She retains a tone and attitude that either resonates with you or not. Her sentences do not get better or different with time, neither do her themes. Either you are taken with her from the start or you decide that she’s not for you and move on. So there, let’s say it in a no-nonsense way: Didion is not an acquired taste. I stole the title not only because the words sounded right but because they seemed to sum up, in a no-nonsense way, all I have to tell you. 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. In many ways, writing is the art 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. There you have three short unambiguous words that share a sound, and the sound they share is this: One reason I stole it was that I like the sound of the words: Why I Write. Of course I stole the title for this talk, from George Orwell.
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