The Lies We Tell About Joan Didion

Here are some things I learned in Evelyn McDonnell’s new book allegedly about Joan Didion, The World According to Joan Didion:

Evelyn McDonnell lives in San Pedro, California. Evelyn McDonnell considers the California mythology around coastal living (“overdetermined, romanticized, privileged”) to “figure prominently in my own childhood mythology”. Evelyn McDonnell loves nature, “like Joan”. Evelyn McDonnell believes it is important to render the name of the 50th US state with a diacritical mark, as Hawai’i, though native Hawaiians had no written language before Western contact, the “okina” serving as a mark of deference to some locals’ pronunciation with a glottal stop before the final syllable. Evelyn McDonnell believes the literary phenomenon of which Joan Didion is the greatest exemplar known as the New Journalism was “primarily a revolution for white men”, and thus the New Journalism was in a meaningful sense the “same as the old journalism”.