Joan Didion

American journalist, novelist, essayist, and screenwriter

• Born: December 5, 1934
• Birthplace: Sacramento, California
• Died: December 23, 2021
• Place of death: New York, New York

Biography

In post-World War II American letters, Joan Didion emerged as a prominent voice. She was born in 1934 to Frank Reese and Eduene Jerret Didion. As she noted in various essays, Didion was a child who developed a strong sense of place in terms of both heredity and landscape. Her ancestors were among the unfortunate pioneer migrants in the Donner Party, and she was the fifth generation to live in the Sacramento Valley, a location that figures prominently in many of her works.

From 1942 to 1944, Didion’s family followed her father on four moves to different Air Corps bases in Washington, North Carolina, and Colorado. Didion’s sense of dislocation was acute, even after the family returned to Sacramento, and the ten-year-old girl began writing stories. A loner through junior high school, Didion spent much of her time reading the works of writers such as Joseph Conrad and Ernest Hemingway, both of whom made lasting impressions on her. She matriculated to C. K. McClatchy Senior High School and later attended the University of California, Berkeley, from 1952 to 1956.

At Berkeley, Didion majored in English literature, and she later claimed that many of her adult attitudes were shaped by her experiences in college. In 1956, during her senior year, Didion won first place in a Vogue magazine writing contest with an essay about William Wilson Wurster, a San Francisco architect. The win led to the magazine hiring Didion as a member of the editorial staff where she wrote merchandising and promotional copy. Under the tutelage of her editor, Allene Talmey, Didion began writing feature pieces in 1961 for Vogue and other magazines.

Eventually homesick, Didion began writing her first novel, Run River (1963) and resigned from her full-time position with the magazine. In 1964 she married John Gregory Dunne, then a writer with Time magazine and later that year the couple moved to Los Angeles. In 1966, they adopted a daughter, Quintana Roo, and during this period, in spite of marital difficulties, Didion steadily wrote articles, a number of which she collected and published in 1968 as Slouching Towards Bethlehem.

Two years later, Didion published her critically well-received second novel, Play It as It Lays, which was nominated for a National Book Award. In 1971, she and her family moved to the beach community of Trancas, where they remained for the next seven years. This was a productive period for both Didion and her husband. In 1971, Didion and Dunne collaborated on the first of the many screenplays they would coauthor.

In 1977, A Book of Common Prayer, an instant best-seller, was published, and two years later, The White Album, a second collection of essays dealing with the late 1960s and early 1970s, was published. In 1983, Didion published her first extended piece of nonfiction, Salvador, and she followed that in the next year with a fourth novel, Democracy, a tale of political and sexual intrigue. In 1987, she published her second extended work of nonfiction, Miami, and in 1988 she and her husband moved back to New York.

Didion’s third, long-awaited collection of essays appeared in 1992 under the title After Henry, and like her earlier works it stirred controversy. She dedicated the collection to her former editor, Henry Robbins, and another writer, “each of whom did time with its publisher.” The publisher was Didion’s own, Simon and Schuster, with which she was dissatisfied and from which she sought a release. The collection, like Slouching towards Bethlehem, is organized around locations—Washington, DC, California, and New York—and reflects the bicoastal life she and her husband had been living in the 1980s.

In her 1996 novel The Last Thing He Wanted, a journalist covering the 1984 presidential campaign quits her assignment, visits her sick father in Florida, takes his place running guns to the Nicaraguan Contras, and finds herself in the middle of an international conspiracy. In Political Fictions (2001), a collection of eight essays from the New York Review of Books, Didion unmasks the manipulation of American politics from the first Bush administration in 1988, to President Clinton's extramarital affair with an intern, and to the 2000 presidential election between George W. Bush and Al Gore. In 2003, Didion published Where I Was From, a collection of essays on the culture and history of California, where she was raised and where she continued to spend much of her time.

In July 2003, Didion and Dunne's daughter, Quintana, was married in New York City. Then, in late December, Quintana was hospitalized for pneumonia, which developed into sepsis, and Quintana soon fell into a coma. Didion and Dunne visited her daily, and on December 30, 2003, five days after Quintana became comatose, John Dunne suffered a massive heart attack and died. In order to help herself deal with the loss of her husband of forty years, Didion turned to literature and read all she could find on the subject of grief. In October 2004, she began writing what would be titled The Year of Magical Thinking (2005), which she finished on December 31. In this National Book Award–winning memoir, Didion relives her life and her relationship with John and chronicles the grief and emotion she experienced in the year following his death. Didion later adapted the memoir into a Broadway stage production of the same name.

In 2006, the collection We Tell Ourselves Stories in Order to Live was published and includes the complete content of Didion's first seven works of nonfiction. The title of the book is taken from the first line of the essay, "The White Album," which appears in the book of the same name.

Several weeks following John Dunne's death on December 30, 2003, Quintana Dunne regained consciousness and was told that her father had died. When she was strong enough, she attended his March 2004 funeral, which had been purposely delayed so that she could attend. Two days later, as she was boarding a flight to Los Angeles, she collapsed from a brain hemorrhage. Following brain surgery and several subsequent hospitalizations and stays in intensive care units, Quintana died in August 2005 at the age of thirty-nine. Didion once again turned to writing to help process an immense loss, and in 2011 published Blue Nights, which is a memoir on parenting, aging, and the death of her only child.

In 2014, actor and film producer Griffin Dunne, who was Didion's nephew and the son of celebrity crime writer Dominick Dunne, began work on a documentary about Didion, which is titled We Tell Ourselves Stories in Order to Live. The film utilizes Didion's own writing, which is read by Didion, to chronicle her life, highlight original footage and photos from her personal life, and to supplement interviews and remembrances with both Didion and those who have known and worked with her.

In 2017, Didion published various notes, snippets, article drafts, and miscellaneous observations from the 1970s South and California as South and West: From a Notebook. The collection was applauded by national publications such as Time, Kirkus Reviews, and the New York Times.

While Didion’s works were highly individualistic, certain themes and concerns appeared repeatedly. For example, in the preface to Slouching Towards Bethlehem, Didion coins the term “atomization” to describe the sense of disruption and chaos that plagues contemporary American life. In essay after essay, Didion reveals a society cut off from tradition, ethics, and any coherent sense of the past. The subjects of various essays become living parallels for the metaphors from William Butler Yeats’s poem “The Second Coming,” which Didion offers as one of two revealing epigraphs for the collection.

In all of Didion’s work, fiction and nonfiction, there emerges a palpable sense of dread, often a free-floating anxiety that cannot be appeased or eradicated. In the beginning of The White Album, in a moment of uncomfortable candor, Didion shares a psychiatric report of her that reveals her pessimistic worldview; the ensuing essays stand as eloquent testimony for such oppressive feelings. While she never formally acknowledged it, this attitude is profoundly existential and forms the core of her literary and personal vision.

In her novels, the heroines were invariably of a certain type—thin, often frail, frequently neurasthenic, and usually victimized by their friends, lovers, and the world in general. They are characters for whom the ordinary promises of life—happiness, success, love—have somehow failed; often, like Maria Wyeth in Play It as It Lays, they search desperately and unsuccessfully for the reasons for this failure. At the same time, though, these women reveal a gritty determination to continue with life. Maria, for example, refuses escape through suicide and continues her search for meaning and fulfillment.

While the vision Didion presented is an uncomfortable one, there is no questioning her honesty and determination. As she revealed in her essay “Why I Write,” Didion was committed to writing itself, which for her, in the most literal sense, was a continuing act of discovery and survival. Her prose was animated by a scrupulous honesty and a hard particularity. Much like her inspiration, Hemingway, Didion filled her works with carefully wrought sentences and clear, precise images. With each work, Didion reasserted her integral place in contemporary American literature and demonstrated a remarkably distinct talent.

For her work, Didion received numerous awards and honors, including the Morton Dauwen Zabel Award for fiction (1978), the Saint Louis Literary Award (2002), the American Academy of Arts and Letters' Gold Medal in Literature (2005), and the University of California, Berkeley's Hubert Howe Bancroft Award (2006). Her overall lifetime achievements were recognized through induction into Academy of Achievement (2006), the National Book Foundation's Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters (2007), the National Humanities Medal (2012), and the PEN Center USA's lifetime achievement award (2013). Didion died on December 23, 2021, at her home in New York City from complications of Parkinson's disease. She was eighty-seven years old.

Author Works

Long Fiction:

Run River, 1963

Play It as It Lays, 1970

A Book of Common Prayer, 1977

Democracy, 1984

The Last Thing He Wanted, 1996

Short Fiction:

Telling Stories, 1978

Drama:

The Year of Magical Thinking: The Play, 2007

Screenplays:

The Panic in Needle Park, 1971 (with John Gregory Dunne)

Play It as It Lays, 1972 (with Dunne)

A Star Is Born, 1976 (with Dunne and Frank Pierson)

True Confessions, 1981 (with Dunne)

Up Close and Personal, 1996 (with Dunne)

Teleplays:

Hills Like White Elephants, 1990 (with John Gregory Dunne)

Broken Trust, 1995 (with Dunne)

Nonfiction:

Slouching towards Bethlehem, 1968

The White Album, 1979

Salvador, 1983

Joan Didion: Essays and Conversations, 1984 (edited by Ellen G. Friedman)

Miami, 1987

After Henry, 1992 (also known as Sentimental Journeys, 1992)

Political Fictions, 2001

Fixed Ideas: America since 9.11, 2003

Where I Was From, 2003

The Year of Magical Thinking, 2005

We Tell Ourselves Stories in Order to Live, 2006

Blue Nights, 2011

South and West: From a Notebook, 2017

Bibliography

Aguirre, Abby. "Vogue Exclusive: Preview the New Joan Didion Documentary." Vogue. Condé Nast, 22 Oct. 2014. Web. 24 Dec. 2014. Discusses the documentary of Didion created by her nephew, filmmaker Griffin Dunne.

Felton, Sharon, ed. The Critical Response to Joan Didion. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1994. Print. This useful collection of reviews and scholarly essays covers Didion’s work through After Henry. Includes career chronology, bibliography, and indexes.

Flanagan, Caitlin. "The Autumn of Joan Didion." Atlantic. Atlantic Monthly Group, 20 Dec. 2011. Web. 24 Dec. 2014. Discusses the attraction of Didion's work for young women, details parts of Didion's work and private life, and provides the writer's own changing impressions of Didion over the decades.

Friedman, Ellen G., ed. Joan Didion: Essays and Conversations. Princeton, N.J.: Ontario Review Press, 1984. Print. Collects essays on various themes and deals with works through Salvador.

Grimes, William. "Joan Didion, 'New Journalist' Who Explored Culture and Chaos, Dies at 87." The New York Times, 23 Dec. 2021, www.nytimes.com/2021/12/23/books/joan-didion-dead.html. Accessed 4 Feb. 2022.

Hall, Linda. “The Writer Who Came in from the Cold.” New York 29 (September, 1996): 28–33, 57. Print. Published shortly after the release of The Last Thing He Wanted, this profile is particularly strong on Didion’s early career and the influence of her former mentor, Noel Parmentel.

Hanley, Lynne. Writing War: Fiction, Gender, and Memory. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1991. Print. Chapters on Didion's work considers the theme of war in her Book of Common Prayer, Salvador, and Democracy.

Henderson, Katherine Usher. Joan Didion. New York: Ungar, 1981. Print. A concise but helpful introductory study of Didion’s life and work up through The White Album. Written for a general audience of nonspecialists.

Lacy, Robert. "Joan Didion: Daughter of Old California." Sewanee Review 122.3 (2014): 500–505. Print. Considers the importance of place and the use of autobiography in Didion's fiction.

Loris, Michelle Carbone. Innocence, Loss, and Recovery in the Art of Joan Didion. New York: Peter Lang, 1989. Print. Explores the themes of disorder, wilderness, and redemption in Didion's writings. Examines her use of biblical imagery and female pioneers as protagonists.

Nowak-McNeice, Katarzyna. "Joan Didion's California: Literary Representations of History, Melancholy, and Transgression." The Quint: An Interdisciplinary Quarterly 7.1 (2014): 82–99. Print. Views California's history, future, and identity as central preoccupations for Didion.

Winchell, Mark Royden. Joan Didion. 1980. Rev. ed. Boston: Twayne, 1989. Print. A revised and updated version of the first book written on Didion, this study follows its subject’s career up through Miami. Accessible to the general reader, Winchell writes for a scholarly audience. Includes notes, bibliography, and index.