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Truman Capote gave rise to “Capote-esque” (any true-crime or remotely macabre book), while David Foster Wallace is attached to writers besotted with long sentences. Every mannered novel invites comparisons with Jane Austen: Anita Brookner was so sick of comparisons to her that this interview, entitled Just Don’t Mention Jane Austen, says it all Alice Munro has been billed as “a 20th-century Jane Austen”. It comprises perhaps a 10th of the book, but that is enough for journalists and reviewers to start with comparisons.ĭidion is not the first author to become an almost-adjective. The final essay is about her obsession with Didion’s novel Play It As It Lays. Then there is Alana Massey, a writer on “identity, culture, vice and virtue” who also got the label when her essay collection All the Lives I Want was released earlier this year. The parallels may be loose, but they are enough for Witt to be touted as an heir to the grande dame herself. Didion wrote about drugs Witt chooses sex as her vice and both do it in Haight-Ashbury. Witt emulates just that: also heading out to Haight-Ashbury, in San Francisco, as Didion did in Slouching Toward Bethlehem.
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Take Emily Witt, author of Future Sex: A New Kind of Free Love: deemed “Didion-esque” in a Vogue profile in which Witt admits to loving Didion’s ability “ to hold herself in the middle distance”, cannily writing from her own perspective without writing about herself.
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Instead, a closer look at the use of Didion-like reveals that it is only applied to certain female writers.
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That’s what I would have thought it meant. With the coy assistance of suffixes, her surname has become an adjective, with “Didion-like” and “Didion-esque” signifying all things Didion: a detached but insightful, prescient but vulnerable female writer, acidly exposing American faults to American readers. She has remained cool, and it is perhaps this enduring quality that has transformed “Didion” into a word beyond just a proper noun. In the near half-century since, Joan Didion has grown old.