging, the experience of shame across the adult lifespan, and more recently about friendship.    Peggy Warren, MD, is a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst in Boston. Originally from Chicago, she danced professionally with Giordano Dance Chicago from ages 15 to 21, which created a lifelong interest in the effects of creativity and mentoring on human development. Fascinated by cell biology, she received a master's degree in microbiology from Chicago Medical School and then an MD from Rush University. In medical school, she was chosen to be an Osler Honor Fellow in Pathology/Oncology, where she was first exposed to dying patients. Awarded the Nathan Freer prize for excellence in a medical student at graduation, she used the prize money to buy the Complete Works of Freud and began to learn about the power of the unconscious. After completing residency training in psychiatry at Massachusetts General Hospital, she pursued analytic training and graduated from the Boston Psychoanalytic Society and Institute. She was on the teaching and supervising faculty of the MGH/McLean psychiatry residency program for 30 years, the Boston Psychoanalytic faculty for 20 years, and won the teaching award from the Harvard Medical School MGH/McLean residency program in 2010. She has given talks on “Vaslav Nijinski: Creativity and Madness,” was a discussant with Doris Kearns Goodwin on Abraham Lincoln and depression, lectured on the effect of twinships on siblings, was a discussant in the “Off the Couch Film Series,” (Boston Coolidge Corner theater), a case presenter “On the Dying Patient” at the 2017 American Psychoanalytic meetings, and is a faculty member of the American Psychoanalytic Association's annual Workshop on Psychoanalytic Writing. She has been in private practice in Boston as a psychoanalyst for 38 years.   Recommended Readings: Bergner, S. (2011). Seductive Symbolism: Psychoanalysis in the Context of Oncology. Psychoanalytic Psychology, 28,267-292.   Emanuel, L. (2021). Psychodynamic contributions to palliative care patients and their family members. In H. Schwartz (Ed.), Applying Psychoanalysis to Medical Care. New York: Routledge.    Hitchen, C. (2012). Mortality. New York: Hatchette Book Group.   Minerbo, V. (1998). The patient without a couch: An analysis of a patient with terminal cancer. Int. J. Psych-Anal., 79,83-93.   Norton, J. (1963). Treatment of a Dying Patient. Psychoanalytic Study of the Child, 18, 541-560   Didion, Joan: The Year of Magical Thinking. Vintage/Random House, 2007   Jaouad, Suleika: Between Two Kingdoms: A Memoir of a Life Interrupted; Random House, 2022.   Bloom, Amy: In Love: A Memoir of Love and Loss;Random House, 2023.  

Esta semana, na estante do programa com o nome em banho-Maria, antecipa-se uma efeméride no calendário da próxima segunda-feira. O centenário da morte de Kafka é o pretexto para a edição (e a recomendação) de “K.”, o ensaio de Roberto Calasso dedicado aos autor de O Processo. Assinala-se a edição portuguesa do sexto e último volume da magistral novela gráfica “O Árabe do Futuro”, de Riad Sattouf. Chega também agora a Portugal, em português, o livro de despedida de Joan Didion, falecida em 2021: “Vou Dizer-te o que Penso”. Por fim, as complexidades da questão da identidade racial estão presentes num pequeno volume da escritora Djaimilia Pereira de Almeida intitulado “O que é ser uma escritora hoje, de acordo comigo”.  See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

If you love DIdion's inimitable prose and you're interested in any kind of history or intrigue or scandal--listen in. NO SPOILERS!

This week we're reviewing the latest Ripley adaptation, and discussing two essays from prominent 20th century writers. We begin by discussing a short bookish essay by Christopher Hitchens and then review Joan Didion's essay on John Wayne. And lastly, we heap all kinds of praise on the Ripley series debuting on Netflix. Fun episode for everybody. Enjoy! Contact Us: Instagram @therewillbbooks Twitter @therewillbbooks Email willbebooks@gmail.com Goodreads: Therewillbebooks ko-fi.com/therewillbbooks patreon.com/therewillbbooks

So why on earth do we so often signal the opposite? Literally and figuratively, we send the message that they're bothering us, that they're a distraction, a burden, annoying. As Evelyn McDonnell writes in her fascinating book The World According to Joan Didion, Didion's daughter Quintana Roo once wrote down a list of her mother's sayings. They were: “Brush your teeth,” “Brush your hair,” and “Shush, I'm working.”Only later do we realize what we're saying to them—as Didion did tragically in her haunting book Blue Nights—how this hurt them, how it contradicted what we felt deep down inside. We were just busy in that moment! We just needed to finish something real quick! We didn't mean anything by it!Of course, we have to make a living. Sometimes we do have to finish things. Some things are important. We just have to make sure that we value what really is important, that we remember, as we say in the March 22nd entry in The Daily Dad: 366 Meditations on Parenting, Love, and Raising Great Kids, our kids aren't a distraction from our work, they are our work.✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com

It's not easy for lots of reasons. Gay Talese, who knew the Didion family (who we've been talking about a lot recently), speculates in Evelyn McDonnell's biography of Joan Didion (signed copies here) what it must have been like to be Quintana Roo, their adopted daughter.✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com

On this episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast, Ryan continues his conversation with writer, academic and associate professor of journalism, Evelyn McDonnell. Together they discuss the obstacles and how to get through them, the illusion of stability, how staying calm can be contagious, and her book The World According to Joan Didion.Evelyn McDonnell, professor of journalism in the LMU Bellarmine College of Liberal Arts, has been appointed the inaugural faculty director of Media Arts & A Just Society (MAJS), effective January 2024. The acclaimed journalist, essayist, critic, feminist, native Californian, and university professor who regularly teaches Didion's work, is attuned to interpret Didion's vision for readers today. Inspired by Didion's own words—from her works both published and unpublished—and informed by the people who knew Didion and those whose lives she shaped, The World According to Joan Didion is an illustrated journey through her life, tracing the path she carved from Sacramento, Portuguese Bend, Los Angeles, and Malibu to Manhattan, Miami, and Hawaii. McDonnell reveals the world as it was seen through Didion's eyes.Signed copies of The World According to Joan Didion are available at The Painted Porch. X: @EvelynMcDonnellIG: @msLadyEvelyn✉️ Sign up for the Daily Stoic email: https://dailystoic.com/dailyemail

There's an interesting passage in Evelyn McDonnell's fascinating biography of Joan Didion (who we have written about many times and we also just had Evelyn on the Daily Stoic podcast), that points out another about the difference between how the public saw Didion and her husband John Gregory Dunne, also a great and successful writer. One was clearly identified as a parent and the other was not, even though Dunne actually wrote a whole book about the topic! As we've said before, by talking about the joys and the struggles of parenting you are helping other parents. You are putting things out in the open. ✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com

On this episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast, Ryan talks with writer, academic and associate professor of journalism, Evelyn McDonnell. Together they discuss the resurgence of psychedelics, how will you deal with tomorrow, the job of the artist, and her book The World According to Joan Didion.Evelyn McDonnell, professor of journalism in the LMU Bellarmine College of Liberal Arts, has been appointed the inaugural faculty director of Media Arts & A Just Society (MAJS), effective January 2024. The acclaimed journalist, essayist, critic, feminist, native Californian, and university professor who regularly teaches Didion's work, is attuned to interpret Didion's vision for readers today. Inspired by Didion's own words—from her works both published and unpublished—and informed by the people who knew Didion and those whose lives she shaped, The World According to Joan Didion is an illustrated journey through her life, tracing the path she carved from Sacramento, Portuguese Bend, Los Angeles, and Malibu to Manhattan, Miami, and Hawaii. McDonnell reveals the world as it was seen through Didion's eyes.Signed copies of The World According to Joan Didion are available at The Painted Porch. ✉️ Sign up for the Daily Stoic email: https://dailystoic.com/dailyemail

We came in with a plan to add some shorter works to our TBR, and because of Matt's ear infection and because Peter can't help himself, we added two novellas and six essays/short stories. Reasonable, right? Lots of interesting nominations this week so be sure to grab a pen and paper. As always thanks for listening. Enjoy! Jan/Feb TBR Additions: Notes from Underground by Fyodor Dostoevsky Breakfast at Tiffany's by Truman Capote “Fear and Loathing at the Super Bowl” by Hunter S. Thompson “The Hyena” by Paul Bowles “The Truth is a Cave in the Black Mountains” by Neil Gaiman “John Wayne: A Love Story” by Joan Didion “Before the Law” by Franz Kafka “Prisoner of Shelves” by Christopher Hitchens Contact Us: Instagram @therewillbbooks Twitter @therewillbbooks Email willbebooks@gmail.com Goodreads: Therewillbebooks ko-fi.com/therewillbbooks patreon.com/therewillbbooks

On December 6, 2023, the US Chemical Safety Board (CSB) released its final report into the 2017 fatal dust explosion and fire at the Didion Milling Facility in Cambria, WI. In today's episode, Rob and Jo give you an overview of the CSB's findings, covering what happened, the causes, the recommendations CSB made, what types of companies could be at risk from incidents like this one, and key lessons for the industry. Find the resources we mention in this week's episode at the links below: CSB Report Episode 88 - Why Senior Management Should Care About Process Safety --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/amplifyyourprocesssafety/message

Jidion a famous YouTuber with over 7.82 Million subscribers just deleted all videos for Jesus, so that he might be able to follow God closely as the Holy Spirit convicted him to stop making comedy videos. Joe Kirby from Off the Kirb Ministries has a message for Jidion and also for Christians on how we should react to Didion's testimony and new found faith in Christ.

Episode 9 in our series on the great essays is about Joan Didion's 'The White Album' (1979), her haunting, impressionistic account of the fracturing of America in the late 1960s. From Jim Morrison to the Manson murders, Didion offers a series of snapshots of a society coming apart in ways no one seemed to understand. But what was true, what was imagined, and where did the real sickness lie?More on Joan Didion from the LRB archive:Thomas Powers on Didion and California:'The thing that California taught her to fear most was snakes, especially rattlesnakes...This gets close to Didion's core anxiety: watching for something that could be anywhere, was easily overlooked, could kill you or a child playing in the garden – just like that.'Mary-Kay Wilmers on Didion and memory:'Reassurance is something Didion doesn't need. She is talking to herself, weighing up the past, going over old stories, keeping herself company. Staging herself.'Martin Amis on Didion's style:'The Californian emptiness arrives and Miss Didion attempts to evolve a style, or manner, to answer to it. Here comes divorces, breakdowns, suicide bids, spliced-up paragraphs, 40-word chapters and italicised wedges of prose that used to be called "fractured".'Patricia Lockwood on reading Didion now:'To revisit Slouching Towards Bethlehem or The White Album is to read an old up-to-the-minute relevance renewed. Inside these essays the coming revolution feels neither terrifying nor exhilarating but familiar – if you are a reader of Joan Didion, you have been studying it all your life.' Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Friday December 29, 2023 Didion Milling to Pay $1.8 million for Deaths of Five Workers

Joan Didion was a titan of American writing. In the new biography, The World According to Joan Didion, author Evelyn McDonnell assesses Didion's importance as a writer while also providing a full portrait of her as a human being. On December 7th at The Algonquin Hotel, McDonnell and other authors will share readings that celebrate the life and legacy of Didion.     

Great American Novel Podcast 24 considers Joan Didion's 1970 novel Play It as It Lays, which shut the door on the 60s and sped down the freeway into the 70s, eyes on the rearview mirror all the while.  In a wide-ranging discussion which touches not only upon Didion and her screenwriter husband but also John Wayne, Ernest Hemingway, the Manson cult, the Mamas and the Papas and Lloyd Cole and the Commotions, we drive down the interstate with Didion and her Corvette as we consider Hollywood, Las Vegas, the desert, Hippies and Hipsters, and the legacy of the 1960s.  As always, listeners are warned, there be spoilers here. The Great American Novel podcast is an ongoing discussion about the novels we hold up as significant achievements in our American literary culture.  Additionally, we sometimes suggest novels who should break into the sometimes problematical canon and at other times we'll suggest books which can be dropped from such lofty consideration.  Your hosts are Kirk Curnutt and Scott Yarbrough, professors with little time and less sense who nonetheless enjoy a good book banter.  All opinions are their own and do not reflect the points of view of their employers, publishers, relatives, pets, or accountants. Intro and outro music is by Lobo Loco.  The intro song is “Old Ralley,” and the outro is “Inspector Invisible.”  For more information visit: https://locolobomusic.com/.  Clip from the trailer for the film Play It As It Lays, dir. 1972 by Frank Perry, monologue spoken by Tuesday Weld, written by Didion and John Gregory Dunne.  Excerpt from “Rattlesnakes” by Lloyd Cole and the Commotions, on the album Rattlesnakes, 1984 Polydor/Geffen, prod. Paul Hardiman.We may be contacted at greatamericannovelpodcast (@) gmail.com. 

Evelyn McDonnell is a storyteller, writing about a storyteller. Her tribute to Joan Didion, “The World According to Joan Didion,” places each of us at the moment we first became aware of the California author. The book delves into Didion's roles as a woman, mother, spouse, and consumer, even as she remains a bit of a political enigma. All these facets contribute to the complex landscape of Didion's life and her work as a kind of cartographer for California.

Host Meg Wolitzer presents two works by the dazzling writer Joan Didion, whose essays, novels, and memoirs have been beloved by generations of readers. This sophisticated, knowing artist placed herself squarely in her reportage, telling her own story vividly and courageously. We'll hear excerpts from two of her best-known works, The White Album, in which she reports on her own mental collapse in the madness of California in the 1960s, and Goodbye to All That, in which her youthful self falls in, and out of, love with New York City. Jill Eikenberry performs The White Album and Mia Dillon shares Goodbye to All That.

Kimberly explores the similarities and profound differences between oft-compared literary GENIUSES Joan Didion and Eve Babitz . . . before digging in to why people keep lumping Emma Cline, and her new novel, in with these legends.

For the last episode in our summer season on the great twentieth-century essays and essayists, David discusses Joan Didion's 'The White Album' (1979), her haunting, impressionistic account of the fracturing of America in the late 1960s. From Jim Morrison to the Manson murders, Didion offers a series of snapshots of a society coming apart in ways no one seemed to understand. But what was true, what was imagined, and where did the real sickness lie?More on Joan Didion from the LRB archive:Thomas Powers on Didion and California:'The thing that California taught her to fear most was snakes, especially rattlesnakes...This gets close to Didion's core anxiety: watching for something that could be anywhere, was easily overlooked, could kill you or a child playing in the garden – just like that.'Mary-Kay Wilmers on Didion and memory:'Reassurance is something Didion doesn't need. She is talking to herself, weighing up the past, going over old stories, keeping herself company. Staging herself.'Martin Amis on Didion's style:'The Californian emptiness arrives and Miss Didion attempts to evolve a style, or manner, to answer to it. Here comes divorces, breakdowns, suicide bids, spliced-up paragraphs, 40-word chapters and italicised wedges of prose that used to be called "fractured".'Patricia Lockwood on reading Didion now:'To revisit Slouching Towards Bethlehem or The White Album is to read an old up-to-the-minute relevance renewed. Inside these essays the coming revolution feels neither terrifying nor exhilarating but familiar – if you are a reader of Joan Didion, you have been studying it all your life.' Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.