To a certain set of young women Joan Didion is something of an intellectual godmother. These women (they are almost always women) are attracted to her knife-like prose and her cool “disassembling of overprecious myth,” as the New Yorker staff writer Jia Tolentino put it at Didion’s memorial service in 2022. They want to sound like her, look like her, be her. 

But they don’t write like it. In The World According to Joan Didion, the feminist pop culture writer Evelyn McDonnell demonstrates the limits of the tribute biography. She sets herself up as her subject’s admiring Boswell, tracing her footsteps and imitating her prose—but Didion is no Samuel Johnson. She’s not the effusive center of a world class intellectual club who tolerates pesky scribbling hangers-on in part to cement a legacy as a giant of English literature. She is, simply put, a loner, and about the worst tactical mistake someone could make in trying to understand her work is to try to emulate her. 

A biographer’s interest in Didion is easy to understand. However different Didion may be from Johnson in personality, she is, like Johnson, quotable. “We tell ourselves stories in order to live,” from the title piece on The Doors in The White Album (1979), is one of the best known—and worst interpreted —opening lines of all of journalism. (It doesn’t mean we really like bookstores. It means any attempt at understanding one’s circumstances is a construction, a fabrication.) “I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking,” from her 1976 essay “Why I Write,” is even more revealing of her self centered method—and has suffered similar abuse among novice writers.