On Didion – Zadie Smith in The New Yorker:

‘It is a peculiarity of Joan Didion’s work that her most ironic formulations are now read as sincere, and her sincerest provocations taken with a large pinch of salt. Perhaps when your subject is human delusion you end up drawing that quality out of others, even as you seek to define and illuminate it. How else to explain the odd ways we invert her meanings? We tell ourselves stories in order to live. A sentence meant as an indictment has transformed into personal credo. The same goes for “magical thinking.” Magical thinking is a disorder of thought. It sees causality where there is none, confuses private emotion with general reality, imposes—as Didion has it, perfectly, in “The White Album”—“a narrative line upon disparate images.” But the extremity of mourning aside, it was not a condition from which she generally suffered.’

(…)

‘She wasn’t looking for approval. Would not be bullied by what “everyone” was saying or what “everyone” believed. Abhorred the kind of thought that forecloses thought. In her 2003 essay “Fixed Opinions, or the Hinge of History,” she spies foreclosure everywhere in the American scene. In the willfully unexamined “US relationship with Israel.” In the public condemnation of another tough-minded woman, Susan Sontag, for daring to consider the motivations of Al Qaeda (“Inquiry into the nature of the enemy we faced, in other words, was to be interpreted as sympathy for that enemy.”) That essay concerns the immediate aftermath of 9/11, but to a contemporary reader—assailed by fixed opinions on all sides—the following lines might have a more general application: The very question […] has come to be seen […] as unraisable, potentially lethal, the conversational equivalent of an unclaimed bag on a bus. We take cover. We wait for the entire subject to be defused, safely insulated behind baffles of invective and counterinvective. Many opinions are expressed. Few are allowed to develop. Even fewer change.
With notable exceptions, Didion was a woman who did not so much express opinions, or emotions, as interrogate both. If this still strikes us as unusual, it seemed unprecedented to me, when reading her for the first time in the late eighties. That she was a woman mattered, very much. When women writers of my generation speak in awed tones of Didion’s “style,” I don’t think it’s the shift dresses or the sunglasses, the cigarettes or commas or even the em dashes that we revere, even though all those things were fabulous. It was the authority. The authority of tone.’

(…)

‘As long as it takes to be in a Didion sentence, you have little choice but to submit to it. Boy, didn’t she know it: In many ways writing is the act of saying I, of imposing oneself upon other people, of saying listen to me, see it my way, change your mind. It’s an aggressive, even a hostile act. You can disguise its aggressiveness all you want with veils of subordinate clauses and qualifiers and tentative subjunctives, with ellipses and evasions—with the whole manner of intimating rather than claiming, of alluding rather than stating—but there’s no getting around the fact that setting words on paper is the tactic of a secret bully, an invasion, an imposition of the writer’s sensibility on the reader’s most private space.
Didion’s confession of being a “secret bully,” of even being capable of mental invasion—for this was another thing we had feared women could not do—was radically liberating. Whether she thought of herself as being part of a “women’s movement” or not, her kinds of sentences played a vital role in it. I never got to thank her for it, except by way of imitation, conscious and unconscious. Though she would no doubt have found the idea sentimental and needlessly generalized, I am part of a great army of women writers in her debt.’

Read the article here.

Isn’t human delusion and disillusionment the subject of most authors? Especially the subject of most novelists I revere.

And yes, writing is an act of aggression, often it’s wise to disguise the aggression at least partly; courtesy makes the aggression that writing is more effective.

Irony is many things, but it is also the cloak that transforms the act of writing i.e. the aggression into something that is slightly more palatable.