Lauren Groff on Work and Love
This week’s story, “ Between the Shadow and the Soul ,” is about a fifty-year-old woman named Eliza who has
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A 2011 portrait of the writer Joan Didion. Her former assistant Cory Leadbeater has written a memoir about the years he worked for, and lived with, her. THE UPTOWN LOCAL: Joy, Death, and Joan Didion: A Memoir, by Cory Leadbeater One of Joan Didion’s greatest talents was a bit of sorcery: She somehow became an icon of vulnerable self-revelation without being all that revealing. Her later memoirs, “The Year of Magical Thinking” and “Blue Nights,” are full of the vulnerability that age can afford. But her early work, in the collections “Slouching Towards Bethlehem” and “The White Album,” led her fans to believe she was just like them, that she could understand them. “A lot of people read these pieces,” she recalled in 2011 . “People would come to me for, like, advice, and I hated it.” So you might read “Goodbye to All That,” her 1967 essay about loving and leaving New York, and feel like you’re getting to know the author as a young woman. But there are smoothed-over spots throughout, lots of people with blank faces. In the period it covers, she published a novel, had a long relationship with a well-known writer and then married another. Yet the details are hazy and half-hidden. Such elision left fans voracious for more about Didion — consider the exorbitant prices fetched at her 2022 estate auction . Among the people who actually knew her, Cory Leadbeater seems particularly well poised to actually fill in some of the gaps. While Leadbeater was an M.F.A. candidate at Columbia, the poet James Fenton suggested a job opportunity: A “well-known writer” needed help with “all kinds of things,” a job that would “require tact and would be difficult.” It turned out the writer was Didion, who was in her late 70s and living alone on the Upper East Side. Her husband, the writer John Gregory Dunne, and their daughter had passed away several years earlier. Leadbeater got the job, moved into Didion’s apartment and became both her assistant and her companion — arranging her meals, buying her favored type of tissues, conversing, […]
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This week’s story, “ Between the Shadow and the Soul ,” is about a fifty-year-old woman named Eliza who has
The British realist director Mike Leigh loves the term “character actor,” which he uses often and with zeal. To him,
