I wrote about Joan Didion for the TLS

I have always struggled to articulate why Joan Didion, patron saint of female essayists, leaves me cold. No one could deny that she is a crisp stylist, or that she is drily and drolly hilarious, or that her prose is somehow remote and vivid at once. As Hilton Als puts it in his deft introduction to her new collection of essays, her non-fiction has “the metaphorical power of great fiction”. She writes, for instance, that inside a Las Vegas hotel it is “perpetually cold and carpeted and no perceptible time of day or night”; that sitters in Robert Mapplethorpe’s photographs have “skin like marble, faces like masques”. Each sentence paints a concise yet telling portrait. Read more here.