No country but America could have produced Joan Didion. And no other country would have tolerated her. Think about it. Born in 1934, and gone this month, eighty-seven years later, Didion came of age during Stalin’s reign, at a time when South Africa was instituting apartheid, when India and Pakistan were almost drowning in the aftermath of Partition. Would Mao’s China have welcomed her? Or England—the country of saying the opposite of what you think so as not to cause offense? Not likely. Plus, she didn’t like England. “Everything that’s wrong here started there,” she told me once, when she was thinking of cancelling a trip to London. “Also, so obsequious,” she added. “ ‘Yes, Miss Didion. No, Miss Didion.’ ” Beat. “And they don’t mean it.”
Global in mind but a small-town girl at heart, Didion stayed close to home because she was, first and foremost, a writer, and she was interested in what constituted an American voice. Including her own. She loved Norman Mailer’s, especially the laconic, Western tone he adopted in his 1979 book “The Executioner’s Song,” which she, in a Times review of the book, called a voice “heard often in life but only rarely in literature, the reason being that to truly know the West is to lack all will to write it down.” I think she was drawn to V. S. Naipaul’s pessimism-as-style, too, less because of what it sprang from—the displaced Trinidadian with race and class envy—than because Naipaul’s unwillingness to hope, viewed from a certain angle, mirrored Didion’s own fascination with failure. Indeed, she could never quite reconcile herself to the fact that her country rarely grappled with, or acted on, its own principles.
Background noise typically doesn’t bother me. Directly beneath my apartment, and audible through many holes in the floor (it’s an old building) is a warehouse that does a brisk traffic in cabbages and soybean oil. I’ve long been able to mentally delete the whirring of forklifts and stacking of crates. But the sound of a human scream is — perhaps for evolutionary reasons — difficult to tune out.
I didn’t come to Stoic philosophy as a result of the construction site, but the site did offer an ideal beginner’s challenge: a persistently annoying but not materially threatening situation that was completely outside the bounds of my control.
Writing about food every single week of this year challenged me and changed me. It has made me accountable — accountable for pushing outside of my comfort zone and trying new things, accountable for making sure the things I eat are good enough to tell others about. It has made me really consider the way my food looks, not for the sake of pointless Instagram perfection, but as a humble means of making a little bit of beauty in an often ugly time. It has also made me accept — nay, embrace — my apparently permanent lowered expectations regarding my own cooking. Good enough is good enough, and I'm all in.
Turkish novelist Ayşegül Savaş has a gift for creating likenesses of life bathed in light. Her calming, serene prose delights in the visible. Here is the opening of White on White, Savaş’s alluring new novel: “Mornings, the apartment expanded with light. Light flitted across the walls and curtains, streaked the wooden floorboards, lay dappled on the sheets, as if a luminous brush had left its mark upon my awakening.” The unnamed narrator wields that luminous brush to paint their surrounding world.
In adamant clarity, in an acrylic cube,
the one called phasma or ghost, difficult to see
on its native bark, compels and says I am,
repels and says I am. Which camouflage is which?