"[Jia] Tolentino, a millennial essayist and New Yorker staff writer, said that she had not read Ms. Didion until her 20s, but immediately realized..."

"... that 'through the words of others, I had been reading her my entire life.' At a memorial where so many of the eulogies came from writers who have been paid a lot to complete sentences, it came as little surprise that the guests spent much time debating about who’d given the best one. But the funniest, many people said, belonged to [Susannah] Moore, who vividly recalled some of Ms. Didion’s one-liners, among them, 'Whatever you do, you’ll regret both,' and 'evil is the absence of seriousness.' That one arrived following a dinner Ms. Didion hosted. Among the guests, Ms. Moore said, was Bianca Jagger, who ignited scorn from Ms. Didion by proceeding to pick the magazines up off the coffee table and read them one after the other. The editor Joan Juliet Buck described a conversation she had with Ms. Didion, who had told her how to deal with a stalker: 'Move into the Carlyle.' Annabelle Dunne, Ms. Didion’s niece, reported that her aunt had advised: 'Don’t forget to have a baby. It’s easy to forget.' [David] Remnick started his speech with his misgivings about giving it: 'How do you speak about someone who was in her time the foremost enemy of canned cliché and falsehood?' he asked, before going on to praise her 'authority of tone' and the way she led by example."

From "A Star-Studded Goodbye to All That/Among the well-wishers at Joan Didion’s memorial service in New York" (NYT).

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