I am far from the only writer sitting at her desk weeping at the death of Joan Didion, who as a writer has meant more to me than any, the way she tells you things, the child's longing as she digs what she imagines are her mother's years-old lipstick-stained cigarettes out of the sand; why the Santa Anas make a housewife "calculate how to burn her husband alive in a Volkswagen"; the tropics where you will not get shot, the affair that will go better than you think it will and the one that will not, and the three-year-old boy in the car Didion needed to care for but could not care, and how the need jumped to me.