The blog posts about Joan Didion’s reading here Wednesday night are rolling in. Writing for Beatrice, author Pearl Abraham shared some of her notes from the evening:

Asked about the difference between fiction and non-fiction, Ms. Didion compared non-fiction writing to sculpture, in which you have a large unformed mass, your notes, your mountain of research, and your thoughts, at which you then chip away to give it shape. With fiction, she said, you have nothing, you have to make it all up. “You wake up every morning only with a smile and a shoeshine… You have to re-animate yourself every morning.” You ask yourself “whether the world really needs another novel, and does it need this novel. After which, you don’t get interested again in this novel until 5 p.m.”

And playwright and Didion fan Lee Houck relayed every detail of the evening, and recognized Didion’s grief as his own.