Iconic American Novelist And New Journalist Joan Didion

According to Joan Didion’s niece, Annabelle Dunne,

Joan was bigger than anything I can put into words. She and her world were a set of organizing principles. Everything I needed to learn about life, work, and love was in there. She taught me countless things. The lesson I will hold close is to always keep a part of yourself that is just for you.

Joan Didion was born to parents Eduene and Frank Reese Didion on December 5th, 1934 in Sacramento, California. Didion recalls she spent time jotting things down at the early age of 5. An avid reader, Didion referred to herself, as a shy bookish child. Accordingly, she pursued theater, and public speaking as a means to alleviate her social anxiety.

Due to her father’s military career, Joan’s family moves repeatedly prohibiting her from being able to attend school regularly. In her 2003 memoir Where I Was From, Didion recounts that moving frequently during her school years caused her to feel like a perpetual outsider.

As an adolescent, Didion examines Ernest Hemingway’s narratives by tapping his works onto the pages nestled within her typewriter. Drawn to Hemmingway, she types his stories to become more familiar with Hemingway’s sentence structure.

During her senior year of college, Didion submits her work to Vogue magazine’s coveted sponsored essay contest “Prix de Paris”. Vogue crowns her the winner, and Didion launches her career comprising articles for the magazine.

Simultaneously, Didion acquires her Bachelor of Arts degree in English from the University of California, Berkeley in 1956.

While working for Vogue Didion crafts her first book with the assistance of John Dunne, entitled Run River in 1963.

Didion marries writer John Dunne in 1964. Together, they contribute a joint column in the Saturday Evening Post (1967–69)—and write screenplays including A Star Is Born (1976; with others) and Up Close and Personal (1996).

The couple also adopts their daughter Quintana Roo. Although Quintana opts for a private social life, she comes to be an entrepreneur and falls in love with writing too.

Didion, an iconic American novelist, and journalist is known for her astute observations of diverse social subcultures of the 1960s and the deterioration of American values into the early 1970s.

She went on to become the author of Run River, Slouching Towards Bethlehem, Play As It Lays, The White Album, After Henry, The Year of Magical Thinking, Blue Nights, and South And West among others.

Didion’s honors include the National Book Award for Nonfiction and she was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Pulitzer Prize for Biography and or Autobiography for her notable title The Year of Magical Thinking.

In The Year of Magical Thinking, Didion wrote about her feelings of sorrow encapsulating

we are imperfect mortal beings,

aware of that mortality even as we push it away,

failed by our very complication,

so wired that when we mourn our losses we also mourn,

for better or for worse,

ourselves as we were

as we are no longer

as we will one day not be at all.

Photo courtesy of Annie Spratt

On December 23rd, 2021, novelist Joan Didion passed away at her home in Manhattan, New York. She was 87 years old.