Jim’s Reviews > The Last Love Song: A Biography of Joan Didion > Status Update

Paul Schrader once argued that detective noir concerns the disillusionment and moral uncertainty of postwar American culture, 'the loss of public honor, heroic conventions, personal integrity and finally, psychic stability.'

Before Quintana was born, before she came to live with me, I assumed that I was mother material. It was only when I had to face the reality of actually having the perfect baby in my arms that I kind of felt not, not up to it.... I didn't have a clue to what was involved.

Like [Norman] Mailer, Didion revered the novel's lyricism and interiority, but she, too, felt the genre's crisis: Story premises no longer held for her. Plot and character had gone spongy, soaked through with predictability.

One way you can tell a true Westerner: she's the one who—when winters are too dry and too many days in a row are excessively beautiful—begins to worry about the snowpack in the Sierras.