I’m supposed to be finishing my column but I started reading this new Joan Didion essay that Sean found and I simply can’t stop.

I’ve blathered about Didion before, all over the place, in this newspaper and that one, and I’m sure everyone’s sick of hearing about it. I shant bore you with my reflections on the simple truth that if there’s one writer who made me want to be a writer, it’s she. Easily. No competition. Seeing a print-out of the essay sitting on my desk when I got here today — thanks, Sean — made me explode. With happiness.

Also, Sean: She’s not as old as either of us thought (she’s 71), she is the opposite of giant in person, her voice is incredibly high, and she clearly deserves the Nobel Prize. She invented a form, she invented a tone, she redefined what a serious writer could write about, she’s smarter than God, and she continues, to this day, in spite of her fame, to invest her energy in the cultural developments of a country that has historically found little reason to invest much in women. Certainly it has downplayed them as thinkers.

“The greatest essayist of the last 30 years”? Sean, she’s the greatest essayist of the last century. Even against White and Capote and McCarthy and Vidal and a couple others who come close. I happen to think Charles D’Ambrosio comes close. (Have you read D’Ambrosio’s essays? How many times do I have to tell you, people?)

More on the new Didion essay soon as I finish it. I’m a third of the way through…