Daugherty means as an American citizen, but he may be talking as well about literary citizenship, given that remaining in good standing on that terrain seems to require the delicate treatment of certain legendary figures. In the case of Didion, there has always been something uncouth about asking too much, pressing too hard. You can imagine even the most intrepid and meticulous biographer—and Daugherty certainly qualifies—running into roadblocks on the Didion path and letting out a relieved “Oh, well!” That’s because Didion not only has been granted special status by virtue of her age and the tragedies she’s endured. She also occupies the rare cultural position of having been a sacred cow (or sacred mouse) from almost the beginning. The gushing love she gets from readers and fellow writers has often been characterized as obsessive, but it’s always been, at its root, protective. To be a Didion fan is to be a defender of the sharp and brutal edges, a champion of the dispassion, a forgiver—even an appreciator—of the simmering elitism.

In an era when discussions of privilege and gender have become preoccupations in certain corners of the media and, in some circles, feelings have been granted equal status with facts, it’s interesting to think about how Didion would have fared had she come to New York in 2015 rather than 1955. She is, after all, a writer for whom feelings (especially her own) are inherently unreliable sources. She assailed feminism’s “invention of women as a ‘class’ ” and wrote dismissively of the oppressed “Everywoman” who “needed contraceptives because she was raped on every date … and raped finally on the abortionist’s table.” She never got involved in the women’s movement, because, according to a friend, “she was beyond that.” Didion is, for all her sensitivity and curiosity, more than a little bit of a class snob. “Dunne joked about her archconservative values,” Daugherty writes. For much of her life, it seems, she voted Republican.

As new generations of artists and tastemakers grow hungrier for voices from worlds where mothers do not give teas and closets are not full of organdy tablecloths on long rollers, it’s easy to imagine a writer of Didion’s tastes and sensibility being called out in the blogosphere and in social media as fundamentally gifted yet fundamentally “problematic” (to use a term of the moment that Didion might have great fun with) in her politics and tone. For all her brilliance, she might be deemed too haughty to tolerate, the ultimate white girl.

But that would be both reductive and a total missing of the point. Didion may be a white girl to whom generations of white girls have been disproportionately drawn, but she’s one we—and all kinds of readers—have desperately needed. In the prefeminist 1950s and ’60s, we needed her to show that it was possible for a woman to put her writing first without apology or fanfare. In the let-it-all-hang-out ’70s, we needed her to be the disciplined storyteller who could deliver the goods while keeping herself at arm’s length. In the ’80s and ’90s, we needed her to separate the nation’s ghosts from the political machine. More recently, we needed her to grow old before us and, even amid unthinkable personal tragedy, show that it’s possible not only to remain visible and vital but also to remain unimpeachably, ineluctably cool. We still need her. Maybe now more than ever.