Joan Didion | |
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.jpg) Didion in 1970 | |
| Born | (1934-12-05)December 5, 1934 Sacramento, California, U.S. |
| Died | December 23, 2021(2021-12-23) (aged 87) New York City, U.S. |
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| Education | University of California, Berkeley (BA) |
| Period | 1956–2021 |
| Literary movement | New Journalism |
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| Spouse | |
| Children | 1 |
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Joan Didion (/ˈdɪdiən/; December 5, 1934 – December 23, 2021) was an American writer and journalist. She is considered one of the pioneers ofNew Journalism, along withGay Talese,Truman Capote,Norman Mailer,Hunter S. Thompson andTom Wolfe.[4][5][6]
Didion's career began in the 1950s after she won an essay contest sponsored byVogue magazine.[7] She went on to publish essays inThe Saturday Evening Post,National Review,Life,Esquire,The New York Review of Books andThe New Yorker. Her writing during the 1960s through the late 1970s engaged audiences in the realities of thecounterculture 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 andthe United States's foreign policy in Latin America.[8][9] In 1991, she wrote the earliest mainstream media article to suggest that theCentral Park Five had been wrongfully convicted.[7]
With her husbandJohn Gregory Dunne, Didion wrote screenplays includingThe Panic in Needle Park (1971),A Star Is Born (1976), andUp Close & Personal (1996). In 2005, she won theNational Book Award for Nonfiction and was a finalist for both theNational Book Critics Circle Award and thePulitzer Prize forThe Year of Magical Thinking, a memoir of the year following the sudden death of her husband. She later adapted the book into a play that premiered on Broadway in 2007. In 2013, she was awarded theNational Humanities Medal by PresidentBarack Obama.[10] Didion was profiled in the 2017Netflix documentaryThe Center Will Not Hold, directed by her nephewGriffin Dunne.
Didion was born on December 5, 1934, inSacramento, California,[1][11] to Eduene (née Jerrett) and Frank Reese Didion.[1] She had one brother, five years her junior, James Jerrett Didion, who became a real estate executive.[12] Didion recalled writing things down as early as age five,[1] although she said she never saw herself as a writer until after her work had been published. She identified as a "shy, bookish child", an avid reader, who pushed herself to overcome social anxiety through acting and public speaking. During her adolescence, she would type outErnest Hemingway's works to learn how his sentence structures worked.[11]
Didion's early education was nontraditional. She attended kindergarten and first grade, but, because her father was a finance officer in theArmy Air Corps and the family constantly relocated, she did not attend school regularly.[13] In 1943 or early 1944, her family returned to Sacramento, and her father went toDetroit to negotiate defense contracts forWorld War II. Didion wrote in her 2003 memoirWhere I Was From that moving so often made her feel as if she were a perpetual outsider.[11]
Didion received a B.A. in English fromUniversity of California, Berkeley, in 1956.[14] During her senior year, she won first place in the "Prix de Paris" essay contest, sponsored byVogue,[15] and was awarded a job as aresearch assistant at the magazine. The topic of her winning essay was the San Francisco architectWilliam Wurster.[16][17]
During her seven years atVogue, from 1956 to 1964, Didion worked her way up from promotionalcopywriter to associate feature editor.[15][17]Mademoiselle published Didion's article "Berkeley’s Giant: The University of California" in January 1960.[18] While atVogue, and homesick for California, she wrote her first novel,Run, River (1963), about a Sacramento family as it comes apart.[1] Writer and friendJohn Gregory Dunne helped her edit the book.[13] John—the younger brother of author, businessman, and television mystery show hostDominick Dunne[13]—was writing forTime magazine at the time. He and Didion married in 1964.
The couple moved to Los Angeles in 1964, intending to stay only temporarily, but California remained their home for the next 20 years. In 1966, they adopted a daughter, whom they named Quintana Roo Dunne.[1][19] 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 inThe New Yorker. "Their[Saturday Evening] Post rates allowed them to rent a tumbledown Hollywood mansion, buy a banana-coloredCorvette Stingray, raise a child, and dine well."[20]
In Los Angeles, they settled inLos Feliz from 1963 to 1971, and then, after living inMalibu for eight years, she and Dunne moved toBrentwood Park, a quiet, affluent residential neighborhood.[21][16] Didion wrote in her laterNotes to John she felt "for years" that she and Dunne had "failed their daughter". When Quintana was five years old, she phoned the state psychiatric facility inVentura County to find out what she needed to do if she was "going crazy." At a later time, she called20th Century Fox to ask them what she needed to do to be a star, while, at the age of thirteen, she spoke to Didion of "the novel I'm writing just to show you."[22]
In 1968, Didion published her first nonfiction book,Slouching Towards Bethlehem, a collection of magazine pieces about her experiences in California.[23][16] Cited as an example ofNew Journalism, it used novel-like writing to cover the non-fiction realities ofhippiecounterculture.[24] 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.[25]The New York Times characterized the "grace, sophistication, nuance, [and] irony" of her writing.[26]
Didion's novelPlay It as It Lays, set in Hollywood, was published in 1970, andA Book of Common Prayer appeared in 1977. In 1979, she publishedThe White Album, another collection of her magazine pieces fromLife,Esquire,The Saturday Evening Post,The New York Times, andThe New York Review of Books.[16] InThe White Album's title essay, Didion documented an episode she experienced in the summer of 1968. After undergoing psychiatric evaluation, she was diagnosed as having had an attack ofvertigo and nausea. After periods of partial blindness in 1972, she was diagnosed withmultiple sclerosis, but remained in remission throughout her life.[17][27] In her essay entitled "In Bed", Didion explained that she experienced chronicmigraines.[28]
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 a1972 film adaptation of her novelPlay It as It Lays that starredAnthony Perkins andTuesday Weld and the screenplay for the 1976 film ofA Star is Born.[29] They also spent several years adapting the biography of journalistJessica Savitch into the 1996Robert Redford andMichelle Pfeiffer film,Up Close & Personal.[13][29]
Didion's book-length essaySalvador (1983) was written after a two-week trip to El Salvador with her husband. The next year, she published the novelDemocracy, the story of a long, but unrequited love affair between a wealthy heiress and an older man, aCIA officer, against the background of theCold War and theVietnam War. Her 1987 nonfiction bookMiami looked at the different communities in that city.[13] In 1988, the couple moved from California to New York City.[17]
In a prescientNew York Review of Books piece of 1991,[30] a year after the various trials of theCentral 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.[31][32][33] In 1992, Didion publishedAfter 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.[34] She publishedThe Last Thing He Wanted, a romantic thriller, in 1996.[35]
In 2003, Didion's daughter Quintana Roo Dunne developedpneumonia that progressed toseptic shock and she was comatose in an intensive-care unit when Didion's husband suddenly died of a heart attack on December 30.[13] Didion delayed his funeral arrangements for approximately three months until Quintana was well enough to attend.[13] While in Los Angeles after the funeral, Quintana fell at the airport, hit her head on the pavement, and required brain surgery forhematoma.[36]
On October 4, 2004, at the age of 70, Didion began writingThe Year of Magical Thinking, documenting her response to the death of her husband and the severe illness of their daughter. She finished the manuscript on the following New Year's Eve.[36] This was her first nonfiction book that was not a collection of magazine assignments.[20] After progressing toward recovery in 2004, Quintana died of acutepancreatitis on August 26, 2005, at age 39, during Didion's New York promotion forThe Year of Magical Thinking.[37] Didion said that she found the book-tour process therapeutic during her period of mourning.[37] The book was called a "masterpiece of two genres: memoir and investigative journalism" and won several awards.[37] Didion wrote about Quintana's death in her 2011 book,Blue Nights.[1]
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Didion was living in an apartment on East 71st Street inManhattan in 2005.[36]Everyman's Library publishedWe Tell Ourselves Stories in Order to Live, a 2006 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, andWhere I Was From), with an introduction by her contemporary, the criticJohn Leonard.[38]
Didion began working with English playwright and directorDavid Hare on a one-woman stage adaptation ofThe Year of Magical Thinking in 2007. Produced byScott Rudin, the Broadway play featuredVanessa Redgrave. Although Didion was hesitant to write for the theater, she eventually found the genre, which was new to her, exciting.[37] Didion wrote early drafts of the screenplay for an untitledHBO biopic directed byRobert Benton onKatharine Graham. Sources say it may trace the paper's reporting on theWatergate scandal.[39]
In 2011,Knopf publishedBlue Nights, a memoir about aging that also focused on Didion's relationship with her late daughter.[40] More generally, the book deals with the anxieties Didion experienced about adopting and raising a child, as well as the aging process.[41]
In 2012,New York magazine announced that Didion andTodd Field were "co-writing a screenplay".[42] The project titledAs 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 movieTár wherein the title character returns to her childhood bedroom and peers at "little boxes" labeled precisely the way Didion describes Quintana's inBlue Nights[43]
A photograph of Didion shot byJuergen Teller was used as part of the 2015 spring-summer campaign of the luxury French fashion brandCéline, while previously the clothing companyGap had featured her in a 1989 campaign.[17][44] Didion's nephewGriffin Dunne directed a 2017Netflix documentary about her,Joan Didion: The Center Will Not Hold.[45] In it, Didion discusses her writing and personal life, including the deaths of her husband and daughter, adding context to her booksThe Year of Magical Thinking andBlue Nights.[46] In 2021, Didion publishedLet Me Tell You What I Mean, a collection of 12 essays she wrote between 1968 and 2000.[47]
Didion died from complications ofParkinson's disease at her home in Manhattan on December 23, 2021, at the age of 87.[1]
Didion viewed the structure of the sentence as essential to her work. In theNew York Times article "Why I Write" (1976),[48] 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."[48]
Didion was heavily influenced by Ernest Hemingway, whose writing taught her the importance of how sentences work in a text. Her other influences includedGeorge Eliot andHenry James, who wrote "perfect, indirect, complicated sentences".[49] Didion was also an observer of journalists,[50] 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.[49]
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",[49] saying that without the distance, she could not make proper edits. She would end her day by cutting out and editing prose, not reviewing the work until the following day. She would sleep in the same room as her work, 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."[49] In a notorious 1980 essay, "Joan Didion: Only Disconnect,"Barbara Grizzuti Harrison called Didion a "neurasthenicCher" whose style was "a bag of tricks" and whose "subject is always herself".[51] In 2011,New York magazine reported that the Harrison criticism "still gets her (Didion's) hackles up, decades later".[52] CriticHilton Als suggested that Didion is reread often "because of the honesty of the voice."[53]
From 1957 to 1962, Didion was in a relationship withNoel E. Parmentel Jr., a political pundit on the New York literary and cultural scene.[54] Didion wished to have a baby, but Parmentel felt he had already failed at marriage and ruled out a conventional domestic arrangement.[55] 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 [h]er [significant] other was out of town, it happened."[56] They married in January 1964 and, while living in Los Angeles in 1966, they adopted a daughter, whom they named Quintana Roo Dunne.[1][19] Didion and Dunne remained together until his death from a heart attack in 2003.
Parmentel, who had championed and found publishers for Didion's work, was angered by what he felt was a thinly veiled portrait of him in her 1977 novel,A Book of Common Prayer.[57] In 1996, breaking a long-held silence on Didion, Parmentel was interviewed for an article about her inNew York magazine.[58] InNotes to John, Didion wrote of discussing the relationship with her psychiatrist, telling him that Parmentel had hit her and had a drinking problem.[59] 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 ... [T]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.”[59]
Didion was a cancer survivor, but kept her treatment secret from everyone except Dunne, even getting her radiation treatments at a location in northern Manhattan where she believed she was less likely to run into people she knew.[60][59] ARepublican in her early years, Didion later drifted toward theDemocratic Party, "without ever quite endorsing [its] core beliefs".[61] As late as 2011, she smoked precisely five cigarettes per day.[62]
TheHammer Museum atUniversity of California, Los Angeles, organized the exhibitionJoan Didion: What She Means. Curated byThe New Yorker contributor and writerHilton Als, the group show was on view from 2022 and is scheduled to travel to thePérez Art Museum Miami in 2023.Joan Didion: What She Means pays homage to the writer and thinker through the lens of nearly 50 modern and contemporary international artists such asFélix González-Torres toBetye Saar,Vija Celmins,Maren Hassinger,Silke Otto-Knapp,John Koch,Ed Ruscha, andPat Steir, among others.[79][80]
American Academy of Achievement Awards Council member Justice Anthony M. Kennedy presents the Golden Plate Award to author Joan Didion at the 2006 International Achievement Summit in Los Angeles, California.
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