Joan Didion  

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Joan Didion (December 5, 1934 – December 23, 2021) was an American writer of critical and popular acclaim. She first published in 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.

Career

During her seven years at Vogue, Didion worked her way up from promotional copywriter to associate feature editor. While there, and homesick for California, she wrote her first novel, Run, River, which was published in 1963. Writer and friend John Gregory Dunne helped her edit the book, and the two moved into an apartment together. A year later they married, and Didion returned to California with her new husband. The two 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 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 Cuban expatriate community 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 eight 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 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.

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.

Writing style

New Journalism

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. Tom Wolfe, who along with E.W. Johnson edited the anthology The New Journalism (1973) and wrote a manifesto for the style that popularized the term, said "it is possible to write journalism that would ... read like a novel". New Journalist writers tend to transcend "just the facts" and focus on dialogue, and the scenarios the author may have experienced. It gives the author more creative freedom, helping to represent the truth and reality through the author's eyes. Exhibiting subjectivity is a major theme in New Journalism, where the author's voice is critical to the opinions the reader forms.

Didion's Slouching Towards Bethlehem exemplifies much of what New Journalism represents as it explores the cultural values and experiences of American life in the 1960s. She includes her personal feelings and memories in this first-person narrative, describing the chaos of individuals and the way in which they perceive the world. Rejecting conventional journalism, she created a subjective approach to essays, a style that was her own.

Writing style and themes

Didion viewed the structure of the sentence as essential to her work. In the New York Times article "Why I Write" (1976), Didion remarks, "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. Other influences included Henry James, who wrote "perfect, indirect, complicated sentences", and George Eliot.

Didion was also an observer of journalists, believing the difference between the process of fiction and nonfiction is the element of discovery that takes place in nonfiction, which happens not during the writing, but the research.

Rituals were a part of Didion's creative process. At the end of the day, she would take a break from writing to remove herself from the "pages", saying that without the distance, she could not make proper edits. She would then end the day by cutting out and editing prose, and reviewing the work the following day. She would sleep in the same room as her book, saying "That's one reason I go home to Sacramento to finish things. Somehow the book doesn't leave you when you're right next to it."

In a notorious 1980 essay, "Joan Didion: Only Disconnect", Barbara Grizzuti Harrison called Didion a "neurasthenic Cher" whose style was "a bag of tricks" and whose "subject is always herself". In 2011, New York magazine reported that the criticism "still gets her (Didion's) hackles up, decades later".

Works

Fiction

• Run, River (1963)
• Play It as It Lays (1970)
• A Book of Common Prayer (1977)
• Democracy (1984)
• The Last Thing He Wanted (1996)

Nonfiction

• Slouching Towards Bethlehem (1968)
• The White Album (1979)
• Salvador (1983)
• Miami (1987)
• After Henry (1992)
• Political Fictions (2001)
• Where I Was From (2003)
• Fixed Ideas: America Since 9.11 (2003; preface by Frank Rich)
• Vintage Didion (2004; selected excerpts of previous works)
• The Year of Magical Thinking (2005)
• We Tell Ourselves Stories in Order to Live: Collected Nonfiction (2006; includes her first seven volumes of nonfiction)
• Blue Nights (2011)
• South and West: From a Notebook (2017)
• Let Me Tell You What I Mean (2021)