Famed essayist who chronicled American culture
JOAN DIDION | Dec. 5, 1934 - Dec. 23, 2021
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 Thursday 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, Ms. 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 mid-century California. In that sun-dappled land of pleasure and possibility, America seemed instead to be falling apart, atomized by greed and amorality.
Ms. 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, Ms. 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 Ms. Didion had just returned after visiting their daughter in the hospital.
“Long before what I wrote began to be published,” Ms. Didion wrote at the book’s outset, “I developed a sense that meaning itself was resident in the rhythms of words and sentences and paragraphs, a technique for withholding whatever it was I thought or believed behind an increasingly impenetrable polish.” Yet, she continued, “this is a case in which I need more than words to find the meaning. This is a case in which I need whatever it is I think or believe to be penetrable, if only for myself.”
The book sold more than 1 million copies, won the National Book Award and was adapted by Ms. Didion into a well- received Broadway play starring her friend Vanessa Redgrave. Its success was darkened by the death of Ms. Didion’s daughter, Quintana Roo Dunne, shortly after publication. A follow-up, “Blue Nights,” was released in 2011 to critical acclaim.
Like Tom Wolfe and Truman Capote, Ms. Didion was one of the few writers of her era who were instantly recognizable to a mass audience through their cultivation of an off-the-page mystique. Photographed for Time magazine shortly after the publication of “Slouching,” she seemed a paragon of sang-froid, posing in front of her yellow Corvette Stingray with a cigarette in hand.
She remained a fashion icon late in life, photographed for a Céline ad in 2015 with her hair in a bob and her eyes obscured by a pair of large, dark sunglasses. Yet she also explored her physical fragility, writing about her frequent migraines and revealing, in the title essay of “The White Album,” that she had gone blind for six weeks from a condition diagnosed as multiple sclerosis and had checked herself into a psychiatric clinic.
In her view, her diminutive size worked only in her favor.
“I am so physically small, so temperamentally unobtrusive, and so neurotically inarticulate that people tend to forget that my presence runs counter to their best interests,” she wrote in the preface to “Slouching.” “And it always does. That is one last thing to remember: Writers are always selling somebody out.”
Ms. Didion and Dunne, a fellow novelist, largely funded their literary work by writing and revising Hollywood screenplays. Ensconced in the social whirl of 1970s Hollywood, the couple hosted and partied with stars, including Warren Beatty and the Mamas and the Papas, and were among the most highly paid screenwriters in Hollywood.
Their films included “The Panic in Needle Park” (1971), which starred Al Pacino as a New York drug addict and hustler; “A Star Is Born” (1976), with Barbra Streisand and Kris Kristofferson as rising and fading rock singers, respectively; and “True Confessions” (1981), featuring Robert De Niro and Robert Duvall in an adaptation of Dunne’s L.A. crime novel.
A hellish eight years spent writing and rewriting “Up Close and Personal,” a widely panned 1996 romantic drama starring Robert Redford and Michelle Pfeiffer, was chronicled by Dunne in his 1997 nonfiction book “Monster.”
Ms. Didion herself was often disparaging of screenwriting, which she told the Paris Review was “not writing” but “notes for the director.”
The other writing she did, the “true” writing of her essays and books, was essential to her life. “Had I been blessed with even limited access to my own mind there would have been no reason to write,” she said in a talk and essay titled “Why I Write.” “I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means.”
Joan Didion was born in Sacramento, Calif., on Dec. 5, 1934, to a fourth-generation California family. Her father sold insurance and later became a real estate speculator; her mother, Ms. Didion later wrote, was a socialite who “‘gave teas’ the way other mothers breathed.”
Traveling across the country with her father, who worked as a finance officer with the Army Air Forces during World War II, she developed a nearly lifelong habit of taking her notebook with her wherever she went, furtively recording snatches of dialogue from adults whispering behind closed doors or convalescing at military hospitals.
Shortly before graduating from the University of California at Berkeley in 1956, Ms. Didion won a Vogue magazine contest for young writers. Choosing between the contest’s two prize options, a trip to Paris or a job at Vogue, she decided she would try her luck at the magazine’s offices in New York.
She also wrote for the National Review, the Nation and the Saturday Evening Post. Whether praising the work ethic of an ill and aging John Wayne or, in later years, offering a scathing critique of Woody Allen and the “faux adults” in movies such as “Manhattan” and “Interiors,” she developed a reputation as anindependent-minded critic, fiercely concerned with authenticity.