Joan Didion Slouching Towards Martha Analysis

In interim with the onset of my formative years, Joan Didion was one of my principal heroines. After reading Slouching Towards Bethlehem, I pictured this strong, free-willed, and iconoclastic writer as having the ultimate and perfect life. Slouching Towards Bethlehem was the first piece of writing that my adolescent self-connect with, and in many ways changed the way I thought about the world and the people around me. I proudly fell into the cult following of fans who idealized this gutsy novelist.

Joan Didion’s essays were wild and made me feel free and adventurous by proxy. She was a strong-willed career woman who went after what she wanted in life with all the gusto of a hurricane, while wearing chic overcoats, oversized sunglasses, and driving a convertible. She was not a community leader, per say, but she influenced women of all ages around the country. I had epitomized her as a strong and confident woman who had it all: the style, the career, the exotic experiences, and the family. Throughout adolescence and young adulthood, this woman represented the apotheosis of what a girl who loved writing, could become. Near the end of high school was when I realized that Joan Didion’s life was not so glamorous as I

Didion, herself, has stated that after the tragedy that she struggled not to lose her defining quality, her writing. She said that writing “no longer comes easily to me” and that she found “a certain weariness with my own style” (“A Daughter’s Death”). While Didion has suffered greatly and her life has been completely changed, she has expressed resilience in how she continues to live day after day and continue writing. She took her greatest moments of pain and turned them into best-selling novels. Using art to cope with tragedy is something admirable, that I have learned from