Joan Didion, who chronicled American decadence and hypocrisy, dies at 87

Joan Didion, a virtuosic prose stylist who for more than four decades explored the agitated, fractured state of the American psyche in her novels, essays, criticism and memoirs, and who as one of the “New Journalists” of the 1960s and ‘70s helped reportorial nonfiction acquire the status of an art form, died Dec. 23 at her home in Manhattan. She was 87.

The cause was complications from Parkinson’s disease, according to a statement from her publisher, Knopf.

With an unwavering eye and piercing intellect, Didion revealed an America gripped by moral decadence and self-deception, in thrall to false narratives that offered little explanation about how the world worked.

Her trenchant, frequently contrarian opinions on subjects as varied as the films of Woody Allen and the traffic in Los Angeles were matched by a precise style that was nearly universally admired. “Try to rearrange one of her sentences,” New York Times critic John Leonard once wrote, “and you’ve realized that the sentence was inevitable, a hologram.”

Many of her early works - the classic essay collections “Slouching Towards Bethlehem” (1968) and “The White Album” (1979) and the quick-cutting novel “Play It As It Lays” (1970) - chronicled the grim realities of midcentury California. In that sun-dappled land of pleasure and possibility, America seemed instead to be falling apart, atomized by greed and amorality.

Didion argued “that the Norman Rockwell version of America was a convenient illusion, and that if you looked closely, we lived in a time in which fear and anxiety and isolation and loneliness were our common laws,” said Martin Kaplan, a University of Southern California professor of entertainment, media and society, in a 2015 interview.

In her later years, Didion became known for her dispassionate memoirs on death and grieving. In “The Year of Magical Thinking” (2005), she tracked the elliptical, death-denying patterns of thought that dominated her life after the sudden loss of her husband, John Gregory Dunne, from a heart attack at home, where he and Didion had just returned after visiting their daughter in the hospital.

The book sold more than 1 million copies, won the National Book Award and was adapted by Didion into a well-received Broadway play starring her friend Vanessa Redgrave.