210 Contemporary Literature, 1970 to Present
Criticism
Bruce Bawer, “Didion’s Dreamwork,” Hudson Review, 60 (Spring 2007): 85–103.
A negative review of We Tell Ourselves Stories in Order to Live that analyzes
Didion’s self-presentation in her nonfiction.
Elyse Blankley, “Clear-Cutting the Western Myth: Beyond Joan Didion,” in San
Francisco in Fiction: Essays in a Regional Literature, edited by David M. Fine
and Paul Skenazy (Las Cruces: University of New Mexico Press, 1995), pp.
177–197.
Compares Didion’s writing to works by other women and nonwhite writers and
reveals the relationship of Didion’s writing to myths about the West.
Krista Comer, “Joan Didion,” in Updating the Literary West, sponsored by the
Western Literature Association (Fort Worth: Texas Christian University
Press, 1997), pp. 346–351.
Focuses on images of California and feminism in Didion’s work.
Sharon Felton, ed., The Critical Response to Joan Didion (Westport, Conn.: Green-
wood Press, 1994).
A particularly useful collection of reviews and essays on Didion’s work from her
first novel, Run River (1963), to After Henry (1992). It includes an extensive bib-
liography of secondary sources.
Ellen G. Friedman, ed., Joan Didion: Essays and Conversations (Princeton: Ontario
Review Press, 1984).
Focusing primarily on Didion’s fiction (only three of the fourteen essays included
examine her nonfiction), an anthology of interviews and critical essays that offers
insights into the writer’s craft, sensibility, and thematic concerns.
Merritt Moseley, “Joan Didion’s Symbolic Landscapes,” South Carolina Review,
21 (Spring 1989): 55–64; reprinted in Felton, ed., pp. 133–143.
Examines the symbolic resonance of “surroundings.... The setting, the weather,
the wind, the animal life” in Didion’s writing, particularly Slouching towards Beth-
lehem and The White Album.
Mark Z. Muggli, “The Poetics of Joan Didion’s Journalism,” American Literature,
59 (October 1987): 402–421; reprinted in Felton, pp. 143–158.
Provides an in-depth analysis of Didion’s nonfiction and categorizes her uses of
metaphor while arguing for the need to consider “the sophisticated poetics of
factual literature.”
Robert Ward, “Remembering Memoir: California(s) in Joan Didion’s Where I
Was From,” Lifewriting Annual: Biographical and Autobiographical Studies, 2
(2008): 113–125.
Describes Didion’s role as memoirist as putting together the “I”—her own per-
sonal crises and the way she has used writing to grapple with them—and the “Not
I,” her gathering of master narratives in the history of California and the more
fragmentary history represented by women’s diaries and journals, letters, quilts,
and other objects of material history to create a collage-like structure.