Informal Response:

Sorry, I forgot to post/publish this post on Friday!

Didion 

Didion's essays "Goodbye to All That" and "In bed" remind me of Fitzgerald's "The Crack-Up" as she admits to getting sick of New York City and having migraines. Like Fitzgerald, she is blatantly honest about sometimes being broken. For example, when she turned twenty-eight, she says that, " Everything that was said to me I seemed to have heard before, and I could no longer listen. . . . I hurt the people that I cared about, and insulted those I did not. I cut myself off from the one person who was closer to me than any other. I cried until I was not even aware  when I was crying." It is this honesty that increases her intimacy with her readers. The statements that she uses to describe her emotions seems universal, which heightens the universality of her situation. But more importantly, she adds the specifics of not being able to sit at Grand Central, hearing from people receiving advances from publishers, and not going up to Madison Avenue to people watch, which validate her universal point.

Another aspect of these essays I really enjoyed was her voice and style of writing. There was the honesty to it, but also a very "story-like" style. She tells you how everything happened and addresses the reader directly, which increases this story aspect to it. For example on page 684 of "Goodbye to All That," she mentions, "You see I was in a curious position in New York: it never occurred to me that I was living a real life there." She then explains what she had imagined about her situation. To share where she started feeling depressed and broken in New York, because she had stayed in New York too long, she claims, "I could not tell you when I began to understand that." This direct address makes the story "flow" better and also increases the intimacy with the reader even more.

Rodriguez

 Rodriguez also draws the reader in through his honesty, personality and voice in the essay. His essay "Late Victorians" intrigued me as he sets up in juxtaposition of the rigid, traditional Victorian ideals through the houses and acceptance, love, and celebration of being gay. He begins this very interestingly with the idea of St. Augustine, the saint that addressed inherent sin from Adam and Eve and as Rodriguez said, that humans should be unhappy, because unhappiness is a sign of immorality. This beginning sets up the juxtaposition and also shows a little about him and his dilemma to believe this ideal. He explains why at the end of the essay, he remains seated on the hard pew. It also corresponds with the rigid Victorian houses that represented the rigid and narrow-minded moral family setting of that era. He makes this point of view unique in how that house symbolized having multiple generations living under the same roof. The interesting contrast he then sets up is that families have gravitated toward the one floor houses or the one generation house while men without families or children began buying and living in these Victorian houses.

Throughout this essay, he then brings in interesting and entertaining anecdotes about his living in such a house. That with his personal experiences and observations, he then recounts the naturalness and celebration of gays seen in San Francisco. He recounts this blunt juxtaposition to describe what he sees but also his own dilemma, which is shown in the end of the story. Through these interesting tales and honest accounts, Rodriguez really captivates the reader throughout the entire essay. I thoroughly loved this work.