Joan Didion, 'Goodbye to All That' and the struggle to see yourself clearly

Anyone who's completed the climb out of their early 20s hopefully has the wits to remember when life was as vivid as Kodachrome and the experience to recognize that perhaps all those new colors were duller than they seemed. Perspective, after all, is one of the great pleasures of getting older. But at the date of her death Thursday at the age of 87, Joan Didion's 1967 essay "Goodbye to All That" remains the permanent sunspot obscuring the center-vision of many maturing writers even contemplating leaving a place like New