The Last Love Song by Tracy Daugherty review – Joan Didion’s resurgence
‘Style is character,’ observed Didion, whose fanbase keeps widening. But what lies beneath that cool, unsmiling facade?
Thursday 15 October 2015 12.00 BST
M
ore than with most other long biographies, reading Tracy Daugherty’s The Last Love Song feels like traversing a large continent on foot. The book passes through its own weather systems, from a crisp intro, depicting the youth of its subject, Joan Didion, in Sacramento, California, during the 1930s and 40s, through her fecund early working years in Manhattan and on into the hot, gritty, apocalyptic dog days of 1960s Los Angeles, whose bard Didion became. Then comes the greying climate of late middle age and the bare-branched present, leaving Didion, now 80, mourning the deaths of both her husband and adopted daughter, losses she wrote about in two of her most successful non-fiction books, The Year of Magical Thinking and Blue Nights. The Last Love Song has its share of dull stretches, too: periods of endless, flat landscape as Didion and her husband, John Gregory Dunne, host gourmet dinner parties with boring Hollywood celebrities, get involved in the production of mediocre movies and think deep thoughts about swimming pools and Vietnam.
