Activity

The usual elisions occur

Joan Didion, for all her stylistic brio, becomes straightforward

for memoirs, they still leave holes, pockets of deliberate vagueness, writerly lacunae

We have come to expect psychological lightning from the books we read on beaches and buses and trains. We want motives, symptoms, childhood traumas. We want years on the analyst's couch condensed into a single paragraph. We want the deep pleasure of what reviewers call "penetrating psychological in…