...nor can we know ahead of the fact the unending absence that follows, the void, the very opposite of meaning, the relentless succession of moments during which we will confront the experience of meaningless itself.

read like a novel. Didion wrote in her 2003 memoir Where I Was From that moving as often as her family did made her feel like a perpetual outsider. In the New York Times article Why I Write (1976) Didion remarks "To shift the structure of a sentence alters the meaning of that sentence as definitely and inflexibly as the position of a camera alters the meaning of the object photographed.

Joan Didion (born December 5 1934) is an American author best known for her novels and her literary journalism. A sense of anxiety or dread permeates much of her work.