But that was Didion before Salvador, before Miami, before Political Fictions. Before most of her work. Before “New York: Sentimental Journeys,” in which she concludes that the reason the rape of one white investment banker in Central Park captured more attention than any of the other 3,254 rapes reported in New York City in 1989 was that it seemed to be the story the city wanted to tell itself. That story, an upper-class fantasy, “was of a city systematically ruined, violated, raped by its underclass.” It was a story, she observes, that reversed reality. The rich of the city wanted to believe that the poor made them unsafe, not the other way around.

“We tell ourselves stories in order to live” was printed triumphantly across a banner at a writing conference I once attended. Had they read the rest of that paragraph, I wondered. Because what she means is not that stories are the stuff of life, but that we lie to ourselves. Self-deception has always been her subject. And this is why she follows me in a minivan.