Joan Didion Writes Fan Fiction

- "Lauren looks out the window. Through her sleepy eyes, LA looks hazy and blurry and warm. It doesn’t look real. She’s been here for years now but sometimes it still doesn’t look real."

- The story describes Lauren's vision getting blurry -- obviously foreshadowing a migraine in the next installment.

- The close of the story: "Lauren doesn’t know what to do. A girl in a movie would probably scream, but Lauren knows her scream is really unattractive and you never know when someone is waiting around in the bushes to put your unattractive scream on Youtube and Lauren does not need that kind of stress right now. Lauren goes back in the house without screaming and turns on the television. Her cable is out. Lauren doesn’t know what to do."

Seriously, could anyone other than Joan Didion have written this? And an MTV reality show set in Los Angeles starring real fake real people who become pseudo-celebrities with their own clothing lines and magazine covers which the show never acknowledges? Is totally something that Joan Didion would write about for the New York Review of Books. I don't understand why nobody's commissioned her to write that article, which would maybe require her spending a week hanging out & crashing with Lauren and friends at their house.

Plus, she must have identified with Lauren Conrad leaving Laguna Beach for LA because she wrote about an uncannily similar experience of her leaving New York for California in "Goodbye to All That": "I can remember now, with a clarity that makes the nerves in the back of my neck constrict, when New York Laguna Beach began for me, but I cannot lay my finger upon the moment it ended, can never cut through the ambiguities and second starts and broken resolves to the exact place on the page where the heroine is no longer as optimistic as she once was." That's, like, LC in a nutshell.

Especially anybody wandering by this LJ who studies television for a living (hey, I'm just saying -- it is revolutionary for the genre & medium! But don't take my word for it, go read this article from the Globe and Mail, quoting Justin Wolfe or maybe Joan Didion). Plus, you can easily catch up on the first 3 seasons by watching them on MTV's website -- I suggest starting with Season 3, because it's the best. And you don't have to feel guilty by watching online if you're supporting the WGA strike by boycotting TV episodes online: The Hills is unscripted*, so no writers are getting cheated out of residuals!

* Except for maybe a few lines, like when Lauren says to Heidi, "I want to forgive you, and I want to forget you" and it sounded like she'd rehearsed that sentence ahead of time, but maybe it was just something that she and Audrina had come up with themselves.