I am not sure what more I could tell you about these pieces. I could tell you that I liked doing some of them more than others, but that all of them were hard for me to do, and took more time than perhaps they were worth; that there is always a point in the writing of a piece when I sit in a room literally papered with false starts and cannot put one word after another and imagine that I have suffered a small stroke, leaving me apparently undamaged but actually aphasic.

—Joan Didion, from Slouching Towards Bethlehem: Essays

(Joan Didion sitting inside a white Stingray car in Hollywood, November 1970 / Julian Wasser/Time Life Pictures/Getty Images.)