On December 23, 2021, legendary journalist, novelist, and essayist Joan Didion passed away at the age of eighty-seven due to complications from Parkinson's disease. Throughout a career spanning more than seventy years, she produced works of fiction and non-fiction that explored both the political and the personal.
This pioneer of New Journalism received many accolades throughout her career, including the National Book Award for Nonfiction, a National Medal for the Arts, and was a finalist for both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award. Today, we explore Didion's career and some passages that exemplify her inimitable style and observational skills, which make her one of America's most important writers.
Didion was born in Sacramento, California in 1934. Her father's work as a finance officer in the Army Air Corps
prevented her from attending school regularly. Despite this, she earned a BA in English from Berkeley. A prize-winning essay for Vogue magazine secured her a position as a research assistant, eventually working her way up to assistant feature editor.
During her time at Vogue, she wrote and published her first novel, Run, River. Her first work, the acclaimed Slouching Toward Bethlehem, was published in 1968 and is considered one of the major works of New Journalism from the 1960s.
Throughout the 60s and 70s, Didion released numerous fiction and non-fiction works while publishing numerous columns and freelance articles with her husband, John Gregory Dunne. The pair also co-wrote screenplays together, including Michelle Pfieffer's Up Close and Personal and the 1976 version of A Star Is Born. After the death of her husband, she released her first memoir, The Year of Magical Thinking, which earned her the National Book Award and Pulitzer nomination.
Tragically, she revisited memoirs on grief not long after with Blue Nights, focusing on the death of her daughter. She continued writing and publishing fiction, essays, and the play adaptation of The Year of Magical Thinking. She released her final book of essays, Let Me Tell You What I Mean, just months before her death. The following passages from both her fiction and non-fiction highlight the sharp writing and observational skills Didion possessed:
“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.” The Year of Magical Thinking
“I think we are well-advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not. Otherwise, they turn up unannounced and surprise us, come hammering on the mind's door at 4 a.m. of a bad night and demand to know who deserted them, who betrayed them, who will make amends. We forget all too soon the things we thought we could never forget. We forget the loves and the betrayals alike, what we whispered and screamed, and forget who we were .” Slouching Toward Bethlehem
“We tell ourselves stories to live...We look for the sermon in the suicide, for the social or moral lesson in the murder of five. We interpret what we see and select the most workable of the multiple choices. We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images, by the "ideas" with which we have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria which is our experience.” The White Album
“Something real was happening: this was, as it were, her life. If she could keep that in mind, she could play it through, do the right thing, whatever that meant.” Play It As It Lays
“You have your wonderful memories,” people said later as if memories were solace. Memories are not. Memories are, by definition, of times past, things gone. Memories are the Westlake uniforms in the closet, the faded and cracked photographs, the invitations to the weddings of the people no longer married, and the mass cards from the funerals of the people whose faces you no longer remember. Memories are what you no longer want to remember.” Blue Nights
“In many ways, writing is the act of saying I, imposing oneself upon other people, saying listen to me, see it my way, change your mind. It’s an aggressive, even a hostile act. You can disguise its aggressiveness all you want with veils of subordinate clauses and qualifiers and tentative subjunctives, with ellipses and evasions—with the whole manner of intimating rather than claiming, of alluding rather than stating—. Still, there's no getting around the fact that setting words on paper is the tactic of a secret bully, an invasion, an imposition of the writer's sensibility on the reader's most private space.” Let Me Tell You What I Mean+
