"(The mother of Marina Warner, the beautiful and brilliant English cultural historian, used to ask her, 'Why do you keep disagreeing with men? They don’t like it, you know.')"

"Women who are admired as beauties risk dismissal as brains. But Didion was both. It was non-negotiable: it was impossible to dismiss her words, and it was impossible to ignore her looks. Like her words, they were spare, elegant, and arresting...."

From "Joan Didion’s Priceless Sunglasses/An auction of the writer’s possessions is further confirmation of how, for Didion, style was not surface but essence" by Roxana Robinson (The New Yorker).

"Several years back, you offered a stunning reading of the Rapunzel story. You looked at the beginning, in which a pregnant woman..."

"... so craves the parsley growing in a witch’s garden that she steals some, and the witch punishes her by taking her baby. The baby grows up to be Rapunzel, the girl with long hair who is locked in a tower. I’m thinking of the story now because our Supreme Court seems poised to strike down Roe v. Wade."

Said Katy Waldman, recently, interviewing Marina Warner, in "Marina Warner Sees the Myths in Our Moment Warner has spent decades studying how our oldest stories speak to modern life, from the lure of fake news to the politics of abortion" (The New Yorker). 

Warner answers: