I remember reading my first Hemingway book on a flight from Boston to LA in the early tens. Spent a year or two getting from Fiesta to The Old Man and the Sea. Took a break from Hemingway and started thinking in longer sentences again.

A few years later I moved to Brooklyn and became friends with an NYU journalism girl in Greenpoint. She turned me on to Ulysses, Pynchon, Didion, George Saunders. She had a dog named Kip.

I remember reading Didion and thinking: Alas, Hemingway is not dead! He lives on sharper and with higher alcohol content in this woman of graceful cool—slouching everywhere…and now off into eternity.

RIP Joan Didion.