Hundreds gather for Joan Didion tribute Wednesday night
Joan Didion, a master of rhythm and of the meaning of the unsaid, was remembered Wednesday as an inspiring and fearless writer and valued, exacting and sometimes eccentric friend
NEW YORK (AP) — Joan Didion's precision with words extended even to ones she would never live to hear, such as those used during a small, private service this spring at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine.
“She left very clear directions about what she wanted to happen at that service,” the Very Rev. Patrick Malloy said Wednesday night, at the start of a memorial tribute at the Cathedral. “She wanted it to be very brief and she specified the texts she wanted us to use, all from the Episcopal Book of Common Prayer, which is what you'd expect from an Episcopalian who wrote a book called ‘A Book of Common Prayer.’"
The texts she chose were “remarkably dour,” Malloy went on to explain, and they were not from the contemporary edition of the Book of Common Prayer, but from an older, more ornate printing. It was Didion's way of reminding everyone that the sounds of the words, and their rhythm, meant as much as the words themselves.
Didion, a master of rhythm and of the meaning of the unsaid, was remembered Wednesday as an inspiring and fearless writer and valued, exacting and sometimes eccentric friend, the kind who didn’t like to speak on the phone unless asked to or who might serve chocolate soufflés at a child’s birthday party because she didn’t know how to bake a cake.
