Joan Didion is a celebrated author of novels, memoirs and literary journalism. Her career spans decades and chronicles the shifts in American culture as well as her personal tragedies, anxiety and motherhood. Cool Customer.
 

"We tell ourselves stories in order to live...We look for the sermon in the suicide, for the social or moral lesson in the murder of five. We interpret what we see, select the most workable of the multiple choices. We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images, by the 'ideas' with which we have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience."

— Joan Didion, The White Album