Rereading all these Didion pieces + profiles around Let Me Tell You What I Mean makes it hard to write. Like I could just never so why bother trying at all

— Emily Ratajkowski (@emrata) January 30, 2021

Eh, Didion is ok. Like eating a dry cracker with lots of flavor but no real reason to consume another.

Emily’s writing is quite good. I’d read it even if I did not know who she was. It’s clear, non-meandering, and not spoiled with too many weird metaphors. That beats 99%+ of writers right there.

This is Didion on her own writing:

In short I had no past, and, every Monday-Wednesday-Friday at noon in Dwinelle Hall, it seemed increasingly clear to me that I had no future. I ransacked my closet for clothes in which I might appear invisible in class, and came up with only a dirty raincoat. I sat in this raincoat and I listened to other people’s stories read aloud and I despaired of ever knowing what they knew. I attended every meeting of this class and never spoke once. I managed to write only three of the required five stories. I received—only, I think now, because Mr. Schorer, a man of infinite kindness to and acuity about his students, divined intuitively that my failing performance was a function of adolescent paralysis, of a yearning to be good and a fright that I never would be, of terror that any sentence I committed to paper would expose me as not good enough—a course grade of B. I wrote no more stories for exactly ten years.

That’s from Let Me Tell You What I Mean. She’s no different than Emily, or any good writer; just in the right place at the right time.