One fine essayist sizes up another

 The best assessment I’ve seen of Joan Didion, a wonderful essayist, was by Hilton Als, another wonderful essayist.

Als’s main point: An artist’s job is to question the values that went into making this place, whatever place you call home. We all inherit a textus recuptus, the book that tells us the way things are. It’s the received tradition that tells us why this place is as it is, and we absorb it, whether we want to or not, as children.

The writer’s job is to question how it got to be that way and to ask: What happens if you disrupt it?

Source: Hilton Als, “An Awful and Beautiful Light,” The New York Review of Books, Dec. 17, 2020, Vol. LXVII, No. 20.