Quite often you want to tell somebody your dream, your nightmare. Well, nobody wants to hear about someone else's dream, good or bad; nobody wants to walk around with it. The writer is always tricking the reader into listening to the dream.

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.