Joan Didion’s family, she says, are a tribe of leavers. In her 2004 book Where I Was From, she begins with her great-great-great-great-grandmother and traces a family history lined with people who, she says, are always leaving, always pushing west. “They tended to accommodate any means in pursuit of an uncertain end,” she says, unsparingly.…

Last Thursday evening I accompanied a group of ten students to Washington D.C. to hear Joan Didion talk about her new book, Blue Nights. The event took place in the Avalon Theatre, a charming old movie theatre with a tall glowing marquis. I hadn’t read the book yet, but I brought a copy with me…

I stole the title for this posting from Joan Didion. One reason I stole it was that I like the brevity of the phrase: In Bed. There you have two short one-syllable words that share a precision, and the precision they share is this: here, now. And, yes, I stole those two sentences, too, from…