Joan Didion eluded me for a long time, because she, along with Joyce Carol Oates, is a hugely prolific writer in so many different genres. I'm still too scared to deal with the Oates canon, but I've finally dipped my toes in the Didion waters. I started with Slouching Towards Bethlehem, one of her collections of early essays, mostly focused on California in the 1960s. It was a nice book to pick up after finishing Against Interpretation, as it followed a very similar structure. As I mentioned in that post, I love essay collections because they allow me to dive in and out of a book so easily, and I gulped Slouching Towards Bethlehem down over the course of a long weekend.

My book club has been trying to figure out how to read Joan Didion for awhile, as we had two members who were Didion veterans (I would even describe one as a Didion superfan), and three members who had never read her, but were anxious to get the chance. We sometimes pick books that one or more members have already read, and that kind of flexibility makes for a better experience and yields better discussions, I think, because we can discuss our most recent perceptions of the book and also address earlier reading experiences.

We finally ended up choosing A Year of Magical Thinking, another non-fiction title, and a much more recent one, describing Didion's struggle in the aftermath of her husband's sudden death, and her daughter's extraordinarily frail health at the time. It's a book about grief, so I expected to be crying the whole time I read it, but that wasn't the case at all. There is a dryness and a rationality to her approach that I found to be such a breath of fresh air.

I'm very anxious to keep reading, and I got a copy of The White Album because I love those photos of her with her Corvette Sting Ray in Malibu. My husband had one framed and hung above my vanity in our newly renovated master bedroom, which I think shows a pretty strong commitment on my part to continuing to read Joan Didion.