{"id":1757838,"date":"2022-12-01T08:02:30","date_gmt":"2022-12-01T13:02:30","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/?p=1757838"},"modified":"2022-12-01T08:02:35","modified_gmt":"2022-12-01T13:02:35","slug":"at-the-whimsical-intersection-of-joan-didion-and-william-f-buckley","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/at-the-whimsical-intersection-of-joan-didion-and-william-f-buckley\/","title":{"rendered":"At The Whimsical Intersection Of Joan Didion And William F. Buckley"},"content":{"rendered":"<aside class=\"mashsb-container mashsb-main mashsb-stretched\"><div class=\"mashsb-box\"><div class=\"mashsb-count mash-medium\" style=\"&quot;\"><div class=\"counts mashsbcount\">22<\/div><span class=\"mashsb-sharetext\">SHARES<\/span><\/div><div class=\"mashsb-buttons\"><a class=\"mashicon-facebook mash-medium mash-nomargin mashsb-noshadow\" href=\"https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/sharer.php?u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.conservativenewsdaily.net%2Fbreaking-news%2Fat-the-whimsical-intersection-of-joan-didion-and-william-f-buckley%2F\" target=\"_top\" rel=\"nofollow\"><span class=\"icon\"><\/span><span class=\"text\">Facebook<\/span><\/a><a class=\"mashicon-twitter mash-medium mash-nomargin mashsb-noshadow\" href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/intent\/tweet?text=&amp;url=https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/?p=1757838&amp;via=ConservNewsDly\" target=\"_top\" rel=\"nofollow\"><span class=\"icon\"><\/span><span class=\"text\">Twitter<\/span><\/a><a class=\"mashicon-subscribe mash-medium mash-nomargin mashsb-noshadow\" href=\"#\" target=\"_top\" rel=\"nofollow\"><span class=\"icon\"><\/span><span class=\"text\">Subscribe<\/span><\/a><div class=\"onoffswitch2 mash-medium mashsb-noshadow\" style=\"display:none\"><\/div><\/div>\n            <\/div>\n                <div style=\"clear:both\"><\/div><\/aside>\n            <!-- Share buttons by mashshare.net - Version: 4.0.47--><p>After viewing former presidents, athletes, and rock stars with a friend at The National Portrait Gallery one afternoon years ago, I stopped in front of a photograph from 1970. In it, a tiny woman, enveloped in a flowy pantsuit threatening to swallow her petite frame, leans against a white Corvette Stingray.\u00a0\u201cHere is my great role model,\u201d I said to my friend. \u201cSusan, meet Joan Didion.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Didion died last December at age 87. Last month, however, her legend resurfaced in a much-hyped estate sale sponsored by Stair Galleries in Hudson, New York: \u201cAn American Icon: Property From the Collection of Joan Didion.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Steering clear of corporate media, I only heard of the Nov. 16 event a week before on Facebook. A member of one of the left-leaning literary binders I joined long ago was gloating about how the collection of William F. Buckley books belonging to Joan Didion had only garnered $150 in bids, while a stack of books by women poets tallied three or four times as much.<\/p>\n<p>There were 224 items up for auction, ranging from fine art to furniture, glassware, and dishes. I had little interest in the author\u2019s American faux bamboo and pine writing table, her Le Creuset enameled cast-iron Dutch ovens, or even her iconic sunglasses. My focus was on those Buckley books, despite the fact that my husband and I already possess three of the five titles.<\/p>\n<p>The idea of owning books written by Bill Buckley which had belonged to Joan Didion seemed a worthy pursuit. From the age of 22, Didion\u2019s work spoke to me, the young, single \u2014 all I want to do is live in New York me \u2014 essayist and conservative selves yet to surface.<\/p>\n<p>I was introduced to Joan Didion in the mid-1980s at Hunter College. My favorite professor Nick Lyons assigned our class the writer\u2019s famous essay, \u201cGoodbye to All That,\u201d the final piece in her iconic collection, \u201cSlouching Towards Bethlehem.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>That essay details the author\u2019s early adulthood in New York City; what it felt like to be a young, single woman transplanted from sprawling California to Manhattan. Its edgy, concrete prose, so personal to the writer yet so universal, explained <em>my<\/em> obsession with New York. Why I wanted \u2014 no, needed \u2014 to move to the city immediately after high school. I could not articulate the necessity or the reason, but Joan Didion explained it perfectly.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cQuite simply, I was in love with New York,\u201d Didion wrote in \u201cGoodbye to All That.\u201d \u201cI do not mean \u201clove\u201d in any colloquial way, I mean that I was in love with the city, the way you love the first person who touches you and never love anyone quite that way again.\u201d<\/p>\n<p> Didion Gets the Washington Treatment <\/p>\n<p>\u201cWe tell ourselves stories in order to live,\u201d Didion wrote. My favorite Didion story isn\u2019t, ironically, a New York story. It\u2019s a Washington story. And because it is set in Washington, it is a political story.<\/p>\n<p>In the 1990s, I was neither an essayist<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I had little interest in the author\u2019s writing table, cast-iron Dutch ovens, or even her iconic sunglasses. I wanted her copy of the Buckley books I already owned.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":710,"featured_media":1757841,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mo_disable_npp":"","fifu_image_url":"https:\/\/cndimages.nyc3.digitaloceanspaces.com\/breaking-news\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/01\/IMG_2758-scaled-1.jpg","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[546],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1757838","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-the-federalist"],"fifu_image_url":"https:\/\/cndimages.nyc3.digitaloceanspaces.com\/breaking-news\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/01\/IMG_2758-scaled-1.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1757838","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/710"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1757838"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1757838\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1757841"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1757838"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1757838"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1757838"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}