(Sometimes, the defense of Didion’s writing from critique takes a page from this proto-girlboss handbook, i.e., that to criticize her is misogynist; defending white heroines is, after all, a totemic American pastime.) The women are fragile but hard; too scattered and distracted to ever be anything as overt as a heroine or a villain; always imperiled but somehow never quite vanquished—most of all, they are ethically neutral objects through which history happens, not decisive actors of history themselves. Their presence in the West is not an active project of occupation, but an inevitability;
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