Joan Didion — What if the person the writer is selling out is herself?

Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking and what happens when the writer turns the camera on herself

We've been here before. In fact, Joan Didion is where much of this journey began.

In Slouching Towards Bethlehem, she gave us the sentence that has followed us through almost every writer we've encountered since: “Writers are always selling somebody out.”

Can you write about someone you cannot understand?

Emmanuel Carrère, The Adversary and what happens when a writer cannot find the explanation

Writers explain things. Even when they don't announce it, it is one of the basic pleasures they offer us. It's why we love to read. They take the mess of experience and give it shape. They decide where a story begins, which details matter, and how one event relates to another. 

In nonfiction especially, we tend to assume that if a writer has spent years researching a person, interviewing people who knew them, and examining the evidence of their life, they will eventually be able to tell us who that person really was. But what happens if they can't?