Steffie Nelson

“She does not collapse on the stage. She darts onto it, and says the most stunning thing, and then darts off. It is not the weight of her disclosures that stuns the audience, but the lightness of attention as it hovers between there and not there, between her enticing proximity and her blunt distance. Joan Didion is not a penitent in confession, or a lover ready for embrace. She is not even a burlesque dancer. God no. She is a boxer. She floats like a butterfly and stings like a bee.”
― Steffie Nelson, Slouching Towards Los Angeles: Living and Writing by Joan Didion’s Light

“We are all, one way or another, on a fulcrum between meaning and meaningless, between blunt knowledge and narcotic abandonment. Yet, while energized by that fulcrum, Didion’s work always ends up swinging one way. In an interview with KPFK in Los Angeles in 1972, Didion said her character Maria in Play It as It Lays “is coming to terms with the meaninglessness of experience.” This is Didion’s leitmotif.”
― Steffie Nelson, Slouching Towards Los Angeles: Living and Writing by Joan Didion’s Light