Tracy Daugherty: The Princess in the Deed Room: Joan Didion’s Changing Sense of Narrative (January 2002)

In the 1960s, Tracy Daugherty argues, Joan Didion all but abandoned traditional storytelling for a more fragmented, non-linear style. Yet Didion’s more recent work, Daugherty notes, shows a return, if not to straightforward narrative, then to “the enduring ability of stories to limn our culture’s secrets.” Looking at a range of Didion’s fiction and non-fiction, Daughterty considers how and why Didion made this return, what it has meant for her work, and what it can tell us about narrative craft more broadly.