American novelist, journalist and essayist Joan Didion died quietly at her home in New York at age 87 last week. Didion’s publisher, Penguin Random House, announced the author’s death last Thursday. She apparently passed away from complications from Parkinson’s disease, the company said.
“Didion was one of the country’s most trenchant writers and astute observers. Her best-selling works of fiction, commentary, and memoir have received numerous honors and are considered modern classics,” Penguin Random House said in a statement.
Didion was born on December 5, 1934, in Sacramento, California. Her father was a finance officer in the Army Air Corps and the family constantly relocated, however, they returned to Sacramento in 1943 or 1944. Didion received a Bachelor of Arts degree in English from the University of California, Berkeley in 1956.
Didion launched her career in the 1960s after winning an essay contest sponsored by Vogue magazine, which landed her a job with the publication. During her seven years at Vogue, Didion worked her way up from promotional copywriter to associate feature editor.
From there, she became one of the most distinctive and influential contemporary writers, who changed the landscape of the American essay as well as the landscape of American thought, with collections like Slouching Towards Bethlehem and The White Album, as well as novels like Play It As It Lays, and A Book of Common Prayer, and memoirs The Year of Magical Thinking, and Blue Nights.
In 1964 Didion married writer and friend John Gregory Dunne who helped her edit her first novel Run, River. The couple moved to Los Angeles, intending to stay only temporarily, but California remained their home for the following 20 years. They adopted a daughter, whom they named Quintana Roo Dunne, in March 1966. While living in LA, the pair wrote screenplays together, including The Panic in Needle Park and the Barbra Streisand remake of A Star Is Born.
Eventually, they moved to New York in the 1980s where Didion continued churning out her works including her book-length essay Salvador, her novel Democracy, and her nonfiction book Miami. In a prescient New York Review of Books piece of 1991, a year after the various trials of the Central Park Five had ended, Didion dissected serious flaws in the prosecution’s case, becoming the earliest mainstream writer to view the guilty verdicts as a miscarriage of justice. She suggested the defendants were found guilty because of a sociopolitical narrative with racial overtones that clouded the court’s judgment.
Also in the 1990s, Didion published the books After Henry and The Last Thing He Wanted.
In the 2000s, Didion suffered significant losses. In 2003 her husband suddenly died of a heart attack on December 30. Sadly, just two years later her daughter passed as well from acute pancreatitis on August 26, 2005, during Didion’s New York promotion for The Year of Magical Thinking, a narrative of her response to the death of her husband and the severe illness of their daughter.
“We have kind of evolved into a society where grieving is totally hidden. It doesn’t take place in our family. It takes place not at all,” she told The Associated Press in 2005.
Didion continued to write and used her gift to process her losses including Blue Nights, a memoir about aging, in 2011, which also focused on Didion’s relationship with her late daughter.
Didion received a National Humanities Medal in 2012, when she was praised for devoting “her life to noticing things other people strive not to see.” For decades, she had engaged in the cool and ruthless dissection of politics and culture, from hippies to presidential campaigns to the kidnapping of Patty Hearst, and for her distrust of official stories.
Didion’s nephew Griffin Dunne directed a 2017 Netflix documentary about her, Joan Didion: The Center Will Not Hold. Didion discusses her writing and personal life, including the deaths of her husband and daughter, adding context to her book, The Year of Magical Thinking and Blue Nights. Didion then published Let Me Tell You What I Mean, a collection of 12 essays she wrote between 1968 and 2000, in 2021.
“Had my credentials been in order I would never have become a writer,” she wrote in 2021 “Had I been blessed with even limited access to my own mind there would have been no reason to write. I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear. Why did the oil refineries around Carquinez Strait seem sinister to me in the summer of 1956? Why have the night lights in the Bevatron burned in my mind for twenty years? What is going on in these pictures in my mind?”
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Writers, readers, politicians and entertainment icons have taken to social media to honor the renowned writer.
It is clear that the world has lost an incredible talent. Joan Didion will surely be missed.
