Getting Serenity News Today

We Tell Ourselves Stories in Order to Live Reflections on the literary influence of Joan Didion. Art by Eleanor Curran. February 22, 2021 My preschool years were spent in California, living atop a mountain covered by lush greenery and speckled with wild deer. The Terminator was Governor, Netflix was a small business that delivered DVDs, and strikingly unaware of the woes of the world, my greatest anxiety was of being eaten alive by the mountain lions that supposedly em...

When Joan Didion was an undergraduate at the University of California, Berkeley, in the mid-1950s, she tried to get to grips with the 19th-century German philosopher Hegel. She even attempted to read theoretical linguistics with what she would later describe as “a kind of hopeless late-adolescent energy, to buy some temporary visa into the world of ideas”. Only, the world of abstract, scholarly theories didn’t hold her attention for very long. Every time she tried to contemplate ...