#tracy daugherty

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Tracy Daugherty

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Emma Roberts, (Instagram, August 28, 2015)

—The Last Love Song: A Biography of Joan Didion, Tracy Daugherty (2015)

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best political biographies or autobiographies : The Last Love Song | Biography & Memoir

Listen to The Last Love Song new releases best political biographies or autobiographies on your iPhone, iPad, or Android. Get any TV and Radio FREE during your Free Trial

Written By: Tracy Daugherty Narrated By: Bernadette Dunne Publisher: Blackstone Audiobooks Date: November 2015 Duration: 26 hours 46 minutes

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But the trigger for Eduene's temperament is less important than Didion's attempt to engage it from the notebook she received from the woman. A certain predilection for the extreme, what else could reach a person for whom nothing mattered, how else to record events for a woman who doubted anything was worth recording.

The Last Love Song Tracy Daugherty

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The West for me is a haunted place. There are these mythic ghosts everywhere you go. I don’t know of a region that buys its own bullshit more so than the American West does. I went last night to a reading by a major figure in literature of the American West, who described the “settling of the American West” as starting in 1849—and I’m like, Uh, buddy when you’re doing all your walks out in nature did you ever find an arrowhead? Apparently it’s still okay for major figures to pretend that indigenous cultures didn’t exist. The way we talk about the California drought has like all the baggage of rugged individualism and Western exceptionalism all over it. For the biographies, I think those figures are interesting. Luz should probably have a biography of Joan Didion with her, too, but that wasn’t out yet.

Vol. 1 Brooklyn | “Interrogating the Myth of the American West”: An Interview With Claire Vaye Watkins

Lucky for Claire, who is in our Wordstock festival on November 7, the author of that Joan Didion biography (Tracy Daugherty) will also be at Wordstock. Get your ticket now!

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There is something slightly uncomfortable about every book that forces life into narrative—narrative elides; narrative obscures. But it is more than slightly uncomfortable when the life being crammed into narrative’s arc is the life of a woman who has spent many years telling us to distrust that very thing.

Tara Merrigan reviews The Last Love Song by Tracy Daugherty.

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Now Trending: Joan Didion

Joan Didion is once again being forced into the spotlight with the publication of her (first-ever) full-length biography, The Last Love Song. Although Didion declined any involvement, author Tracy Daugherty draws a compelling narrative from her correspondence, acquaintances, interviews, and, of course, writing. The reaction to the book is, ironically, more concerned with Didion as celebrity than Didion as writer: a flurry of thinkpieces bemoaned that “we have reached peak Cult of Joan,” claimed that the biography signals the “final apotheosis of Saint Joan, the patron of cool,” described the war between “lit girls” and “fashion girls” for control of her image, and referenced our *stunning* tote bag.

As for the biography itself: it is hindered by Didion’s refusal to participate, never getting “quite far enough from her own version of events to be a serious literary biography.” Daugherty took an almost fanfictive approach, “reproducing [Didion’s] mental and emotional rhythms” by assuming her style. However, it provides an illuminating and thorough account, drawing distinctions “between her real life and her literary persona, between her experiences as a daughter, writer, wife, and mother and… her brand.”

The truth of the matter, it seems, is that Didion has always been and will continue to be a self-styled icon; there is a reason why she remains a “white girl to whom generations of white girls have been disproportionately drawn.” The Didion we know and love (and admire, and worship) is a fiction the author knowingly created. Or, as Gawker puts it, “the persona she’s created in her writing leaps off the page and latches on to her thin frame like a succubus.”

To start fueling your own thinkpiece:

Two interviews with Tracy Daugherty

An excerpt from the book

The 13 best facts Vulture learned

[universitybookstore]

She is quite possibly the coolest woman alive, certainly the coolest American writer of all time, so it’s about time Joan Didion got a full, critical biography! The Last Love Song: A Biography of Joan Didion, by Tracy Daugherty, is just out St. Martin’s Press.