now this is Writing. 

When she's critical of something, Didion has a way of observing it and describing it so whatever is is seems to dig her its own grave. I know that sounds weird but I swear it's true. 

When she likes something, she renders what is true and beautiful about in a dew deft sentences. Absolutely fantastic. 

Highlights: "Pretty Nancy", on Nancy Reagan; "On Being Unchisen by the College of One's Choice", which describes in 1968 (!) a college-admissions landscape which appears very familiar today; "Telling Stories", which tells how Didion learned precision of language writing copy for Vogue in the 50s and leaves no doubt of the skill she acquired; "Why I Write", which includes the sentence "My attention veered inexorably back to the specific, to the tangible, to what was generally considered, by everyone I knew then and for that matter have known since, the peripheral."; "The Long-Distance Runner", which is fun in its description of filmmaker Tony Richardson as a creative and touching in its portrait of him as a friend; and "Last Words", which opens with a surgical dissection of the first paragraph of *A Farewell to Arms* and continues on to the issue of posthumously publishing a writer's letters or unfinished work (in Hemingway's case, both occurred, against his explicit instructions). 

The Nancy Reagan piece, along with "Getting Serenity", on Gambler's Anonymous, and "Fathers, Sons, Screaming Eagles", on the 101st Airborne Association, are examples of skewering something without saying anything bad about it.