In Didion’s case, books like Slouching Towards Bethlehem have of course become talismanic Californian commodities—but none greater than the image of Didion herself, appearing on literary tote bags and in Céline ads alike, as shorthand for a certain strain of bourgeois intellectual white feminism so beloved by luxury capitalism for the veneer of authenticity and depth it provides: the cool white girl as elder stateswoman, remote in her thousand-dollar sunglasses.
