A friend advised me to read this interview with Didion in The Paris Interview, the interviewer (Linda Kuehl) died shortly after the interview.

‘INTERVIEWER Did any writer influence you more than others? DIDION I always say Hemingway, because he taught me how sentences worked. When I was fifteen or sixteen I would type out his stories to learn how the sentences worked. I taught myself to type at the same time. A few years ago when I was teaching a course at Berkeley I reread A Farewell to Arms and fell right back into those sentences. I mean they’re perfect sentences. Very direct sentences, smooth rivers, clear water over granite, no sinkholes.’

(…)

‘INTERVIEWER Can you tell simply from the style of writing, or the sensibility, if the author is a woman? DIDION Well, if style is character—and I believe it is—then obviously your sexual identity is going to show up in your style. I don’t want to differentiate between style and sensibility, by the way. Again, your style is your sensibility. But this whole question of sexual identity is very tricky. If I were to read, cold, something by Anaïs Nin, I would probably say that it was written by a man trying to write as a woman. I feel the same way about Colette, and yet both those women are generally regarded as intensely “feminine” writers. I don't seem to recognize “feminine.” On the other hand, Victory seems to me a profoundly female novel. So does Nostromo, so does The Secret Agent.’

(…)

‘INTERVIEWER What’s the main difference between the process of fiction and the process of nonfiction? DIDION The element of discovery takes place, in nonfiction, not during the writing but during the research. This makes writing a piece very tedious. You already know what it’s about.’

(…)

‘INTERVIEWER What about the death of a parent, which seems to recur as a motif? DIDION You know how doctors who work with children get the children to tell stories? And they figure out from the stories what’s frightening the child, what’s worrying the child, what the child thinks? Well, a novel is just a story. You work things out in the stories you tell.
INTERVIEWER And the abortion or loss of a child? DIDION The death of children worries me all the time. It’s on my mind. Even I know that, and I usually don’t know what’s on my mind. On the whole, I don’t want to think too much about why I write what I write. If I know what I’m doing I don’t do it, I can’t do it. The abortion in Play It As It Lays didn’t occur to me until I’d written quite a bit of the book. The book needed an active moment, a moment at which things changed for Maria, a moment in which—this was very, very important—Maria was center stage for a number of pages. Not at a party reacting to somebody else. Not just thinking about her lot in life, either. A long section in which she was the main player. The abortion was a narrative strategy.’

(…)

‘INTERVIEWER You seem to live your life on the edge, or, at least, on the literary idea of the edge.
DIDION Again, it’s a literary idea, and it derives from what engaged me imaginatively as a child. I can recall disapproving of the golden mean, always thinking there was more to be learned from the dark journey. The dark journey engaged me more. I once had in mind a very light novel, all surface, all conversations and memories and recollections of some people in Honolulu who were getting along fine, one or two misapprehensions about the past notwithstanding. Well, I’m working on that book now, but it’s not running that way at all. Not at all.
INTERVIEWER It always turns into danger and apocalypse.
DIDION Well, I grew up in a dangerous landscape. I think people are more affected than they know by landscapes and weather. Sacramento was a very extreme place. It was very flat, flatter than most people can imagine, and I still favor flat horizons. The weather in Sacramento was as extreme as the landscape. There were two rivers, and these rivers would flood in the winter and run dry in the summer. Winter was cold rain and tulle fog. Summer was 100 degrees, 105 degrees, 110 degrees. Those extremes affect the way you deal with the world. It so happens that if you're a writer the extremes show up. They don’t if you sell insurance.’

Read the interview here.

Hemingway has completely gone out of fashion, I know some writers who can’t stand him, but it’s true that there’s a hint of Hemingway in Didion’s sentences, one of the reasons why I like these sentences most of the time.

And the adventure in non-fiction is the research indeed, the writing is just an attempt to remember that adventure, to throw a few things out that might not be of interest to the reader.

And a plot twist as a narrative strategy is something I like also.

Perhaps we should learn to say about the mishaps in our lives, ‘it’s a just a narrative strategy.’