Joan Didion (; December 5, 1934 – December 23, 2021) was an American writer and journalist. She is considered one of the pioneers of New Journalism, along with Gay Talese, Truman Capote, Norman Mailer, Hunter S. Thompson and Tom Wolfe.
Didion's career began in the 1950s after she won an essay contest sponsored by Vogue magazine. She went on to publish essays in The Saturday Evening Post, National Review, Life, Esquire, The New York Review of Books and The New Yorker. Her writing during the 1960s through the late 1970s engaged audiences in the realities of the counterculture of the 1960s, the Hollywood lifestyle and the history and culture of California.
Play It As It Lays (1970), Didion's second novel, is considered a classic work of American fiction; Time magazine included the novel in its list of the 100 best English-language novels from 1923 to 2005. Didion's political writing in the 1980s and 1990s concentrated on political rhetoric and the United States's foreign policy in Latin America. In 1991, she wrote the earliest mainstream media article to suggest that the Central Park Five had been wrongfully convicted.
With her husband John Gregory Dunne, Didion wrote screenplays including The Panic in Needle Park (1971), A Star Is Born (1976), and Up Close & Personal (1996). 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 The Year of Magical Thinking, a memoir of the year following the sudden death of her husband. She later adapted the book into a play that premiered on Broadway in 2007. In 2013, she was awarded the National Humanities Medal by President Barack Obama. Didion was profiled in the 2017 Netflix documentary The Center Will Not Hold, directed by her nephew Griffin Dunne.
Early life and education Didion was born on December 5, 1934, in Sacramento, California, to Eduene () and Frank Reese Didion. She had one brother, five years her junior, James Jerrett Didion, who became a real estate executive. Didion recalled writing things down as early as age five, although she said she never saw herself as a writer until after her work had been published. She identified as a "shy, bookish child", an avid reader, who pushed herself to overcome social anxiety through acting and public speaking. During her adolescence, she would type out Ernest Hemingway's works to learn how his sentence structures worked.
Didion's early education was nontraditional. She attended kindergarten and first grade, but, because her father was a finance officer in the Army Air Corps and the family constantly relocated, she did not attend school regularly. In 1943 or early 1944, her family returned to Sacramento, and her father went to Detroit to negotiate defense contracts for World War II. Didion wrote in her 2003 memoir Where I Was From that moving so often made her feel as if she were a perpetual outsider.
Didion received a B.A. in English from University of California, Berkeley, in 1956. 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. The topic of her winning essay was the San Francisco architect William Wurster.
Career
Vogue During her seven years at Vogue, from 1956 to 1964, Didion worked her way up from promotional copywriter to associate feature editor. Mademoiselle published Didion's article "Berkeley's Giant: The University of California" in January 1960. 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. John—the younger brother of author, businessman, and television mystery show host Dominick Dunne—was writing for Time magazine at the time. He and Didion married in 1964.
The couple moved to Los Angeles in 1964, intending to stay only temporarily, but California remained their home for the next 20 years. In 1966, they adopted a daughter, whom they named Quintana Roo Dunne. The couple wrote many newsstand-magazine assignments. "She and Dunne started doing that work with an eye to covering the bills, and then a little more," Nathan Heller reported in The New Yorker. "Their [Saturday Evening] Post rates allowed them to rent a tumbledown Hollywood mansion, buy a banana-colored Corvette Stingray, raise a child, and dine well."
In Los Angeles, they settled in Los Feliz from 1963 to 1971, and then, after living in Malibu for eight years, she and Dunne moved to Brentwood Park, a quiet, affluent residential neighborhood. Didion wrote in her later Notes to John she felt "for years" that she and Dunne had "failed their daughter". When Quintana was five years old, she phoned the state psychiatric facility in Ventura County to find out what she needed to do if she was "going crazy". At a later time, she called 20th Century Fox to ask them what she needed to do to be a star, while, at the age of thirteen, she spoke to Didion of "the novel I'm writing just to show you".
Slouching Towards Bethlehem In 1968, Didion published her first nonfiction book, Slouching Towards Bethlehem, a collection of magazine pieces about her experiences in California."Joan Didion (1934-)" in Jean C. Stine and Daniel G. Marowski (eds.) Contemporary Literary Criticism, Vol. 32. Detroit: Gale Research, 1985, pp. 142-150. Accessed April 10, 2009. Cited as an example of New Journalism, it used novel-like writing to cover the non-fiction realities of hippie counterculture. She wrote from a personal perspective, adding her own feelings and memories to situations, inventing details and quotes to make the stories more vivid, and using metaphors to give the reader a better understanding of the disordered subjects of her essays: politicians, artists, or just people living an American life. The New York Times characterized the "grace, sophistication, nuance, [and] irony" of her writing.
1970s 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 her magazine pieces from Life, Esquire, The Saturday Evening Post, The New York Times, and The New York Review of Books. In The White Album's title essay, Didion documented an episode she experienced in the summer of 1968. After undergoing psychiatric evaluation, she was diagnosed as having had an attack of vertigo and nausea. After periods of partial blindness in 1972, she was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, but remained in remission throughout her life. In her essay entitled "In Bed", Didion explained that she experienced chronic migraines.
Dunne and Didion worked closely 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 and the screenplay for the 1976 film of A Star is Born. They also spent several years adapting the biography of journalist Jessica Savitch into the 1996 Robert Redford and Michelle Pfeiffer film, Up Close & Personal.
1980s and 1990s 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 1988, the couple moved from California to New York City.
In a prescient New York Review of Books piece of 1991, a year after the various trials of the Central Park Five, Didion dissected serious flaws in the prosecution's case, making her the earliest mainstream writer to view the guilty verdicts as miscarriages of justice. She suggested the defendants were found guilty because of a sociopolitical narrative with racial overtones that clouded the judgment of the court. In 1992, Didion published After Henry, a collection of twelve geographical essays and a personal memorial for Henry Robbins, who was Didion's friend and editor until his death in 1979. She published The Last Thing He Wanted, a romantic thriller, in 1996.
The Year of Magical Thinking In 2003, Didion's daughter Quintana Roo Dunne developed pneumonia that progressed to septic shock and she was comatose in an intensive-care unit when Didion's husband suddenly died of a heart attack on December 30. Didion delayed his funeral arrangements for approximately three months until Quintana was well enough to attend. While in Los Angeles after the funeral, Quintana fell at the airport, hit her head on the pavement, and required brain surgery for hematoma.
On October 4, 2004, at the age of 70, Didion began writing The Year of Magical Thinking, documenting her response to the death of her husband and the severe illness of their daughter. She finished the manuscript on the following New Year's Eve. This was her first nonfiction book that was not a collection of magazine assignments. After progressing toward recovery in 2004, Quintana died of acute pancreatitis on August 26, 2005, at age 39, during Didion's New York promotion for The Year of Magical Thinking. Didion said that she found the book-tour process therapeutic during her period of mourning. The book was called a "masterpiece of two genres: memoir and investigative journalism" and won several awards. Didion wrote about Quintana's death in her 2011 book, Blue Nights.
2000s
Didion was living in an apartment on East 71st Street in Manhattan in 2005. Everyman's Library published We Tell Ourselves Stories in Order to Live, a 2006 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.
Didion began working with English playwright and director David Hare on a one-woman stage adaptation of The Year of Magical Thinking in 2007. Produced by Scott Rudin, the Broadway play featured Vanessa Redgrave. Although Didion was hesitant to write for the theater, she eventually found the genre, which was new to her, exciting. Didion wrote early drafts of the screenplay for an untitled HBO biopic directed by Robert Benton on Katharine Graham. Sources say it may trace the paper's reporting on the Watergate scandal.
Later works In 2011, Knopf published Blue Nights, a memoir about aging that also focused on Didion's relationship with her late daughter. More generally, the book deals with the anxieties Didion experienced about adopting and raising a child, as well as the aging process.
In 2012, New York magazine announced that Didion and Todd Field were "co-writing a screenplay". The project titled As it Happens was a political thriller that never came to fruition, as they couldn't find a studio to properly back it. Ultimately Field was to become the only writer, other than Dunne, with whom Didion would ever collaborate. He paid tribute to her in a scene for his movie Tár wherein the title character returns to her childhood bedroom and peers at "little boxes" labeled precisely the way Didion describes Quintana's in Blue Nights