Joan Didion (December 5, 1934-December 23, 2021) was an American writer who launched her career in the 1960s after winning an essay contest sponsored by Vogue magazine.
Her writing during the 1960s through the late 1970s engaged audiences in the realities of the counterculture of the '60s and the Hollywood lifestyle. Her political writing often concentrated on the subtext of political and social rhetoric.
In 1991, she wrote the earliest mainstream media article to suggest the Central Park Five had been wrongfully convicted.
In 2005, she won the National Book Award for Nonfiction and was a finalist for both the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Pulitzer Prize for Biography/Autobiography for The Year of Magical Thinking. She later adapted the book into a play, which premiered on Broadway in 2007.
In 2017, Didion was profiled in the Netflix documentary The Center Will Not Hold, directed by her nephew Griffin Dunne.
Didion was born on December 5, 1934, in Sacramento, California, to Frank Reese and Eduene (née Jerrett) Didion. Didion recalled writing things down as early as the age of five, though she said that she never saw herself as a writer until after her work had been published. She identified as a shy, bookish child who pushed herself to overcome social anxiety through acting and public speaking. She read everything she could get her hands on. She spent her adolescence typing out Ernest Hemingway's works to learn more about how sentence structures work.
In 1956, Didion
received a Bachelor of Arts degree in English from the University of
California, Berkeley. During her senior year, she won first place in the
Prix de Paris essay contest sponsored by Vogue,
and was awarded a job as a research assistant at the magazine, having
written a story on the San Francisco architect William Wurster.
More information: The New Yorker
During her seven years at Vogue, Didion worked her way up from promotional copywriter to associate feature editor.
In January 1960, Mademoiselle, published Didion's article Berkeley’s Giant: The University of California.
While at Vogue, and homesick for California, she wrote her first novel, Run, River (1963), about a Sacramento family as it comes apart. Writer and friend John Gregory Dunne helped her edit the book, and the two moved into an apartment together.
In 1968, she published her first work of nonfiction, Slouching Towards Bethlehem, a collection of magazine pieces about her experiences in California. The New York Times referred to it as containing grace, sophistication, nuance, [and] irony.
Didion's novel Play It as It Lays, set in Hollywood, was published in 1970, and A Book of Common Prayer appeared in 1977.
In 1979, she published The White Album, another collection of magazine pieces that previously appeared in Life, Esquire, The Saturday Evening Post, The New York Times, and The New York Review of Books.
Didion's book-length essay Salvador (1983) was written after a two-week trip to El Salvador with her husband. The next year, she published the novel Democracy, the story of a long but unrequited love affair between a wealthy heiress and an older man, a CIA officer, against the background of the Cold War and the Vietnam War.
Her 1987 nonfiction book Miami looked at the
different communities in that city.
In a prescient New York Review of Books piece of 1991, a year after the various trials of the Central Park Five had ended, Didion dissected serious flaws in the prosecution's case, becoming the earliest mainstream writer to view the guilty verdicts as a miscarriage of justice.
She suggested the Five were found guilty because of a sociopolitical narrative with racial overtones that clouded the court's judgment.
In 1992, she published After Henry, a collection of twelve geographical essays and a personal memorial for Henry Robbins, who was Didion's friend and editor from 1966 until his death in 1979.
In 1996, she published The Last Thing He Wanted, a romantic thriller. Dunne and Didion worked closely together for most of their careers. Much of their writing is therefore intertwined. They co-wrote a number of screenplays, including a 1972 film adaptation of her novel Play It as It Lays that starred Anthony Perkins and Tuesday Weld. They also spent several years adapting the biography of journalist Jessica Savitch into the Robert Redford and Michelle Pfeiffer film Up Close & Personal.
Didion began writing The Year of Magical Thinking, a narrative of her response to the death of her husband and the severe illness of their daughter, Quintana Roo Dunne Michael, on October 4, 2004, and finished the manuscript 88 days later on New Year's Eve.
Written at the age of seventy, this was her first nonfiction book that was not a collection of magazine assignments. She went on a book tour following the book's release, doing many readings and promotional interviews, and said that she found the process very therapeutic during her period of mourning.
In 2006, Everyman's Library published We Tell Ourselves Stories in Order to Live, a compendium of much of Didion's writing, including the full content of her first seven published nonfiction books (Slouching Towards Bethlehem, The White Album, Salvador, Miami, After Henry, Political Fictions, and Where I Was From), with an introduction by her contemporary, the critic John Leonard.
In 2007, Didion began working with English playwright and director David Hare on a one-woman stage adaptation of The Year of Magical Thinking. Produced by Scott Rudin, the Broadway play featured Vanessa Redgrave. Although she was hesitant to write for the theater, eventually she found the genre, which was new to her, quite exciting.
Didion wrote early drafts of the screenplay for an HBO biopic directed by Robert Benton on The Washington Post publisher Katharine Graham. It was untitled. Sources say it may trace the paper's reporting on the Watergate scandal which led to President Richard Nixon's resignation.
More information: Vogue
In 2011, Knopf published Blue Nights, a memoir about aging. The book focuses on Didion's daughter, who died just before The Year of Magical Thinking was published. It addresses their relationship with stunning frankness. More generally, the book deals with the anxieties Didion experienced about adopting and raising a child, and about the aging process.
In 2021, Didion published Let Me Tell You What I Mean, a collection of 12 essays she wrote between 1968 and 2000.
A photo of Didion shot by Juergen Teller was used as part of the Spring/Summer 2015 campaign of the luxury French brand Céline.
New Journalism seeks to communicate facts through narrative storytelling and literary techniques. This style is also described as creative nonfiction, intimate journalism, or literary nonfiction. It is a popular moment in the long history of literary journalism in America.
Didion viewed the structure of the sentence as essential to her work. In the New York Times article Why I Write (1976), Didion remarked, To shift the structure of a sentence alters the meaning of that sentence, as definitely and inflexibly as the position of a camera alters the meaning of the object photographed... The arrangement of the words matters, and the arrangement you want can be found in the picture in your mind...The picture tells you how to arrange the words and the arrangement of the words tells you, or tells me, what's going on in the picture.
Didion was heavily influenced by Ernest Hemingway, whose writing taught her the importance of how sentences work in a text. Her other influences included Henry James, who wrote perfect, indirect, complicated sentences, and George Eliot.
Didion died from complications of Parkinson's disease at her home in Manhattan on December 23, 2021, at the age of 87.
More information: The Guardian
Writing nonfiction is more like sculpture,
a matter of shaping the research into the finished thing.
Novels are like paintings, specifically watercolors.
Every stroke you put down you have to go with.
Of course you can rewrite,
but the original strokes are still there in the texture of the thing.
Joan Didion
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