Over the past couple of months I’ve been spending a lot of time with Joan Didion.  In addition to re-reading her collected nonfiction, I made my way through Tracy Daugherty’s biography, The Last Love Song (St. Martin’s, 2015).  Didion’s writing is a love song to a vanished California that never was, an imagined paradise lost to Okies and aerospace engineers.  Daugherty’s biography is, I suppose, a love song to Didion’s voice. But it stands also as an homage to another lost paradise. In his preface to the book, Daugherty writes, “Above all, in studying Didion, I am fashioning literary biography Read more