Joan Didion's powerful passage includes many strong metaphors, similes, imagery, and choice phrases. She uses these literary tools to helop convey her life changing lesson: "self-respect has nothing to do with the approval of other...has nothing to do with reputation, which...is something people with courage can do without."
             "Innocence ends when on is stripped of the delusion one likes onself." Didion is trying to explain how self-respect is lost at the same time as innocence. She recalls how mortified she was when she learned she had not been accepted into a sorority. "I had not been elected to Phi Beta Kappa...I was unnerved by it." All her life, Didion had thought she was exempt to the "cause-and-effect relationships" that had affected others. After not being accepted into Phi Beta Kappa, she began to realize she could not have everything just because she wanted it. "I lost the conviction that lights would always turn green for me, the pleasant certainty that those rather passive virtues which had won me approval as a child automatically guaranteed me...happiness, honor, and the love of a good man." Before her realization, her self-respect had rested and depended on those virtues. When she realized her virtues meant absolutely nothing in the real world, she lost all respect for herself. Eventually, Didion realized there was only one thing standing between her and self-respect: the idea that one cannot deceive oneself. Decieving oneself "remains the most difficult deception." One can always easily trick others, but to trick oneself is the hardest thing to do. In other words, one can trick others into like, even respecting, them, but one cannot make oneself have self-respect.
             Throughout the passage, Didion uses specific words and phrases to convey her tone. Through words such as marvel, doubtful, and unnerved, she expresses her disbelief and astonishment. At first, her disbelief is directed toward her failed atte...