Let Me Tell You What She Means: The Rebranding of Joan Didion

We know how Joan Didion saw the world because she told us herself, quoting a psychiatrist’s report written during her 1968 breakdown:

It is as though she feels deeply that all human effort is foredoomed to failure, a conviction which seems to push her further into a dependent, passive withdrawal. In her view[,] she lives in a world of people moved by strange, conflicted, poorly comprehended, and, above all, devious motivations . . .

A psychiatric patient who believes that human effort is doomed and people are devious is paranoid; a leading intellectual who . . .