The keen-eyed social critic who chronicled decadence and grief
Joan Didion 1934–2021
Readers didn’t turn to Joan Didion for uplift. Dread, loss, and dissolution were consistent themes in a career that spanned six decades and scores of novels, essays, memoirs, and screenplays. Emerging in the 1960s as a leading practitioner of New Journalism, which combined on-the-ground reportage and literary style, Didion tackled subjects as diverse as John Wayne, the Black Panthers, and Haight-Ashbury hippies in terse, cleareyed pieces compiled in Slouching Towards Bethlehem (1968) and The White Album (1979). “Pathetically unequipped children” adrift in “a social vacuum,” she called the hippies in the former collection’s celebrated title piece. In subsequent books she explored Central America (1983’s Salvador), Cuban immigrants (1987’s Miami), and American politics (2001’s Political Fictions). Her biggest commercial success came in her 70s, with The Year of Magical Thinking, a 2005 memoir that chronicled her grief over the death of her husband, John Gregory Dunne. “I am more attracted to the underside of the tapestry,” said Didion. “I tend to always look for the wrong side, the bleak side.”
A fifth-generation Californian whose ancestors traveled with, then split off from, the doomed Donner party in 1846, she was born in Sacramento, to an Army finance officer and his homemaker wife. A frail, anxious child, Didion was given a notebook at age 5 by her mother, who suggested writing might calm her nerves, said The Guardian. She began writing stories and recording observations, and in her teens typed out Hemingway passages “in order to master the keyboard and his syntax.” Shy and slight, she was “inclined to solitude,” said the Associated Press, but “determined to express herself through writing.” She studied English at University of California, Berkeley, then moved to New York City for a job at Vogue “after winning a writing contest sponsored by the magazine.”
In 1963 she published Run, River, a “well-received” debut novel about “the unraveling of a Sacramento family,” said The New York Times. It introduced some of her recurring themes: “violence, dread, the sickening sense that the world was spinning out of control.” The following year she married Dunne, a Time writer, and as the 1960s progressed, Didion “came to prominence” with a series of magazine pieces that “explored the fraying edges of postwar American life.” Relocating to California, she and Dunne collaborated on screenplays including Panic in Needle Park (1971) and A Star Is Born (1976). As Didion’s own star rose, she and Dunne “became a bicoastal glamour couple, with one foot in Hollywood and the other in Manhattan’s literary salons.”
The Year of Magical Thinking, written after Dunne died suddenly from a massive coronary, “topped best-seller lists for months,” said the Los Angeles Times. Just before the book’s release, Didion and Dunne’s adopted daughter, Quintana, died following a cerebral hemorrhage. That led to Blue Nights (2011), a rumination on Didion’s “failings as a mother” and “struggles with getting older.” It was a continuation of what Didion said she’d always done: make sense of a chaotic world by writing about it. “Had I been blessed with even limited access to my own mind there would have been no reason to write,” she once wrote. “I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see, and what it means.”