Accessibility Tools

  • Content scaling 100%
  • Font size 100%
  • Line height 100%
  • Letter spacing 100%

The last love song: A biography of Joan Didion by Tracy Daugherty

by
August 2016, no. 383

The last love song: A biography of Joan Didion by Tracy Daugherty

St Martin’s Press $54.99 hb, 752 pp, 9781250010025

The last love song: A biography of Joan Didion by Tracy Daugherty

by
August 2016, no. 383

For many young writers, Julian Wasser's 1968 Time magazine photograph of Joan Didion posed in front of her yellow Corvette remains the epitome of cool. This has less to do with the car and the cigarette than the challenging gaze that seems to say, 'I'd rather be writing.'

Didion's work continues to deliver news to us as readers and instruct us as writers. In essay collections such as Slouching Towards Bethlehem (1968), The White Album (1979), and Political Fictions (2001), and in her novels Play It as It Lays (1970) and A Book of Common Prayer (1977), she captures all the longings of people (or characters) and the place and era they inhabit. Didion didn't just write about her subjects, whether they were John Wayne, Haight-Ashbury, or the candidates in the 1988 Republican and Democrat National Conventions. As the filmmaker Cameron Crowe notes about Didion's essay 'The White Album', in which (among other things) she observes a recording session of The Doors, '[It] ended up being about life in California, the weather, and existence. I thought, "I get it! This is big picture stuff!"' Or, in biographer Tracy Daugherty's words, Didion's essay on John Wayne reads like 'an elegy not just for an individual but for an era'.

Kevin Rabalais reviews 'The Last Love Song: A biography of Joan Didion' by Tracy Daugherty

The last love song: A biography of Joan Didion

by Tracy Daugherty

St Martin’s Press $54.99 hb, 752 pp, 9781250010025

From the New Issue

You May Also Like

Leave a comment

If you are an ABR subscriber, you will need to sign in to post a comment.

If you have forgotten your sign in details, or if you receive an error message when trying to submit your comment, please email your comment (and the name of the article to which it relates) to ABR Comments. We will review your comment and, subject to approval, we will post it under your name.

Please note that all comments must be approved by ABR and comply with our Terms & Conditions.