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[...] After the famous first line of her collection The White Album, "We tell ourselves stories in order to live," [...]

[...] Didion uses ironic, or what could be more accurately called skeptical, quotation marks fanatically and constantly. They highlight the fact that the journalist is not just telling a story, she is taking it apart; that the words we use are suspect, revelatory.

She did clipped irony and she did sentences swelling with portent.