In theory momentos serve to bring back the moment. In fact they serve only to make clear how inadequately I appreciated the moment when it was here. How inadequately I appreciated the moment when it was here is something else I could never afford to see.

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.