School of famous writers

The writer who'd said she'd never write her memoir has written her memoir. She says she was talked into writing it by her editor and not only did she write it, it's just been published. It's subtitled, "A Writer's Memoir." Several famous writers have written blurbs for her memoir, at least one of them saying it's a, "must read." I'm saving it to read in my after-life.

There's a new documentary about Joan Didion, made by two of her family members. I like Joan Didion, she's our foremost memoirist, everything she's written is memoir as far as I can tell. She seems like a no bullshit kind of person, the kind of person who might still smoke without asking, "do you mind if I smoke?" I've never understood why so many writers invoke Joan Didion's statement, "we tell ourselves stories in order to live," but they do and so the saying has become famous; I've seen the statement invoked by other famous writers of Joan Didion's generation more than once. It seems quaintly banal to me, like saying, "we breathe so that we may keep breathing," especially amidst all the other really wonderful things Joan Didion's said or written, but I'm not a famous writer and so I'm probably wrong about this.