some of these nonfiction pieces are darker than others, though even the bleakest parts are written incredibly personally, humanly - so much so as to never come close to any sort of cheap, simple mistanthropy or nihilism, but even in its darkest moments, didion’s never gonna give a straight answer to whether love is real, but it most definitely has real effects in the worlds she portrays - with a care and attention to every person and place even if it’s a passing glance into a life, a whole dimension of character shines thru every line of (sparse) dialogue. the voice that’s heard the most, and is the most captivating and thoughtful, is didion’s, which is super fun to read after only having read her novel “play it as it lays”. though this collection of essays makes me want to go back to didion’s fiction. i think because she uses her nonfiction to draw out the same themes of searching thru a “center”-less world, feeling a pull of some distant nostalgia for a place that never was, or was only in the minds of people, and how this came to shape the way people lived, specifically in this book: how they lived in 60s california. but i’m interested to see more of how she does this in fiction with more room to play around. didion is incredibly attuned to the times, culturally and philosophically. the center cannot, and did not, hold, and reading didion alongside derrida is not a bad idea at all