When I try to find the center of this experience and of this book, I can only poke my finger through the air, pinning down nothing until I realize the reader is the one who is meant to do the heavy lifting. She doesn’t need her readers or reviewers as much as we need her. She’s rarely at the center of her own work, in contrast to the often confessional bent of contemporary nonfiction. Didion is as aloof as a cultural figure as she is on the page. And as a long-time Joan Didion fan, this all seemed terribly apt. To this day, I have never received a hard copy of South and West from Knopf. When I emailed Knopf’s publicity department asking for an advance copy, they replied four days later, months before the book’s release, telling me they had run out of books, and would I take an electronic link? They would send me a book in the mail as soon as they got more. Trying to get my hands on an advanced copy of Joan Didion’s new book, South and West, out this month from Knopf, was, in many ways, a metaphor for my experience reading the book itself.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |