I'm a great 'book prescriber'. I'm sure all problems can be fixed with the right novel, and I take great pleasure in matching friends with things they just have to read. Right now. And here, can I lend it to you?
My most frequently recommended writer? Joan Didion. She's got something for everyone, and I truly do believe that every break up, health problem, death, sadness, career confusion and creative block can be soothed by her 'surgically precise prose'. And if not? You're probably fucked.
Didion began her career at Vogue in 1956. Since then, she's written a multitude of essays, novels and reportage- on subjects as diverse as migraines (and yes, she makes that a fascinating read) and the Manson Family. Her book The White Album is better than the Beatles and it is the Sixties. It captures that distorted, hazy summer of nothing feeling: a recording session with The Doors, disaffected youth, purposeless political antics, Vietnam, Saran-Wrap and diet pills.
She also eloquently captured the feeling of writer's block and procrastination (which is what I am doing right now in the face of a looming deadline). So says the Diddy-One:
"What else is there to tell? I am bad at interviewing people. I avoid situations in which I have to talk to anyone’s press agent. I do not like to make telephone calls, and would not like to count the mornings I have sat on some Best Western motel bed somewhere and tried to force myself to put through the call to the assistant district attorney. My only advantage as a reporter is that I am so temperamentally unobtrusive and so neurotically inarticulate that people tend to forget that my presence runs counter to their best interests. And it always does. That is one last thing to remember: writers are always selling somebody out."
I'm not really selling anyone out, but the rest...
