Joan Didion Reading - Oct. 10, 2005

Tonight, I went to a reading down at B&N on 14th Street to hear Joan Didion. She has inspired me to write in my blog again. The woman who introduced her mentioned that she had been a person who kept notebooks. She said that it was an obcession of good writers -- probably inborn. That got me thinking about my blog again.

The reading at the bookstore was packed with people. There must have been close to two hundred people there and and dozens more standing at the back. When Didion came out to read, she looked frail and old. Her voice was a little bit slurred. From my vantage point, I could only see her eyes peering out through thick-rimmed glasses over the podium on the speaker's platform. Her voice did not carry to where I sat but came from a speaker that was twenty feet to one side of the stage. Unfortunately, she only read for about twenty minutes. She read from her new book "Magical Thinking." I haven't had a chance to look through it yet, but it was inspired after the sudden death of her husband.

I wondered after the reading whether her publishers were making her read this book simply as a sales tool. There were several other pieces that she could have read. I was hopping for and expecting something a little more political.