My connection to Joan Didion
The book that inspired it all...
Every few Fridays here on Magical Overthinkers, I’ve been taking a page out of Patti Smith’s Substack manual and sharing a video reading from a book I adore. More specifically, I’ve been reading from books that somehow factored into my creative process as I wrote my new book, The Age of Magical Overthinking, coming April 9th. A reader recently asked me how I go about tackling my book research process (I answer that question more in-depth here), and I have to admit, while all the interviewing and academic reading I had to do for Cultish and Wordslut felt more like a necessary (interesting but often tedious) means to the end of the actual writing, I felt incredibly liberated by the “research” I got to do for The Age of Magical Overthinking. That’s because this book’s genre here is so much more fluid and wide-ranging and often very personal, “research” could look like anything from a perusing a philosophy paper about the sunk cost fallacy to visiting a dinosaur museum to rereading Sylvia Plath’s bee poems or Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking.
The latter text is what I’ll be reading from today, in addition to a bit of behind-the-scenes commentary along the way. I’ll also be teasing a single line from my new book, which pairs with the reading.
If you’re not yet a paid subscriber, today would be a good time to consider upgrading :)