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.”
Imagine spending months talking to a writer. You tell them things you wouldn't normally tell people. They meet your family. They read your letters. They listen sympathetically while you explain the worst thing that has ever happened to you. Eventually, perhaps inevitably, you begin to think this person understands you.
Then the book comes out, and you discover that the writer you thought understood you has turned you into a character you barely recognise.
That is the nightmare sitting at the centre of Janet Malcolm's The Journalist and the Murderer. And after everything we've been reading about writers, truth and the people who become material, I suspect Malcolm is the writer we've been heading towards all along.
Hunter S. Thompson drove into Las Vegas with a boot full of drugs. At which point the idea of journalistic objectivity was probably in some difficulty.
.png "Two writers, two very different personalities and the problem with pretending the journalist isn't there")
Mailer was loud, combative, theatrical and seemingly incapable of entering a room without eventually becoming one of the principal subjects under discussion. He ran for mayor of New York. He got into fights. He appeared on television and argued with people. He wrote about politics, war, sex, boxing and himself, frequently managing to combine several of these subjects at once. Norman Mailer didn't simply have a public persona. At times, Norman Mailer appeared to be the principal character in the ongoing Norman Mailer production. He was always the main character.
Didion was something else entirely. Small, watchful, controlled. Dark glasses, cigarette, notebook. She cultivated the impression of somebody sitting quietly at the edge of the room while everyone else made the potentially catastrophic mistake of forgetting she was there.
Joan Didion's writing is a masterclass in precision and insight. Her distinctive style, marked by pared-down, rigorous prose, captured the nuances of American life and personal introspection. As a leading figure in the New Journalism movement of the 1960s, Didion's work blended literary flair with journalistic integrity, offering readers a profound lens through which to view the world.