I’m wrapping up Play It As It Lays, but I wanted to take a minute to post about the novel’s author, Joan Didion.

Every author has some form of persona–the exterior he or she presents to the world. Hemingway was the gruff, manly world traveler. Kerouac was the “I don’t give a F” degenerate. And Joan Didion?

According to Megan Reynolds, who wrote a profile of Didion for Gawker, the author has constructed a persona of delicate fragility: