This is the full text of J. Michael Lennon’s “Looking for Joan Didion: Norman Mailer’s Opposite,” published as a Chicago Tribune op-ed on 28 December 2021, five days after Didion’s death. The same essay also appeared in The Mailer Review 15.1 (2021), p. 23. Rights to the article are reserved — see the frontmatter rights-note. See the Work page: Looking for Joan Didion: Norman Mailer’s Opposite.
When I was a young professor at the University of Illinois at Springfield in the 1970s, I felt the same ardent longing that Holden Caulfield described in “The Catcher in the Rye”: namely, the desire to have intense, candid, one-on-one conversations with the authors of books that knocked me out.