Joan Didion

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. 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. to Eduene and Frank Reese Didion. Didion recalled writing things down as early as age five, 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. 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. While at Vogue, and homesick for California, she wrote her first novel, Run, River (1963), about a Sacramento family as it comes apart. 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.

Slouching Towards Bethlehem In 1968, Didion published her first nonfiction book, Slouching Towards Bethlehem, a collection of magazine pieces about her experiences in California. 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 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. 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. This was her first nonfiction book that was not a collection of magazine assignments. The book was called a "masterpiece of two genres: memoir and investigative journalism" and won several awards.

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.

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

A photograph of Didion shot by Juergen Teller was used as part of the 2015 spring-summer campaign of the luxury French fashion brand Céline, while previously the clothing company Gap had featured her in a 1989 campaign. Didion's nephew Griffin Dunne directed a 2017 Netflix documentary about her, Joan Didion: The Center Will Not Hold. In it, Didion discusses her writing and personal life, including the deaths of her husband and daughter, adding context to her books The Year of Magical Thinking and Blue Nights. In 2021, Didion published Let Me Tell You What I Mean, a collection of 12 essays she wrote between 1968 and 2000.

Death Didion died from complications of Parkinson's disease at her home in Manhattan on December 23, 2021, at the age of 87.

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), she 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 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 during the research. In 2011, New York magazine reported that the Harrison criticism "still gets her (Didion's) hackles up, decades later". Critic Hilton Als suggested that Didion is reread often "because of the honesty of the voice."

Personal life From 1957 to 1962, Didion was in a relationship with Noel E. Parmentel Jr., a political pundit on the New York literary and cultural scene. Didion wished to have a baby, but Parmentel felt he had already failed at marriage and ruled out a conventional domestic arrangement. Parmentel introduced Didion to Gregory Dunne as a potential husband, and they were friends for six years before embarking on a romantic relationship.

Dunne later recalled that at a celebratory lunch with her after he finished reading the galleys for her first novel, Run, River, "while er [significant] other was out of town, it happened." They married in January 1964. In 1966, while living in Los Angeles, they adopted a daughter, whom they named Quintana Roo Dunne. In 1996, breaking a long-held silence on Didion, Parmentel was interviewed for an article about her in New York magazine. In Notes to John, Didion wrote of discussing the relationship with her psychiatrist, telling him that Parmentel had hit her and had a drinking problem.

She also said, of his lawsuit, that the character was "more or less" based on him, but "basing a character on him wasn't really the problem—the problem was that the 'character' did something in the novel that this person had done in real life and didn't want people to know about ... he character had beaten up a woman in circumstances pretty much the same as this person had beaten up a woman I knew. Or so I had believed." As late as 2011, she smoked precisely five cigarettes per day.

Awards and honors 1981: Elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters 1996: Edward MacDowell Medal 2002: St. Louis Literary Award from the Saint Louis University Library Associates 2002: George Polk Book Award for Political Fictions 2005: National Book Award for Nonfiction for The Year of Magical Thinking 2006: American Academy of Achievement's Golden Plate Award 2006: Elected to the American Philosophical Society 2007: Prix Médicis for The Year of Magical Thinking 2007: National Book Foundation's Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters 2007: Writers Guild of America Evelyn F. Burkey Award 2009: Honorary Doctor of Letters, Harvard University 2011: Honorary Doctor of Letters, Yale University 2013: National Humanities Medal 2013: Lifetime Achievement Award, PEN Center USA

Published works

Fiction Run, River (1963) Play It as It Lays (1970) Notes to John (2025)

Screenplays and plays The Panic in Needle Park (1971) (with husband John Gregory Dunne and based on the novel by James Mills) Play It as It Lays (1972) (with John Gregory Dunne and based on her novel of the same name) A Star Is Born (1976) (with John Gregory Dunne and Frank Pierson) True Confessions (1981) (with John Gregory Dunne and based on his novel of the same name) Up Close & Personal (1996) (with John Gregory Dunne) The Year of Magical Thinking (2007) (a stage play based on her book)