Joan Didion

Reported California in the late sixties without ever pretending to be a neutral instrument. Slouching Towards Bethlehem watched the counterculture up close and declined to be charmed by it, and The White Album opens by saying we tell ourselves stories in order to live, which is quoted constantly and almost always as though she meant it approvingly.

The Year of Magical Thinking was written after her husband died at the dinner table while their daughter lay in intensive care. Blue Nights followed the daughter's death. Both are exact rather than consoling. Didion wrote about grief the way she wrote about everything, by noticing what her own mind was doing and refusing to look away from it.