“In many ways, writing is the act of saying I, of imposing oneself upon other people, of saying listen to me, see it my way, change your mind. It’s an aggressive, even a hostile act. You can disguise its aggressiveness all you want with veils of subordinate clauses and qualifiers and tentative subjunctives, with ellipses and evasions—with the whole manner of intimating rather than claiming, of alluding rather than stating—but there’s no getting around the fact that setting words on paper is the tactic of a secret bully, an invasion, an imposition of the writer’s sensibility on the reader’s most private space. ”

–Joan Didion

Joan Didion (December 5, 1934 – December 23, 2021) was an American journalist, essayist, novelist, memoirist, and screenwriter. A key figure in New Journalism, she wrote sharp and evocative analyses of politics, culture, literature, family, and loss. Her 1968 essay collection Slouching Towards Bethlehem brought her national attention. In 2005, she won the National Book Award for The Year of Magical Thinking. Didion’s later essays explored universal themes of love, life, and loss.  (Wikipedia.org)