PaintingFour_Arina - The Monday Morning Memo

“DAVIDSON: What authors have influenced you?

DIDION: As far as influence on a style goes, I don’t think you’re influenced by anybody you read after age twenty. That all happens before you start working yourself. You would never know it from reading me, but I was very influenced by Hemingway when I was thirteen, fourteen, fifteen. I learned a lot about how sentences worked. How a short sentence worked in a paragraph, how a long sentence worked. Where the commas worked. How every word had to matter. It made me excited about words. Conrad, for the same reason. The sentences sounded wonderful. I remember being so excited once, when I discovered the key lines in Heart of Darkness were in parentheses. James, whom I didn’t read until I was in college, was important to me in trying to come to terms with the impossibility of getting it right. James’s sentences, with all those clauses, had to do with keeping the options open, letting the sentence cover as much as it could. That impressed me a great deal.”

- Sara Davidson, A Visit With Joan Didion, The New York Times Book Review, April 3, 1977

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