Meeting Joan Didion.

When I finished Blue Nights, I exhaled deeply knowing things were now different. I’d started it the day before, a copy I’d happened upon, and while I knew there was other writing of hers I’d yet to read to be sure of it, I nevertheless knew I’d tasted something true. The sense of a new era overwhelmed me. Loss, memory, loss, memory. That was my mantra at the time, and Didion sang it back to me more clearly and more devastatingly than I’d known it could be sung. Memories are what you no longer want to remember.

More over at the Paris Review. [via The Paris Review]

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