Somewhere around the migraine essay I stopped taking notes and simply read, which is about the highest compliment I know how to pay another critic.

Cool detachment is the received view on Didion: the observer at one remove, ice in the prose. That view has it backwards. What's actually on these pages is panic being held extremely still — and the stillness is a technique for surviving the panic rather than evidence of its absence. Read the psychiatric report she reproduces without comment and then tell me that woman was detached.

The water essay is what I press on people. It has no business being interesting. Aqueducts, pumping stations, a control room in California, and underneath all of it, how badly she wants to watch water moved from one place to another by people who know exactly what they're doing, during a decade when nothing else appeared to be under anyone's control.

The migraine piece I read in bed with a migraine, which was either a mistake or the only correct method available.

What's aged oddly is some of the political reporting, not because her observations are wrong but because the certainty about what a movement means, delivered from a hotel lobby, lands differently now. There's a coldness in those pieces that isn't technique.

Eight. The first sentence is on tea towels and it deserves better company.