CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 11/15/2022

This week, it's all about Joan Didion

"The upside of knowing how to make dreams come true is understanding the fakery involved," Hilton Als writes in Joan Didion: What She Means, DelMonico Books' hot new clothbound hardcover published to accompany the Als-curated group exhibition on view now at the Hammer Museum. "From the first, Didion saw not only the false or borrowed diamonds on the star’s lapel but also the paste holding them together. You have to know how to look in order to have vision—to see the thing for what it is, and what it means to the self—and not turn your back on that reality or on reality in general. Again, the radicalism of Didion’s vision has to do with not only not looking away but also describing what others cannot see or won’t, generally in a bid to protect the rights and privileges of their class and maintaining that class’s various fictions."

ABOVE: Brigitte Lacombe, Joan Didion, New York, 1996, 1996. Black-and-white photograph. 16 × 20 in. Courtesy of the artist and Lacombe, Inc.