Jia Tolentino on Joan Didion's "everywoman.com"

Joan Didion: one thinks of the Stingray, the mohair throw and the typewriter, bloodshed in Laurel Canyon, the decaying Summer of Love.

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It's always a surprise to remember that the neurasthenic empress of American nonfiction once turned the terrifying gimlet of her attention to Y2Kera fan blogs and Kmart cake toppers for a defense of Martha Stewart. The peculiar liminal timing of the piece, which appeared in this magazine under the headline "everywoman.​com," is part of what makes it a singular artifact: it was published in 2000, three years before Stewart's conviction for conspiracy and obstruction of justice and four years before Didion sat down to write "The Year of Magical Thinking," a time when the Internet was new enough that Didion described one Web site's "seductively logical links." But the pairingmore accurately, a doubling is unrepeatable: one mononymous perfectionist analyzing another, one carapace reflecting another's gleam. Didion's Stewart exegesis, in which most glosses of the subject could also apply to the author, is an urtext on contemporary feminine ambition disguised only partially by style-on the will and the discipline, the persistence of misinterpretation, the unmentioned polestar of whiteness, the victory and the price.