“It was just as nice as I hoped and dreamed it would be,” sobs a young bride in the final line of Joan Didion’s piece “Marrying Absurd.” Just a few pages and slotted neatly in the Slouching Towards Bethlehem collection before more renowned essays, Didion’s portrait of the Las Vegas wedding industry is full of jarring details. Shotgun marriages, chapels that churn through many ceremonies in one night, panic weddings to improve one’s Vietnam draft status—it is, of course, an essay about the institution of marriage run amok, but it is also a piece about how meaning is created and conferred, a meditation on how ceremonies can convey great emotion through semblance and not substance, and the ways in which we yearn to feel connected to deep things we desire yet barely know.
It is an exercise we bestow not just on weddings but on our literary consumptions. Young people facing centuries’ worth of Great Books to pore over in an age of distraction often take shortcuts. Authors and their entire bodies of work can be encapsulated in fragments: a few underlined sentences from their books endlessly reposted on Instagram, influencers flaunting book covers on the beach, photographs of authors appearing lost in melancholy—or best of all, smoking—making rounds on the Internet. To encounter a couple of these images is to recognize the author; to see a few more is to know them.
Since her death in December 2021, no one has been subjected to this peculiar process more than Joan Didion. Much of it is understandable on an aesthetic level, with the suave way she looks holding a cigarette in her Malibu home, the sly look on her face when photographed leaning against a white Corvette. But these photos tell us very little about the books she wrote that led to such poses, books such as The White Album, which include essays like “The Women’s Movement,” describing the burgeoning feminist thinking of the time as “Stalinist” and “narrow.” For an author who viewed even Richard Nixon as too liberal (although she quietly turned more toward the Democrats with age), the admiration of young progressive-left online circles, whose blog pieces declare her a “literary It-girl,” can seem as strange a marriage as anything in Slouching Towards Bethlehem.
But if we wish to discard the aesthetics around her and probe her often incendiary, frequently incisive, and always entertaining commentary, we are faced with the question: What is it, exactly, that the works of Didion can say about our current political and cultural behavior fifty, sixty years on? Much of our political landscape in 2026 is fraught and bewildering, and the advantage of turning to a text like Slouching Towards Bethlehem at this moment is that it paints a timely portrait of an America struggling with deep societal conflict and teetering toward chaos. The places and events that Didion samples in the late Sixties—a time of unpopular foreign involvements, identity-based unrest at home, and a divisive, enigmatic national government—make right now an instructive time to read Slouching.
A way toward contemporary enlightenment from these old(ish) texts could come through her brilliant essay near the collection’s beginning: “Comrade Laski, C.P.U.S.A. (M.-L.).” In it, a curious and open-minded Didion meets Michael Laski, the founder of a new Communist Party organization, lofty in its ambitions yet struggling to sell pamphlets. She reacts with subtle amusement to Laski’s proclamations that participation in his group risks beatings, jail, and assassination, writing that his world is “a minor but perilous triumph of being over nothingness.” While the essay is lightly mocking, it illustrates how (often well-intentioned) activist groups in dire political times can distract themselves from their goal, devolving into unrealistic ambition and petty narcissisms. Every young person in America today knows the story.
Didion’s Miami, a literary tour of the (at the time) increasingly Cuban-American dominated city, and a short book not at all widely read in her oeuvre, provides another mirror. Discussing the exiles who had fled from Castro’s regime, she notes that, “In fact exile life in Miami was dense with political distinctions, none of them exactly in the American grain.” Some of them were considered “ultra-conservative,” but they were all in “ideological confrontations” every day with each other, with differing levels of approval or distrust toward Reagan’s plans regarding change within Cuba. In her emphasis that Miami’s Cuban-born population was not, as the city’s liberal tribunes (including the later famous novelist and journalist Carl Hiaasen) insisted, seeking or likely to achieve assimilation to the native American norm, it’s easy to see Didion as a forerunner of today’s right-wing immigration restrictionists. But her goal was understanding, not vilification—an understanding that has often eluded the successors of the Hiaasens of Didion’s day. Her alertness to the diversity of immigrants’ views, especially on policy matters regarding their former homes, is an insight we can profit from in 2026, two years after Donald Trump won 42 percent of Latino votes. It is, dare I say, a more vital takeaway from her work than her top Goodreads quotes about the writing process, or sepia-toned articles about her Thanksgiving recipes.
But when the Didion image overshadows her writings, these valuable analogies and historical reference points can fade away. They are replaced, all too easily, with secondary literature that seems intent on pushing mythologies that resonate with a social-media generation. A prominent offender here is Lili Anolik’s 2024 dual biography Didion and Babitz, billed as a joint chronicle of the “mother-daughter-like” rivalry she had with the contemporaneous LA essayist Eve Babitz, known for her memoir-cum-fiction stories collected in books like Slow Days, Fast Company, and Eve’s Hollywood. Even though reviews of the book were largely negative—“neither of them would have liked this book” was a common complaint—it was on many Best Books of 2024 lists and, at the college I attend, a much-cited reference when Didion’s works come up in conversations.
Anolik’s marketing pitch was what made the study so especially enticing. Sampling a disparaging letter that Babitz wrote to Didion in 1972, calling her “tiny,” she made videos for TikTok and Instagram asking readers, “Are you a ‘Joan’ or an ‘Eve’?” Beginning her book proclaiming Babitz’s letter to Didion as evidence of a lover’s quarrel, and ending it by calling the two of them soul mates, Anolik renders the essential “Joan” and “Eve” as tired stereotypes: Babitz as the wild, emotional, free spirit; Didion as shrewd and heartless climber. We’ve seen those films before.
Regardless of the fact that the writers’ texts show that they could be both and everything in between, and, regardless of the fact that the connection between the two authors didn’t seem to be much more than some minor editing on Didion’s part and the harsh letter from Babitz, Anolik plays up these stereotypes to create the most dramatic and grandiose contrasts. She asserts without much evidence that Didion was what Babitz both feared and longed to become, and vice versa. She stoops to vulgar Freudianism, theorizing that Didion was a substitute mother figure for Babitz. For two writers who, to put it generously, seemed to have drifted in and out of each other’s lives for only a decade or so, it seems an unconvincing assumption.
Most crucially, it tells us very little about Didion’s work. Other than calling The Year of Magical Thinking dishonest and narcissistic, Anolik attends mostly to Didion’s personal life, considering whether she starved herself to create an emaciated image, speculating on whether her husband John Gregory Dunne might have been gay, and drawing hasty conclusions about her ambition and careerism. Little grace is extended to the older writer—most of it going to Babitz—leaving potential readers little reason to engage with Didion’s work.
This very popular and messy biography is hardly an aberration. It is the byproduct of a literary culture that has gradually emerged since the 2010s, epitomized by Anolik’s odd insistence on informing her reader just how much she prefers Babitz to Didion, often in the most explicit of terms: that she’s on her “side,” and that she loved Babitz too much, with an appetite “unappeasable” and a preoccupation “fetishistic.” It is a kind of parasociality distinctive of my generation’s literary culture. Writing great books is one thing, but if an author can be characterized as enigmatic, quirky, or cool—think Sylvia Plath, Jack Kerouac, or Franz Kafka—then his or her books can be carried around college campuses, lines from them underlined and photographed for distribution on social media or printed on a tote bag. The grayer, comparatively distant personas behind the equally deserving works of people like W. Somerset Maugham, Eudora Welty, or Henry James just cannot compete.
The need to reduce authors to symbolic mascots speaks sadly to the state of Gen Z literary culture. But should we be surprised? After all, social theorist Guy Debord once proclaimed that all that remains in late-modern culture is the representation, the spectacle, the image. Decades later, we see Everyman’s Library re-publishing their selection of the classics with cover art that suggests nothing about the work itself but instead features an image of the pensive-looking author: a well-dressed Oliver Sacks staring into the camera as if it were his patient, Ian McEwan clasping his hands together amid a pile of unidentified books, and—new in September 2025—Joan Didion leaning against a railing with cigarette in outstretched hand: I Write To Find Out What I Am Thinking—Collected Nonfiction. And there we are: Whatever pleasure or illumination the texts might bring to readers is shown to be secondary to what the authors’ image might inspire us to be.
Yet on the question of what Didion’s writings can still say to us today, much can and should be said. When she moves away from politics and writes directly about art, there is a gravitas and an attention to nuance that makes her criticism not only acute but enduring. Her essay on Georgia O’Keeffe in The White Album is the best example. In only a few pages, she shows how O’Keeffe developed a “hardness” during her formation as a painter, a hardness that made her “a straight shooter, a woman clean of received wisdom and open to what she sees.” From anecdotes about O’Keeffe’s resistance to the self-aggrandizing men who populated art schools at the time, Didion concludes that O’Keeffe’s greatness comes from “an immutable sense of who she was and a fairly clear understanding that she would be required to prove it.”
On matters of gender and strength, there is something far weightier about Didion herself in these few pages than there is in her “It-girl” image of recent years. We encounter her analytical succinctness, her curiosity in how people presented themselves, and a prose style consisting of tight, balanced sentences that she attributed to Hemingway. The reduction of Didion to a pretty face smoking a cigarette in front of a vehicle might be aesthetically alluring, but it’s an exercise that works against the hardness in women that she prized and that she cultivated in herself.
The problem with a literary culture of images is that images have an exceptionally short shelf life. People soon grow bored with them and move on to the next “It” author. By contrast, great works of literature, fiction or nonfiction, endure by challenging readers to find and understand themselves, others, and their own time through encounters with words forged in other times and places under the annealing pressure of intellect and art. The only use that the image of Joan Didion serves is that of nostalgia, and perhaps an indeterminate yearning for some other kind of life. Her written words, on the other hand, force the reader to confront the truths that remain most resistant to change and fashion, the ones that shape the reader deeply, from within.
