I've been thinking a lot about Joan Didion and her legacy. My misgivings about her portrait of California have been stacking up over the years, but there's no denying the achievement, and I count myself among her admirers.
In the course of writing about Hunter Thompson, I found myself writing about her, too. She reportedly didn't understand why Tom Wolfe included her work in The New Journalism (1973). "Certainly I have nothing in common with Hunter," she said. That's very true on one level, of course. Her work was cool, precise, controlled. His was fractious, hyperbolic, extravagant. But in both cases, the world revealed its meaning through their heightened perceptions.
Her journey from Goldwater girl to Reagan critic offered another point of comparison with Thompson. By the time she wrote "The Lion King" for The New York Review of Books in 1988, Thompson was no longer the scourge he was during the Nixon era. That transformation was her second act; the third was her grief work at the end of her career. She reinvented herself in a way that Thompson never did, but she never abandoned her signature style or sensibility.
There's more on all this in the Thompson book, maybe too much, but she's a great foil for him as well as a major figure.
