This feels like divine timing: I recently checked A Book Of Common Prayer out of my university library but haven’t started it yet. I read Play it as it lays a few weeks ago and I fear, like so many young women before me, Joan Didion will be my personality for the foreseeable 🫶🏼🩷

i totally agree. my favourite part of ‘on self respect’ is when didion says one can’t fancy oneself cathy from ‘wuthering heights’ with one’s head in a paper bag, because it obliquely implies that cool & aloof joan, like myself and many other girls, did at one point fancy herself to be wild and carefree catherine earnshaw. for similar reasons, her admittance that deep in her heart, she still fancies john wayne makes that essay a personal favourite—there’s an awkward, sentimental lilt to girlhood, and it’s sweet to think joan felt it too. great essay!