The Cordial Enmity Of Joan Didion And Pauline Kael

Here’s an anecdote from James Wolcott’s crackerjack new memoir of ink-stained ’70s New York, Lucking Out: Wolcott, then in his twenties and cutting his teeth at the Village Voice, tagged along with Pauline Kael for a drink at the townhouse of a top Newsweek editor. Kael was three decades older than Wolcott and miles above him then in the editorial food chain, but he wasn’t about to ask the most famous movie critic in America why she kept inviting him to screenings. (Whatta town.)

The only prominent item on the enormous glass coffee table at the editor’s house was Joan Didion’s then-latest

culture October 11, 2011

Just Kids

When Jeffrey Eugenides moved to New York, he was 28 years old and things were not looking good. After graduating from Brown in 1983, he and Rick Moody, a college friend, had driven out to San Francisco with no real plan other than making a go of it as writers, and lived together awhile on Haight Street, listening to the sound of the electric typewriter coming from the other room. Eugenides stayed in the city for five years and didn’t publish a thing. He calls these “the lost years” now. “My life just didn’t seem to go forward.” In 1988, Eugenides moved into a cheap place with roommates on St.