Up close and personal

I am not a fan of Joan Didion, for reasons I explained at length in a Hudson Review article in 2007 (available here to subscribers), but this intimate profile of her makes interesting reading nonetheless. I found the following admission especially striking, because it confirmed my own major reservation about her work:

She admits that her writing might lack empathy, even human curiosity. “I’m not very interested in people,” she says. “I recognize it in myself—there is a basic indifference toward people.”