It is after midnight, and the beginning hours of Christmas Eve. The sky is crying. Rain is pouring down.
It's a deluge. It makes sense. Joan Didion died yesterday. Her work was, and is, a huge inspiration for my essay writing.
It was my wedding anniversary yesterday. My husband Adrian and I spent it with our moms. Adrian made a smoked pork roast. After I ate, I thought of my dad who always loved him a roast. When my dad passed so many years ago, I must have read Didion's "The Year of Magical Thinking" at least three or four times. It was my touchstone and helped me to process and grieve.
The first story in my YA memoir novel is about the day my dad died, the day I had to let him go. It took me years to write that story. It went through so many versions. Some surreal. Fragmented. Poetic. The final version is more scene based.
One day, probably many years in the future, I'll write an essay about grief. About how it manifests. How it changes. How we mutate from it. And I'll have Didion to thank.
When I think back to the writers who inspired me the most, Didion is up there with James Joyce and Sandra Cisneros. Didion taught me how to write an essay just by reading her prose. Didion taught me how to break rules and how to get a point of view across. That thing called voice was something she had in droves.
Didion was a voice for the ages. Her writing was her. She was her writing.
So thank you Joan Didion. May you Rest In Peace dear scribe, with a typewriter by your side.
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