My only advantage as a reporter is that I am so physically small, so temperamentally unobtrusive, and so neurotically inarticulate that people tend to forget that my presence runs counter to their best interests.

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.