The Last Love Song
““I don’t mean physically. I mean that in adopting [the main character’s] point of view, I felt much sharper, harsher,” she said. “I adopted a lot of the mannerisms and attitudes of an impatient, sixty-year-old dying woman. I would cut people off in the middle of conversations. I fell into Grace because I was trying to maintain her tone.”
It was the tone, of course, of Dunne’s dying mother, just as the girl in the book, on the lam from the FBI, is, in some measure, Patty Hearst. These recent eve...nts made their way into the novel the way radiation from the TRIGA Mark III bathed anything straying unprotected into its radius; Didion began to see the novelist’s job as wandering, vulnerable, into the culture’s red zones, setting off the alarms.
But in speaking, in the novel, as an older woman about a younger one with a misguided daughter she’s never understood, Didion was—more crucially—speaking to herself, observing her life from the wide end of the telescope, returning with warnings from the future, a form of magical thinking available only in fiction.MoreLess
It was the tone, of course, of Dunne’s dying mother, just as the girl in the book, on the lam from the FBI, is, in some measure, Patty Hearst. These recent eve...nts made their way into the novel the way radiation from the TRIGA Mark III bathed anything straying unprotected into its radius; Didion began to see the novelist’s job as wandering, vulnerable, into the culture’s red zones, setting off the alarms.
But in speaking, in the novel, as an older woman about a younger one with a misguided daughter she’s never understood, Didion was—more crucially—speaking to herself, observing her life from the wide end of the telescope, returning with warnings from the future, a form of magical thinking available only in fiction.MoreLess
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