Joan Didion

A quick glance into Joan Didion’s life would put readers under the assumption that she identifies as a standard second-wave feminist. A prominent female writer in the 1960s, Didion had initially left me drawing connections to the likes of Betty Friedan and Gloria Steinem. Even her stern gaze present on book covers and articles seems to give off a sense of feminine mystique. But after careful venture into her work, it is my understanding that while feminism plays a role in what Didion tackles as a writer, it is merely one lens out of many that she uses to advance her writing. Didion has had an upbringing in Northern California as a “daughter of the Golden West” (Fabian 1), and the stories of her family, along with personal observations during…

In "Goodbye to All That", We see a young women, by the name of Joan Didion, going into a new territory while trying to find herself. At the beginning of this essay we see how hopeful and passionate she was about living somewhere new and opposite to where she had live which was California. Toward the end of the essay she develops the moral of the story "it is distinctly possible to remain too long at the Fair.” I believe that this sentence holds a lot of meaning and depth. This sentence also…

about growing up and gaining wisdom. Obviously, growing up means something different for every person, but for Didion it meant realizing that her personal comfort far outweighed the attempt to live the life you are supposed to live—a life that other people would be impressed by. To describe moments that compromised her New York life, Didion portrays…

Upon being asked by The American Scholar, essayist Joan Didion discusses her views of morality in her “On Morality”, where she interprets the origins of morality. Didion reasons a point that the ying yang of morality was created by humans blindly passing on their own ideas of wrong and right to others. She develops this perspective by describing anecdotes with a cool absurdity and imagery, causing readers to understand, using personal connection, how we as humans create the ideas of good and bad…

make the best out of everything. Show, and recreate new memories that your future kids, and grandchildren will look back on, and be amazed. In this auto-bibliography by Joan Didion, Joan shares what she defines as “home.” Not referring to the home her husband, daughter, and herself are currently living in, which is located Los Angeles, California. Home as the city she grew up in Central Valley, California. Although, Joan, and her family still have precious moments, and memories in the house…

An attachment is developed when someone uses or spends considerable time with a person or object. In Joan Didion’s “On Going Home,” the reader can see that Didion is struggling to find her true “home” and the root of her difficulties could stem from her feeling of continual detachment from her childhood home because she moved away and began to reside in Los Angeles with her husband and daughter. Didion faces problems in trying to understand where her true “home” is, which is the result of her…

Writer, Joan Didion, in her essay, On Keeping a Notebook, demonstrates the importance of keeping a notebook. Didion's purpose is to explain why she feels this way. She adopts a didactic tone in order to describe her ideas and get them across to the audience. Joan uses several rhetorical devices such as flashbacks, logos, and imagery. Didion opens up her essay with an account from her own notebook. She uses flashbacks in order to do so. The second paragraph in the essay specifically states that…

In the passage “The Santa Ana,” Joan Didion expressed the strangeness of Los Angeles during the supernatural breeze. Los Angeles’s uneasy tensions during these winds has had an effect on the author’s approach to describing the occurrence. Didion used a vast asset of literary techniques within this excerpt — such as her use of tone, imagery, and syntax. Initially, Didion begins to loosely develop a description of the mutual feel during that particular night. The hot winds would advance among the…

There are many potential points of interest in analyzing Joan Didion’s essay, “Holy Water” and the prologue to N. Scott Momaday’s book The Way to Rainy Mountain. The two pieces of writing are significantly dissimilar indeed, and therefore lend themselves more readily to contrast rather than comparison. Upon further investigation, I came to the conclusions that as different as they were in terms of writing style and use of rhetotical devices, both of the writers’ styles were effective. “Holy…

n comparing George Orwell's and Joan Didion's writing pieces there are many different factors in triggering an author’s imagination to come up with what they want to write, and why they want to write it. Both authors made very descriptive points to how their minds wander on and off their writings while trying to write, concluding into two very different styles. They both often were writing about what they didn’t want to write about before they actually wrote what they wanted too .In most writers…