More about Joan Didion and how she is daunting and amazing and how sometimes it seems like she's speaking right to me

I was reading Joan Didion's essay "Why I Write" again tonight. She describes in it this feeling she had as an undergrad at Berkeley as "hopeless late adolescent energy," and I think I have that, too. She talks also about amateur ideas and being "interested" in things (like marine biology, or in my case, American politics). These are not issues about which we are experts, although I suspect Joan Didion knows more about marine biology than I will ever know about anything. She claims that she doesn't think in abstracts, but I think that it's all abstract in the end. She says she isn't an intellectual, that when people call her that, she reaches for her gun, but then in the next paragraph she refers to the "Hegelian dialectic" and hell if I know what is. It sure sounds intellectual to me. Anyway, she talks at the end of the essay about "A Book of Common Prayer" and the questions she has about it. There are always questions, after all. This I already knew. Then, after she explains about the questions, she tells it so well that I will just quote it:

"Let me tell you something about why writers write: had I known the answer to any of these questions I would never have needed to write a novel."