It's not okay how so many men behave as though they have the right to aggressively address strangers on the street because we're women, and it's not okay that we are expected to take it with a smile.

I recently conducted an interview with Joan Didion. We spoke over the phone; she from her hotel in Washington. She was on tour for Blue Nights, a reminisence about the life and death of her daughter, Quintana, and Didion’s thoughts about her own mortality. Over the next few weeks, we will be posting highlights from this interview, then it will all be posted on The Believer website.

- Sheila Heti

THE BELIEVER: When you were a little girl you wanted to be an actress, not a writer?

JOAN DIDION: Right.

BLVR: But you said it’s okay, because writing is in some ways a performance. When you’re writing, are you performing a character?

JD: You’re not even a character. You’re doing a performance. Somehow writing has always seemed to me to have an element of performance.

BLVR: What is the nature of that performance? I mean, an actor performs a character—

JD: Sometimes an actor performs a character, but sometimes an actor just performs. With writing, I don’t think it’s performing a character, really, if the character you’re performing is yourself. I don’t see that as playing a role. It’s just appearing in public.

BLVR: Appearing in public and sort of saying lines—

JD: But not somebody else’s lines. Your lines. Look at me—this is me, is, I think, what you’re saying.

BLVR: And do you feel like that me is a pretty stable thing, or unstable? Is it consistent through one’s life as a writer?

JD: I think it develops into a fairly stable thing over time. I think it’s not at all stable at first. But then you kind of grow into the role you have made for yourself.

BLVR: How would you gauge the distance between the role you have made for yourself—

JD: —and the real person?

BLVR: Yeah.

JD: Well, I don’t know. The real person becomes the role you have made for yourself.

Men in fancy conference rooms in government capitals, the United Nations and think tanks around the world rarely focus on the civilians caught in the crossfire, trapped in a hell they had no role in creating. As rape becomes increasingly relied upon as a weapon to humiliate, destabilize and exercise power, women's bodies become the battlefield between two warring sides. Not only do they get no say in war, they must pay its price in excruciating detail. This trend has only become more apparent as the very nature of war has changed from state-on-state to intra-state conflict.

According to Michelle Bachelet, former president of Chile and now head of UN Women, "in actual budget terms, the U.N. allocates only about 5 percent of its post-conflict funds to addressing women's post-conflict needs."

In Milwaukee, in an effort to solve cold cases, specifically those in which the victim's identity is unknown, the Milwaukee County Medical Examiner's office has started a new program.

They have created composite sketches based on the remains, then created website that features the photo, as well as specific details about the remains... tattoos, etc. Some of the photos of the remains are also posted online. While other cities have similar sites (with composite sketches), Milwaukee and Las Vegas are currently the only 2 places that feature pictures of the actual bodies.

Personally, it makes me a little squeamish, but there have been some positive results.

A news release from the Clark County, Nevada, Office of the Coroner/Medical Examiner states that since 2003, when it launched its own website and designated a group of investigators to handle cold cases, it has identified the remains of 30 people. The site says 152 remain to be identified, the oldest case dating back to 1969.