joan didion in hollywood essay

The best free cultural &

educational media on the web

Online Courses
Certificates
Degrees & Mini-Degrees
Audio Books

Read 12 Masterful Essays by Joan Didion for Free Online, Spanning Her Career From 1965 to 2013

in Literature , Writing | January 14th, 2014 3 Comments

Image by David Shankbone, via Wikimedia Commons

In a classic essay of Joan Didion’s, “Goodbye to All That,” the novelist and writer breaks into her narrative—not for the first or last time—to prod her reader. She rhetorically asks and answers: “…was anyone ever so young? I am here to tell you that someone was.” The wry little moment is perfectly indicative of Didion’s unsparingly ironic critical voice. Didion is a consummate critic, from Greek kritēs , “a judge.” But she is always foremost a judge of herself. An account of Didion’s eight years in New York City, where she wrote her first novel while working for Vogue , “Goodbye to All That” frequently shifts point of view as Didion examines the truth of each statement, her prose moving seamlessly from deliberation to commentary, annotation, aside, and aphorism, like the below:

I want to explain to you, and in the process perhaps to myself, why I no longer live in New York. It is often said that New York is a city for only the very rich and the very poor. It is less often said that New York is also, at least for those of us who came there from somewhere else, a city only for the very young.

Anyone who has ever loved and left New York—or any life-altering city—will know the pangs of resignation Didion captures. These economic times and every other produce many such stories. But Didion made something entirely new of familiar sentiments. Although her essay has inspired a sub-genre , and a collection of breakup letters to New York with the same title, the unsentimental precision and compactness of Didion’s prose is all her own.

The essay appears in 1967’s Slouching Towards Bethlehem , a representative text of the literary nonfiction of the sixties alongside the work of John McPhee, Terry Southern, Tom Wolfe, and Hunter S. Thompson. In Didion’s case, the emphasis must be decidedly on the literary —her essays are as skillfully and imaginatively written as her fiction and in close conversation with their authorial forebears. “Goodbye to All That” takes its title from an earlier memoir, poet and critic Robert Graves’ 1929 account of leaving his hometown in England to fight in World War I. Didion’s appropriation of the title shows in part an ironic undercutting of the memoir as a serious piece of writing.

And yet she is perhaps best known for her work in the genre. Published almost fifty years after Slouching Towards Bethlehem , her 2005 memoir The Year of Magical Thinking is, in poet Robert Pinsky’s words , a “traveler’s faithful account” of the stunningly sudden and crushing personal calamities that claimed the lives of her husband and daughter separately. “Though the material is literally terrible,” Pinsky writes, “the writing is exhilarating and what unfolds resembles an adventure narrative: a forced expedition into those ‘cliffs of fall’ identified by Hopkins.” He refers to lines by the gifted Jesuit poet Gerard Manley Hopkins that Didion quotes in the book: “O the mind, mind has mountains; cliffs of fall / Frightful, sheer, no-man-fathomed. Hold them cheap / May who ne’er hung there.”

The nearly unimpeachably authoritative ethos of Didion’s voice convinces us that she can fearlessly traverse a wild inner landscape most of us trivialize, “hold cheap,” or cannot fathom. And yet, in a 1978 Paris Review interview , Didion—with that technical sleight of hand that is her casual mastery—called herself “a kind of apprentice plumber of fiction, a Cluny Brown at the writer’s trade.” Here she invokes a kind of archetype of literary modesty (John Locke, for example, called himself an “underlabourer” of knowledge) while also figuring herself as the winsome heroine of a 1946 Ernst Lubitsch comedy about a social climber plumber’s niece played by Jennifer Jones, a character who learns to thumb her nose at power and privilege.

A twist of fate—interviewer Linda Kuehl’s death—meant that Didion wrote her own introduction to the Paris Review interview, a very unusual occurrence that allows her to assume the role of her own interpreter, offering ironic prefatory remarks on her self-understanding. After the introduction, it’s difficult not to read the interview as a self-interrogation. Asked about her characterization of writing as a “hostile act” against readers, Didion says, “Obviously I listen to a reader, but the only reader I hear is me. I am always writing to myself. So very possibly I’m committing an aggressive and hostile act toward myself.”

It’s a curious statement. Didion’s cutting wit and fearless vulnerability take in seemingly all—the expanses of her inner world and political scandals and geopolitical intrigues of the outer, which she has dissected for the better part of half a century. Below, we have assembled a selection of Didion’s best essays online. We begin with one from Vogue :

“On Self Respect” (1961)

Didion’s 1979 essay collection The White Album brought together some of her most trenchant and searching essays about her immersion in the counterculture, and the ideological fault lines of the late sixties and seventies. The title essay begins with a gemlike sentence that became the title of a collection of her first seven volumes of nonfiction : “We tell ourselves stories in order to live.” Read two essays from that collection below:

“ The Women’s Movement ” (1972)

“ Holy Water ” (1977)

Didion has maintained a vigorous presence at the New York Review of Books since the late seventies, writing primarily on politics. Below are a few of her best known pieces for them:

“ Insider Baseball ” (1988)

“ Eye on the Prize ” (1992)

“ The Teachings of Speaker Gingrich ” (1995)

“ Fixed Opinions, or the Hinge of History ” (2003)

“ Politics in the New Normal America ” (2004)

“ The Case of Theresa Schiavo ” (2005)

“ The Deferential Spirit ” (2013)

“ California Notes ” (2016)

Didion continues to write with as much style and sensitivity as she did in her first collection, her voice refined by a lifetime of experience in self-examination and piercing critical appraisal. She got her start at Vogue in the late fifties, and in 2011, she published an autobiographical essay there that returns to the theme of “yearning for a glamorous, grown up life” that she explored in “Goodbye to All That.” In “ Sable and Dark Glasses ,” Didion’s gaze is steadier, her focus this time not on the naïve young woman tempered and hardened by New York, but on herself as a child “determined to bypass childhood” and emerge as a poised, self-confident 24-year old sophisticate—the perfect New Yorker she never became.

Add a comment

Free Courses

Art & Art History
Classics/Ancient World
Computer Science
Data Science
Engineering
Environment
Political Science
Writing & Journalism
All 1500 Free Courses
1000+ MOOCs & Certificate Courses

Receive our Daily Email

Free updates, get our daily email.

Get the best cultural and educational resources on the web curated for you in a daily email. We never spam. Unsubscribe at any time.

FOLLOW ON SOCIAL MEDIA

Free Movies

1150 Free Movies Online
Free Film Noir
Silent Films
Documentaries
Martial Arts/Kung Fu
Free Hitchcock Films
Free Charlie Chaplin
Free John Wayne Movies
Free Tarkovsky Films
Free Dziga Vertov
Free Oscar Winners
Free Language Lessons
All Languages

Free eBooks

700 Free eBooks
Free Philosophy eBooks
The Harvard Classics
Philip K. Dick Stories
Neil Gaiman Stories
David Foster Wallace Stories & Essays
Hemingway Stories
Great Gatsby & Other Fitzgerald Novels
HP Lovecraft
Edgar Allan Poe
Free Alice Munro Stories
Jennifer Egan Stories
George Saunders Stories
Hunter S. Thompson Essays
Joan Didion Essays
Gabriel Garcia Marquez Stories
David Sedaris Stories
Stephen King
Golden Age Comics
Free Books by UC Press
Life Changing Books

Free Audio Books

700 Free Audio Books
Free Audio Books: Fiction
Free Audio Books: Poetry
Free Audio Books: Non-Fiction

Free Textbooks

Free Physics Textbooks
Free Computer Science Textbooks
Free Math Textbooks

K-12 Resources

Free Video Lessons
Web Resources by Subject
Quality YouTube Channels
Teacher Resources
All Free Kids Resources

Free Art & Images

All Art Images & Books
The Rijksmuseum
Smithsonian
The Guggenheim
The National Gallery
The Whitney
LA County Museum
Stanford University
British Library
Google Art Project
French Revolution
Getty Images
Guggenheim Art Books
Met Art Books
Getty Art Books
New York Public Library Maps
Museum of New Zealand
Smarthistory
Coloring Books
All Bach Organ Works
All of Bach
80,000 Classical Music Scores
Free Classical Music
Live Classical Music
9,000 Grateful Dead Concerts
Alan Lomax Blues & Folk Archive

Writing Tips

William Zinsser
Kurt Vonnegut
Toni Morrison
Margaret Atwood
David Ogilvy
Billy Wilder
All posts by date

Personal Finance

Open Personal Finance
Amazon Kindle
Architecture
Artificial Intelligence
Beat & Tweets
Comics/Cartoons
Current Affairs
English Language
Entrepreneurship
Food & Drink
Graduation Speech
How to Learn for Free
Internet Archive
Language Lessons
Most Popular
Neuroscience
Photography
Pretty Much Pop
Productivity
UC Berkeley
Uncategorized
Video - Arts & Culture
Video - Politics/Society
Video - Science
Video Games

Great Lectures

Michel Foucault
Sun Ra at UC Berkeley
Richard Feynman
Joseph Campbell
Jorge Luis Borges
Leonard Bernstein
Richard Dawkins
Buckminster Fuller
Walter Kaufmann on Existentialism
Jacques Lacan
Roland Barthes
Nobel Lectures by Writers
Bertrand Russell
Oxford Philosophy Lectures

Receive our newsletter!

Open Culture scours the web for the best educational media. We find the free courses and audio books you need, the language lessons & educational videos you want, and plenty of enlightenment in between.

Great Recordings

T.S. Eliot Reads Waste Land
Sylvia Plath - Ariel
Joyce Reads Ulysses
Joyce - Finnegans Wake
Patti Smith Reads Virginia Woolf
Albert Einstein
Charles Bukowski
Bill Murray
Fitzgerald Reads Shakespeare
William Faulkner
Flannery O'Connor
Tolkien - The Hobbit
Allen Ginsberg - Howl
Dylan Thomas
Anne Sexton
John Cheever
David Foster Wallace

Book Lists By

Neil deGrasse Tyson
Ernest Hemingway
F. Scott Fitzgerald
Allen Ginsberg
Patti Smith
Henry Miller
Christopher Hitchens
Joseph Brodsky
Donald Barthelme
David Bowie
Samuel Beckett
Art Garfunkel
Marilyn Monroe
Picks by Female Creatives
Zadie Smith & Gary Shteyngart
Lynda Barry

Favorite Movies

Kurosawa's 100
David Lynch
Werner Herzog
Woody Allen
Wes Anderson
Luis Buñuel
Roger Ebert
Susan Sontag
Scorsese Foreign Films
Philosophy Films
February 2024
January 2024
December 2023
November 2023
October 2023
September 2023
August 2023
February 2023
January 2023
December 2022
November 2022
October 2022
September 2022
August 2022
February 2022
January 2022
December 2021
November 2021
October 2021
September 2021
August 2021
February 2021
January 2021
December 2020
November 2020
October 2020
September 2020
August 2020
February 2020
January 2020
December 2019
November 2019
October 2019
September 2019
August 2019
February 2019
January 2019
December 2018
November 2018
October 2018
September 2018
August 2018
February 2018
January 2018
December 2017
November 2017
October 2017
September 2017
August 2017
February 2017
January 2017
December 2016
November 2016
October 2016
September 2016
August 2016
February 2016
January 2016
December 2015
November 2015
October 2015
September 2015
August 2015
February 2015
January 2015
December 2014
November 2014
October 2014
September 2014
August 2014
February 2014
January 2014
December 2013
November 2013
October 2013
September 2013
August 2013
February 2013
January 2013
December 2012
November 2012
October 2012
September 2012
August 2012
February 2012
January 2012
December 2011
November 2011
October 2011
September 2011
August 2011
February 2011
January 2011
December 2010
November 2010
October 2010
September 2010
August 2010
February 2010
January 2010
December 2009
November 2009
October 2009
September 2009
August 2009
February 2009
January 2009
December 2008
November 2008
October 2008
September 2008
August 2008
February 2008
January 2008
December 2007
November 2007
October 2007
September 2007
August 2007
February 2007
January 2007
December 2006
November 2006
October 2006
September 2006

Advertise with Us
Copyright Policy
Privacy Policy
Terms of Use

Newsletters

Site search

Israel-Hamas war
Home Planet
2024 election
Supreme Court
All explainers
Future Perfect

Filed under:

How the Manson murders changed Hollywood, explained by Joan Didion

“No one was surprised.”

Share this story

Share this on Facebook
Share this on Twitter
Share this on Reddit
Share All sharing options

Share All sharing options for: How the Manson murders changed Hollywood, explained by Joan Didion

When five people were murdered at Sharon Tate’s house on the night of August 8-9, 1969, the reverberations went far beyond the elite Hollywood community of which she was part. They were felt far beyond Los Angeles, too. By that fall, when police connected the murders (and those of Leno and Rosemary LaBianca the following night) to Charles Manson and his cult-like “family,” Manson was well on his way to infamy, becoming a murderous icon and a symbol of an age.

Similarly, the murders would, for many, feel like the definitive end of the 1960s, and their optimism along with it. As Joan Didion wrote in her essay “The White Album,” the title piece of her 1979 collection , “Many people I know in Los Angeles believe that the Sixties ended abruptly on August 9, 1969, ended at the exact moment when word of the murders on Cielo Drive traveled like brushfire through the community, and in a sense this is true. The tension broke that day. The paranoia was fulfilled.”

But right after the murders happened, it was the community surrounding Tate’s house on Cielo Drive, and the broader group of people involved in show business in LA — which included Didion and her husband, the writer John Gregory Dunne — whose nerves jangled most sharply. Didion explained in her essay:

There were rumors. There were stories. Everything was unmentionable but nothing was unimaginable. This mystical flirtation with the idea of “sin” — this sense that it was possible to go “too far,” and that many people were doing it — was very much with us in Los Angeles in 1968 and 1969. A demented and seductive vortical tension was building in the community. The jitters were setting in. I recall a time when the dogs barked every night and the moon was always full. On August 9, 1969, I was sitting in the shallow end of my sister-in-law’s swimming pool in Beverly Hills when she received a telephone call from a friend who had just heard about the murders at Sharon Tate Polanksi’s house on Cielo Drive. The phone rang many times during the next hour. These early reports were garbled and contradictory. One caller would say hoods, the next would say chains. There were twenty dead, no, twelve, ten, eighteen. Black masses were imagined, and bad trips blamed. I remember all of the day’s misinformation very clearly, and I also remember this, and I wish I did not: I remember that no one was surprised .

The first sentence of “The White Album” furnishes one of Didion’s most quoted lines: “We tell ourselves stories in order to live.” She goes on to explain, through the rest of the essay, what she means: that humans survive the confusion and brutality of life by trying to find connections between events and extract meaning from those connections. We’re constantly trying to force seemingly random happenings into the framework of a story that might teach or show us something. But Didion isn’t so sure that the meaning we crave is truly available to us.

“The White Album” isn’t only about the Manson family and the murders; in it, Didion writes about hanging out with the Doors in the recording studio, visiting Huey Newton in jail, and navigating her own anxiety and suitcase-packing practices as a reporter during the late 1960s.

But the title makes it clear that the shadow of Manson hangs over the whole essay. It’s a reference to the 1968 Beatles album best known by its pure white cover art. But Manson was obsessed with that album, and told his followers it was the Beatles’ way of sending coded messages to the Manson family , warning them of the upcoming race war apocalypse (which he called “helter skelter,” after one of their songs). It’s part of what inspired him to tell his followers to kill the “pigs” on the weekend of August 8.

Didion had more than a mild interest in the case. After the passage quoted above, she writes about visiting Linda Kasabian in prison, and later buying a dress for her to wear to testify in court during Manson’s trial. (Kasabian was among the four members of the Manson family who went to Tate’s house, but she was standing lookout and did not actually kill anyone, which meant she was a prime witness in the case later on.)

In the essay, Didion uses the story of Tate’s murder to demonstrate how, in the aftermath of the event, it felt as if everything in the world had stopped making sense. She writes about strange coincidences and links: She bought a dress to be married in on the morning JFK was killed; later, she wore it to a party that was also attended by Tate and Polanski, and Polanski spilled wine on it. These and other coincidences don’t mean anything, she admits, but “in the jingle-jangle morning of that summer it made as much sense as anything else.”

And she revisits the connection in the last sentence of the essay: “Quite often I reflect on the big house in Hollywood [...] and on the fact that Roman Polanski and I are godparents to the same child, but writing has not yet helped me see what it means.”

“The White Album” viscerally recreates the anxiety of the period: not just Didion’s, but the country’s. It locates the nexus of that anxiety as the summer of 1969, and especially the Tate murders. And while the country would go on to try to make sense of Manson and the murders in the coming months and years — people have been trying to make sense of them ever since — Didion suggests, in the end, that it’s an impossible task.

Will you support Vox today?

We believe that everyone deserves to understand the world that they live in. That kind of knowledge helps create better citizens, neighbors, friends, parents, and stewards of this planet. Producing deeply researched, explanatory journalism takes resources. You can support this mission by making a financial gift to Vox today. Will you join us?

We accept credit card, Apple Pay, and Google Pay. You can also contribute via

Next Up In Culture

Understand the world with a daily explainer plus the most compelling stories of the day.

Thanks for signing up!

Check your inbox for a welcome email.

Oops. Something went wrong. Please enter a valid email and try again.

Crowds of people are seen riding the top of a freight car. Several other people hold onto the sides of the freight car. Many are waving at the camera.

America’s misunderstood border crisis, in 8 charts

Peterson, Silverman, and Mulaney on a talk show set.

So, what was the point of John Mulaney’s live Netflix talk show?

A black-and-white image of a flying saucer-shaped UFO suspended in the air above an arid, hilly landscape.

UFOs, God, and the edge of understanding

An Israeli soldier lying on the ground amid shrubs points a rifle directly at the camera.

Israel’s other war

What we know about the police killing of Black Air Force member Roger Fortson

A brunette woman in a red cape poses on a blue stage.

Inside the bombshell scandal that prompted two Miss USAs to step down

Hollywood: Having Fun

March 22, 1973 issue

Submit a letter:

Email us [email protected]

Memo from David O. Selznick

Figures of Light: Film Criticism and Comment

“You can take Hollywood for granted like I did, or you can dismiss it with the contempt we reserve for what we don’t understand. It can be understood too, but only dimly and in flashes. Not half a dozen men have ever been able to keep the whole equation of pictures in their heads.” —Cecelia Brady in The Last Tycoon

To the extent that The Last Tycoon is “about” Hollywood it is about not Monroe Stahr but Cecelia Brady, as anyone who understands the equation of pictures even dimly or in flashes would apprehend immediately: the Monroe Stahrs come and go, but the Cecelia Bradys are the second generation, the survivors, the inheritors of a community as intricate, rigid, and deceptive in its mores as any devised on this continent. At midwinter in the survivors’ big houses off Benedict Canyon the fireplaces blaze all day with scrub oak and eucalyptus, the French windows are opened wide to the subtropical sun, the rooms filled with white phalaenopsis and cymbidium orchids and needlepoint rugs and the requisite scent of Rigaud candles. Dinner guests pick with vermeil forks at broiled fish and limestone lettuce vinaigrette , decline dessert, adjourn to the screening room, and settle down to The Heartbreak Kid with a little seltzer in a Baccarat glass.

After the picture the women, a significant number of whom seem to have ascended through chronic shock into an elusive dottiness, discuss for a ritual half hour the transpolar movements of acquaintances and the peace of spirit to be derived from exercise class, ballet class, the use of paper napkins at the beach. Quentin Bell’s Virginia Woolf was an approved event this winter, as were the Chinese acrobats, the recent visits to Los Angeles of Bianca Jagger, and the opening in Beverly Hills of a branch Bonwit Teller. The men talk pictures, grosses, the deal, the package, the numbers, the morning line on the talent. “Face it,” I heard someone say the other night of a director whose current picture had opened a few days before to tepid business. “Last week he was bankable.”

Such evenings end before midnight. Such couples leave together. Should there be marital unhappiness it will go unmentioned until one of the principals is seen lunching with a lawyer. Should there be illness it will go unadmitted until the onset of the terminal coma. Discretion is “good taste,” and discretion is also good business, since there are enough imponderables in the business of Hollywood without handing the dice to players too distracted to concentrate on the action. This is a community whose notable excesses include virtually none of the flesh or spirit: heterosexual adultery is less easily tolerated than respectably settled homosexual marriages or well-managed liaisons between middle-aged women. “A nice lesbian relationship, the most common thing in the world,” I recall Otto Preminger insisting when my husband and I expressed doubt that the heroine of the Preminger picture we were writing should have one. “Very easy to arrange, does not threaten the marriage.”

Flirtations between men and women, like drinks after dinner, remain largely the luxury of character actors out from New York, one-shot writers, reviewers being courted by Industry people, and others who do not understand the mise of the local scène . In the houses of the inheritors the preservation of the community is paramount, and it is also Universal, Columbia, Fox, Metro, and Warner’s. It is in this tropism toward survival that Hollywood sometimes presents the appearance of the last extant stable society.

One afternoon not long ago, at a studio where my husband was doing some work, the director of a picture in production collapsed of cardiac arrest. At six o’clock the director’s condition was under discussion in the executives’ steam room.

“I called the hospital,” the head of production for the studio said. “I talked to his wife.”

“Hear what Dick did,” one of the other men in the steam room commanded. “Wasn’t that a nice thing for Dick to do.”

This story illustrates many elements of social reality in Hollywood, but few of the several non-Industry people to whom I have told it have understood it. For one thing it involves a “studio,” and many people outside the Industry are gripped by the delusion that “studios” have nothing to do with the making of motion pictures in the 1970s. They have heard the phrase “independent production,” and have fancied that the phrase means what the words mean. They have been told about “runaways,” about “empty sound stages,” about “death knell” after “death knell” sounding for the Industry.

In fact the byzantine but very efficient economics of the business render such rhetoric even more meaningless than it sounds: the studios still put up almost all the money. The studios still control all effective distribution. In return for financing and distributing the average “independent” picture, the studio gets not only the largest share (at least half) of any profit made by the picture, but, more significantly, 100 percent of what the picture brings in up to a point called “the break-even,” or “break,” an arbitrary figure usually set at 2.7 or 2.8 times the actual, or “negative,” cost of the picture.

Most significant of all, the “break-even” never represents the point at which the studio actually breaks even on any given production; that point occurs, except on paper, long before, since the studio has already received 10 to 25 percent of the picture’s budget as an “overhead” charge, has received additional rental and other fees for any services actually rendered the production company, and continues to receive, throughout the picture’s release, a fee amounting to about a third of the picture’s income as a “distribution” charge. In other words there is considerable income hidden in the risk itself, and the ideal picture from the studio’s point of view is often said to be the picture that makes one dollar less than break-even. More perfect survival bookkeeping has been devised, but mainly in Chicago and Las Vegas.

Still, it is standard for anyone writing about Hollywood to slip out of the economic reality and into a catchier metaphor, usually paleontological, vide John Simon: “I shall not rehearse here the well-known facts of how the industry started dying from being too bulky, toothless, and dated—just like all those other saurians of a few aeons ago….” So pervasive is this vocabulary of extinction (Simon forgot the mandatory allusion to the La Brea Tar Pits) that I am frequently assured by visitors that the studios are “morgues,” that they are “shuttered up,” that in “the new Hollywood” the studio “has no power.” The studio has.

January in the last extant stable society. I know that it is January for an empirical fact only because wild mustard glazes the hills an acid yellow, and because there are poinsettias in front of all the bungalows down around Goldwyn and Technicolor, and because many people from Beverly Hills are at La Costa and Palm Springs and many people from New York are at the Beverly Hills Hotel.

“This whole town’s dead,” one such New York visitor tells me. “I dropped into the Polo Lounge last night, the place was a wasteland.” He tells me this every January, and every January I tell him that people who live and work here do not frequent hotel bars either before or after dinner, but he seems to prefer his version. On reflection I can think of only three non-Industry people in New York whose version of Hollywood corresponds at any point with the reality of the place, and they are Johanna Mankiewicz Davis, Jill Schary Robinson, and Jean Stein vanden Heuvel, the daughters respectively of the late screenwriter Herman Mankiewicz; the producer and former production chief at Metro, Dore Schary; and the founder of the Music Corporation of America and Universal Pictures, Jules Stein. “We don’t go for strangers in Hollywood,” Cecelia Brady said.

Days pass. Visitors arrive, scout the Polo Lounge, and leave, confirmed in their conviction that they have penetrated an artfully camouflaged disaster area. The morning mail contains a statement from 20th Century-Fox on a picture in which my husband and I are supposed to have “points”—or a percentage. The picture cost 1,367,224.57. It has so far grossed $947,494.86. The statement might suggest to the casual subtracter that the picture is about $400,000 short of breaking even, but this is not the case: the statement reports that the picture is $1,389,112.72 short of breaking even. “$1,389,112.72 unrecovered” is, as agents say, the bottom line.

In lieu of contemplating why a venture that cost a million-three and has recovered almost a million remains a million-three in the red, I decide to get my hair cut, pick up the trades, learn that The Poseidon Adventure is grossing four million dollars a week, that Adolph “Papa” Zukor will celebrate his one-hundredth birthday at a dinner sponsored by Paramount, and that James Aubrey, Ted Ashley, and Freddie Fields rented a house together in Acapulco over Christmas. James Aubrey is Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. Ted Ashley is Warner Brothers. Freddie Fields is Creative Management Associates, First Artists, and the Directors Company. The players change but the game stays the same. The bottom line seems clear on the survival of Adolph “Papa” Zukor, but not yet on that of James Aubrey, Ted Ashley, and Freddie Fields.

“Listen, I got this truly beautiful story,” the man who cuts my hair says to me. “Think about some new Dominique-Sanda-type unknown. Comprenez so far?”

So far comprends . The man who cuts my hair, like everyone else in the community, is looking for the action, the game, a few chips to lay down. Here in the grand casino no one needs capital. One needs only this truly beautiful story. Or maybe if no truly beautiful story comes to mind one needs $500 to go halves on a $1,000 option payment for someone else’s truly beautiful but (face it) three-year-old property. (A book or a story is a “property” only until the deal; after the deal it is “the basic material,” as in “I haven’t read the basic material on Gatsby .”)

True, the casino is not now so wide open as it was in ’69, summer and fall of ’69 when every studio in town was narcotized by Easy Rider ’s grosses and all that was needed to get a picture off the ground was the suggestion of a $750,000 budget, a low-cost NABET or even a nonunion crew, and this terrific twenty-two-year-old kid director. As it turned out most of these pictures were shot as usual by IATSE rather than NABET crews and they cost as usual not seven-fifty but a million-two and many of them ended up unreleased, shelved. And so there was one very bad summer there, the hangover summer of 1970, when nobody could get past the gate without a commitment from Ali MacGraw or Barbra Streisand.

That was the summer when all the terrific twenty-two-year-old directors went back to shooting television commercials and all the creative twenty-four-year-old producers used up the leases on their office space at Warner Brothers by sitting out there in the dull Burbank sunlight smoking dope before lunch and running one another’s unreleased pictures after lunch. But that period is over and the game is back on, development money available, the deal dependent only upon the truly beautiful story and the right elements. The elements matter. “We like the elements ,” they say at studios when they are maybe going to make the deal. That is why the man who cuts my hair is telling me his story. A writer might be an element. I listen because in certain ways I am a captive but willing audience, not only to the hairdresser but at the grand casino.

The place makes everyone a gambler. Its spirit is speedy, obsessive, immaterial. The action itself is the art form, and is described in aesthetic terms: “A very imaginative deal,” they say, or, “He writes the most creative deals in the business.” There is in Hollywood, as in all cultures in which gambling is the central activity, a lowered sexual energy, an inability to devote more than token attention to the preoccupations of the society outside. The action is everything, more consuming than sex, more immediate than politics; more important always than the acquisition of money, which is never, for the gambler, the true point of the exercise.

I talk on the telephone to an agent, who tells me that he has on his desk a check made out to a client for $1,275,000, the client’s share of first profits on a picture now in release. Last week, in someone’s office, I was shown another such check, this one made out for $4,850,000. Every year there are a few such checks around town. Many people are shown them. An agent will speak of such a check as being “on my desk,” or “on Guy McElwaine’s deak,” as if the exact physical location lent the piece of paper its credibility. A few years ago they were the Midnight Cowboy and Butch Cassidy checks, this year they are the Love Story and Godfather checks.

In a curious way these checks are not “real,” not real money in the sense that a check for a thousand dollars can be real money; no one “needs” $4,850,000, nor is it really disposable income. It is instead the unexpected payoff on dice rolled a year or two before, and its reality is altered not only by the time lapse but by the fact that no one ever counted on the payoff. A four-million-dollar windfall has the aspect only of Monopoly money, but the actual pieces of paper which bear such figures have, in the community, a totemic significance. They are totems of the action. When I hear of these totems I think reflexively of Sergius O’Shaugnessy, who sometimes believed what he said and tried to take the cure in the very real sun of Desert D’Or with its cactus, its mountain, and the bright green foliage of its love and its money.

Since any survivor is believed capable in the community of conferring on others a ritual and lucky kinship, the birthday dinner for Adolph “Papa” Zukor turns out also to have a totemic significance. It is described by Robert Evans, head of production at Paramount, as “one of the memorable evenings in our Industry…. There’s never been anyone who’s reached 100 before.” Hit songs from old Paramount pictures are played throughout dinner. Jack Valenti speaks of the guest of honor as “the motion picture world’s living proof that there is a connection between us and our past.”

Zukor himself, who is described in Who’s Who as a “motion picture mfr.” and in Daily Variety as a “firm believer in the philosophy that today is the first day of the rest of your life,” appears after dinner to express his belief in the future of motion pictures and his pleasure at Paramount’s recent grosses. Many of those present have had occasion over the years to regard Adolph “Papa” Zukor with some rancor, but on this night there is among them a resigned warmth, a recognition that they will attend one another’s funerals. This ceremonial healing of old and recent scars is a way of life among the survivors, as is the scarring itself. “Having some fun” is what the scarring is called. “Let’s go up and see Nick, I think we’ll have some fun,” David O. Selznick remembered his father saying to him when the elder Selznick was on his way to tell Nick Schenck that he was going to take 50 percent of the gross of Ben-Hur away from him.

The winter progresses. My husband and I fly to Tucson with our daughter for a few days of meetings on a script with a producer on location. We go out to dinner: the sitter tells me that she has obtained, for her crippled son, an autographed picture of Paul Newman. I ask how old her son is. “Thirty-four,” she says.

We came for two days, we stay for four. We rarely leave the Hilton Inn. For everyone on the picture this life on location will continue for twelve weeks. The producer and the director collect Navajo belts and speak every day to Los Angeles, New York, London. They are setting up other deals, other action. By the time this picture is released and reviewed they will be on location in other cities. A picture in release is gone. A picture in release tends to fade from the minds of the people who made it. As the four-million-dollar check is only the totem of the action, the picture itself is in many ways only the action’s by-product. “We can have some fun with this one,” the producer says as we leave Tucson. “Having some fun” is also what the action itself is called.

I pass along these notes by way of suggesting that much of what is written about pictures and about picture people approaches reality only occasionally and accidentally. At one time the assurance with which many writers about film palmed off their misconceptions puzzled me a good deal. I used to wonder how Pauline Kael, say, could slip in and out of such airy subordinate clauses as “now that the studios are collapsing,” or how she could so misread the labyrinthine propriety of Industry evenings as to characterize “Hollywood wives” as women “whose jaws get a hard set from the nights when they sit soberly at parties waiting to take their sloshed geniuses home.” (This fancy, oddly enough, cropped up in a review of Alex in Wonderland , a Paul Mazursky picture which, whatever its faults, portrayed with meticulous accuracy that level of “young” Hollywood on which the average daily narcotic intake is one glass of a three-dollar Mondavi white and two marijuana cigarettes shared by six people.) These “sloshed” husbands and “collapsing” studios derive less from Hollywood life than from some weird West Side Playhouse 90 about Hollywood life, presumably the same one Stanley Kauffmann runs on his mind’s screen when he speaks of a director like John Huston as “corrupted by success.”

What is there to be said about this particular cast of mind? Some people who write about film seem so temperamentally at odds with what both Fellini and Truffaut have called the “circus” aspect of making film that there is flatly no question of their ever apprehending the social or emotional reality of the process. In this connection I think particularly of Kauffmann, whose idea of a nasty disclosure about the circus is to reveal that the aerialist is up there to get our attention. I recall him advising his readers that Otto Preminger (the same Otto Preminger who cast Joseph Welch in Anatomy of a Murder and engaged Louis Nizer to write a script about the Rosenbergs) was a “commercial showman,” and also letting them know that he was wise to the “phoniness” in the chase sequence in Bullitt : “Such a chase through the normal streets of San Francisco would have ended in deaths much sooner than it does.”

A curious thing about Kauffmann is that in both his dogged right-mindedness and his flatulent diction he is indistinguishable from many members of the Industry itself. He is a man who finds R. D. Laing “blazingly humane.” Lewis Mumford is “civilized and civilizing” and someone to whom we owe a “long debt,” Arthur Miller a “tragic agonist” hampered in his artistry only by “the shackles of our time.” It is the vocabulary of the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award. Kauffmann divined in Bullitt not only its “phoniness” but a “possible propagandistic motive”: “to show (particularly to the young) that law and order are not necessarily Dullsville.” The “motive” in Bullitt was to show that several million people would pay three dollars apiece to watch Steve McQueen drive fast, but Kauffmann, like my acquaintance who reports from the Polo Lounge, seems to prefer his version.

“People in the East pretend to be interested in how pictures are made,” Scott Fitzgerald observed in his notes on Hollywood. “But if you actually tell them anything, you find…they never see the ventriloquist for the doll. Even the intellectuals, who ought to know better, like to hear about the pretensions, extravagances and vulgarities—tell them pictures have a private grammar, like politics or automobile production or society, and watch the blank look come into their faces.”

Of course there is good reason for this blank look, for this almost queasy uneasiness with pictures. To recognize that the picture is but the by-product of the action is to make rather more arduous the task of maintaining one’s self-image as (Kauffmann’s own job definition) “a critic of new works.” Making judgments on films is in many ways so peculiarly vaporous an occupation that the only question is why, beyond the obvious opportunities for a few lecture fees and a little careerism at a dispiritingly self-limiting level, anyone does it in the first place.

A finished picture defies all attempts to analyze what makes it work or not work: the responsibility for its every frame is clouded not only in the accidents and compromises of production but in the clauses of its financing. The Getaway was Sam Peckinpah’s picture, but Steve McQueen had the “cut,” or the final edit. Up the Sand-box was Irvin Kershner’s picture, but Barbra Streisand had the cut. In a series of interviews with directors, Charles Thomas Samuels * asked Carol Reed why he had used the same cutter on so many pictures. “I had no control,” Reed said. Samuels asked Vittorio De Sica if he did not find a certain effect in one of his Sophia Loren films a bit artificial. “It was shot by the second unit,” De Sica said. “I didn’t direct it.” In other words Carlo Ponti wanted it.

Nor does calling film a “collaborative medium” exactly describe the situation. To read David O. Selznick’s instructions to his directors, writers, actors, and department heads in Memo from David O. Selznick is to come very close to the spirit of actually making a picture, a spirit not of collaboration but of armed conflict in which one antagonist has a contract assuring him nuclear capability. Some reviewers make a point of trying to understand whose picture it is by “looking at the script”: to understand whose picture it is one needs to look not particularly at the script but at the deal memo.

About the best a writer on film can hope to do, then, is to bring an engaging or interesting intelligence to bear upon the subject, a kind of petit-point -on-Kleenex effect which rarely stands much scrutiny. “Motives” are inferred where none existed; allegations spun out of thin speculation. Perhaps the difficulty of knowing who made which choices in a picture makes this airiness so expedient that it eventually infects any writer who makes a career of reviewing; perhaps the initial error is in making a career of it. Reviewing motion pictures, like reviewing new cars, may or may not be a useful consumer service (since people respond to a lighted screen in a dark room in the same secret and powerfully irrational way they respond to most sensory stimuli, I tend to think most of it beside the point, but never mind that); the review of pictures has been, as well, a traditional diversion for writers whose actual work is somewhere else. Some 400 mornings spent at press screenings in the late 1930s were, for Graham Greene, an “escape,” a way of life “adopted quite voluntarily from a sense of fun.” Perhaps it is only when one inflates this sense of fun into (Kauffmann again) “a continuing relation with an art” that one passes so headily beyond the reality principle.

February in the last extant stable society. A few days ago I went to lunch in Beverly Hills. At the next table were an agent and a director who should have been, at that moment, on his way to a location to begin a new picture. I knew what he was supposed to be doing because this picture had been talked about around town: six million dollars above the line. There was two million for one actor. There was a million and a quarter for another actor. The director was in for $800,000. The property had cost more than half a million; the first draft of the screenplay $200,000, the second draft a little less. A third writer had been brought in, at $6,000 a week. Among the three writers were two Academy Awards and one New York Film Critics Award. The director had an Academy Award for his last picture but one.

And now the director was sitting at lunch in Beverly Hills, and he wanted out. The script was not right. Only thirty-eight pages worked, the director said. The financing was shaky. “They’re in breach, we all recognize your right to pull out,” the agent said carefully. The agent represented many of the principals, and did not want the director to pull out. On the other hand he also represented the director, and the director seemed unhappy. It was difficult to ascertain what anyone involved did want, except for the action to continue. “You pull out,” the agent said, “it dies right here, not that I want to influence your decision.” The director picked up the bottle of Margaux they were drinking and examined the label.

“Nice little red,” the agent said.

“Very nice.”

I left as the Sanka was being served. No decision had been reached. Many people have been talking these past few days about this aborted picture, always with a note of regret. It had been a very creative deal and they had run with it as far as they could run and they had had some fun and now the fun was over, as it would also have been had they made the picture.

March 22, 1973

Subscribe to our Newsletters

More by Joan Didion

Nineteen writers remember The New York Review ’s editor.

May 11, 2017 issue

On covering the Patty Hearst trial in San Francisco, 1976

May 26, 2016 issue

August 15, 2013 issue

We hope you enjoyed this free article.

Read thousands more from The New York Review for just $1 an issue and receive a free pocket notebook. Engage with the most knowledgeable writers on politics, literature, arts, and ideas. To view offers click here.

April 19, 1973

Joan Didion (1934–2021) was the author, most recently, of Blue Nights and The Year of Magical Thinking , among seven other works of nonfiction. Her five novels include A Book of Common Prayer and Democracy . 

Encountering Directors (Putnams, 1972). ↩

From ‘The Lady Eve’

December 20, 1990 issue

The Current Cinema

December 11, 1975 issue

The Young Pretender

October 22, 1981 issue

Working Girl

June 8, 1995 issue

Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?

April 23, 1992 issue

Stanley Kubrick (1928–1999)

April 22, 1999 issue

The Charms of Terror

January 30, 1992 issue

The Ashes of Hollywood

June 20, 2013 issue

Subscribe and save 50%!

Get immediate access to the current issue and over 25,000 articles from the archives, plus the NYR App.

Already a subscriber? Sign in

Joan Didion on Hollywood’s Diversity Problem: A Masterpiece from 1968 That Could Have Been Written Today

By maria popova.

Take Hollywood’s diversity problem, of which the world becomes palpably aware every year as the Academy Awards roll around. (Awards are, after all, a vehicle for rewarding the echelons of a system’s values, and the paucity of people of color among nominees and winners speaks volumes about how much that system values diversity — something that renders hardly surprising a recent Los Angeles Times survey, which found that the Oscar-dispensing academy is primarily male and 94% white.) Nearly half a century before today’s crescendoing public outcries against Hollywood’s masculine whiteness, Didion addressed the issue with unparalleled intellectual elegance.

In an essay titled “Good Citizens,” written between 1968 and 1970 and found in the altogether indispensable The White Album ( public library ) — which also gave us Didion on driving as a transcendent experience — she turns her perceptive and prescient gaze to Hollywood’s diversity problem and the vacant pretensions that both beget and obscure it.

Shortly after the Civil Rights Act of 1968 and the assassination of Martin Luther King, Didion writes:

Politics are not widely considered a legitimate source of amusement in Hollywood, where the borrowed rhetoric by which political ideas are reduced to choices between the good (equality is good) and the bad (genocide is bad) tends to make even the most casual political small talk resemble a rally.

And because this is Didion — a writer of extraordinary subtlety and piercing precision, who often tells half the story in the telling itself — she paints a backdrop of chronic superficiality as she builds up to the overt point:

“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it,” someone said to me at dinner not long ago, and before we had finished our fraises des bois he had advised me as well that “no man is an island.” As a matter of fact I hear that no man is an island once or twice a week, quite often from people who think they are quoting Ernest Hemingway. “What a sacrifice on the altar of nationalism,” I heard an actor say about the death in a plane crash of the president of the Philippines. It is a way of talking that tends to preclude further discussion, which may well be its intention: the public life of liberal Hollywood comprises a kind of dictatorship of good intentions, a social contract in which actual and irreconcilable disagreement is as taboo as failure or bad teeth, a climate devoid of irony.

She recounts one event particularly painful to watch — a staged debate between the writer William Styron and the actor Ossie Davis. Davis had asserted that Styron’s Pulitzer-winning novel The Confessions of Nat Turner , in which the black protagonist falls in love with a white woman, had encouraged racism. With her characteristic clarity bordering on wryness, Didion notes: “It was Mr. Styron’s contention that it had not.” She sums up the evening with one famous spectator’s response:

James Baldwin sat between them, his eyes closed and his head thrown back in understandable but rather theatrical agony.

Didion reflects on what that particular event revealed — and still reveals — about Hollywood’s general vacancy of any real commitment to social justice:

[The evening’s] curious vanity and irrelevance stay with me, if only because those qualities characterize so many of Hollywood’s best intentions. Social problems present themselves to many of these people in terms of a scenario, in which, once certain key scenes are licked (the confrontation on the courthouse steps, the revelation that the opposition leader has an anti-Semitic past, the presentation of the bill of participants to the President, a Henry Fonda cameo), the plot will proceed inexorably to an upbeat fade. Marlon Brando does not, in a well-plotted motion picture, picket San Quentin in vain: what we are talking about here is faith in a dramatic convention. Things “happen” in motion pictures. There is always a resolution, always a strong cause-effect dramatic line, and to perceive the world in those terms is to assume an ending for every social scenario… If the poor people march on Washington and camp out, there to receive bundles of clothes gathered on the Fox lot by Barbra Streisand, then some good must come of it (the script here has a great many dramatic staples, not the least of them in a sentimental notion of Washington as an open forum, cf. Mr. Deeds Goes to Washington ), and doubts have no place in the story.

The unwelcome presence of doubt is, of course, the fatal diagnosis of all systems that warp reality and flatten its complexities by leaving no room for nuance — systems like the Hollywood of that era, which has hardly changed in ours, and the mainstream media of today, who tend to depict the world by the same “dramatic convention” of clickbait and sensationalism adding nothing to the actual conquest of meaning.

Reflecting on Hollywood’s “vanity of perceiving social life as a problem to be solved by the good will of individuals,” Didion recounts the particular pretensions she observed at a national convention of the United States Junior Chamber of Commerce, commonly known as Jaycees — a leadership and civic engagement training organization for young people — held at LA’s Miramar Hotel:

In any imaginative sense Santa Monica seemed an eccentric place for the United States Junior Chamber of Commerce to be holding a national congress, but there they were, a thousand delegates and wives, gathered in the Miramar Hotel for a relentless succession of keynote banquets and award luncheons and prayer breakfasts and outstanding-young-men forums… I was watching the pretty young wife of one delegate pick sullenly at her lunch. “Let someone else eat this slop,” she said suddenly, her voice cutting through not only the high generalities of the occasion but The New Generation’s George M. Cohan medley as well.

It bears noting that this took place a decade and a half before the Jaycees began accepting women as members, so any female presence at the convention was invariably allotted to such pretty young wives — including this one, whom Didion proceeded to see “sobbing into a pink napkin.”

But what makes Didion’s essay doubly poignant is the way in which she gets at — obliquely, unambiguously — how Hollywood’s chronic biases permeate the rest of society. Having gone to the Jaycees national convention “in search of the abstraction lately called ‘Middle America,'” she found instead a mirroring of Hollywood’s superficial and performative approaches to social justice issues. Didion writes:

At first I thought I had walked out of the rain and into a time warp: the Sixties seemed not to have happened.

Nearly half a century later, one can’t help but feel pulled into the very same time warp — Didion could have written this today:

They knew that this was a brave new world and [the Jaycees] said so. It was time to “put brotherhood into action,” to “open our neighborhoods to those of all colors.” It was time to “turn attention to the cities,” to think about youth centers and clinics and the example set by a black policeman-preacher in Philadelphia who was organizing a decency rally patterned after Miami’s. It was time to “decry apathy.” The word “apathy” cropped up again and again, an odd word to use in relation to the past few years, and it was a while before I realized what it meant. It was not simply a word remembered from the Fifties, when most of these men had frozen their vocabularies: it was a word meant to indicate that not enough of “our kind” were speaking out. It was a cry in the wilderness, and this resolute determination to meet 1950 head-on was a kind of refuge. Here were some people who had been led to believe that the future was always a rational extension of the past, that there would ever be world enough and time enough for “turning attention,” for “problems” and “solutions.” Of course they would not admit their inchoate fears that the world was not that way any more. Of course they would not join the “fashionable doubters.” Of course they would ignore the “pessimistic pundits.” Late one afternoon I sat in the Miramar lobby, watching the rain fall and the steam rise off the heated pool outside and listening to a couple of Jaycees discussing student unrest and whether the “solution” might not lie in on-campus Jaycee groups. I thought about this astonishing notion for a long time. It occurred to me finally that I was listening to a true underground, to the voice of all those who have felt themselves not merely shocked but personally betrayed by recent history. It was supposed to have been their time. It was not.

Reading Didion’s astute observations many decades later, at a time when so many of us feel just as “personally betrayed by recent history,” reaffirms the The White Album as absolutely essential reading for modern life — not merely because its title is all the more uncomfortably perfect in light of this particular essay, but because every single essay in it directs the same unflinching perceptiveness at some timeless and timely aspect of our world.

Complement it with Didion’s reading list of all-time favorite books and her answers to the Proust Questionnaire .

— Published February 24, 2015 — https://www.themarginalian.org/2015/02/24/joan-didion-white-album-good-citizens/ —

www.themarginalian.org

PRINT ARTICLE

Email article, filed under, books culture joan didion politics, view full site.

The Marginalian participates in the Bookshop.org and Amazon.com affiliate programs, designed to provide a means for sites to earn commissions by linking to books. In more human terms, this means that whenever you buy a book from a link here, I receive a small percentage of its price, which goes straight back into my own colossal biblioexpenses. Privacy policy . (TLDR: You're safe — there are no nefarious "third parties" lurking on my watch or shedding crumbs of the "cookies" the rest of the internet uses.)

To revisit this article, visit My Profile, then View saved stories .

What Is Cinema?
Newsletters

How Joan Didion the Writer Became Joan Didion the Legend

By Lili Anolik

Image may contain Furniture Human Person Shelf Bookcase Indoors and Room

In a 1969 column for Life, her first for the magazine, Joan Didion let drop that she and husband, John Gregory Dunne, were at the Royal Hawaiian hotel in Honolulu “in lieu of filing for divorce,” surely the most famous subordinate clause in the history of New Journalism, an insubordinate clause if ever there was one. The poise of it, the violence, the cool-bitch chic—a writer who could be the heroine of a Godard movie!—takes the breath away, even after all these years. Didion goes on: “I tell you this not as aimless revelation but because I want you to know, as you read me, precisely who I am and where I am and what is on my mind. I want you to understand exactly what you are getting.” I suppose I’m operating under a similar set of impulses—a mixture of candor, self-justification and self-dramatization, the dread of being misapprehended coupled with the certainty that misapprehension is inevitable (Didion’s style is catching, but not so much as her habit of thought)—when I tell you I’m scared of her.

Before I get into why, I need to clarify something I said. Or, rather, something I didn’t say and won’t say, but which I’m anxious you’re going to think I said: that Didion isn’t a brilliant writer. She is a brilliant writer—sentence for sentence, among the best this country’s ever produced. And I’m not disputing her status as cultural icon either. As large as she looms now, she’ll loom larger as time passes—I’d bet money on it. In fact, I don’t want to diminish or assault her in any way. What I do want to do is get her right. And over the past 11 years, since 2005, when she published the first of her two loss memoirs, one about Dunne, the other about Quintana, her daughter, she’s been gotten wrong. And not just wrong, egregiously wrong, wrong to the point of blasphemy. I’m talking about the canonization of Didion, Didion as St. Joan, Didion as Our Mother of Sorrows. Didion is not, let me repeat, not a holy figure, nor is she a maternal one. She’s cool-eyed and cold-blooded, and that coolness and coldness—chilling, of course, but also bracing—is the source of her fascination as much as her artistry is; the source of her glamour too, and her seductiveness, because she is seductive, deeply. What she is is a femme fatale, and irresistible. She’s our kiss of death, yet we open our mouths, kiss back.

The subject of this piece, though, is not just a who, Didion, but a what, Hollywood. So to bring them together, which is where they belong, a natural pairing, this: I think that Didion, along with Andy Warhol, her spiritual twin as well as her artistic, created L.A.—that is, modern L.A., contemporary L.A., the L.A. that is synonymous with Hollywood. And I think that Didion alone was the vehicle—or possibly the agent—of L.A.’s destruction. I think that for the city of Los Angeles, Didion is the Ángel de la Muerte.

There. I said it. Now you know why I’m scared. Who wants to get on the Ángel de la Muerte’s bad side? Not that I believe I’m going to. Because I have one last thing to add, and I don’t care how weird and screw-loose it sounds: I think she wanted me to say it.

An Ingénue, Disingenuous

The Joan Didion who moved from New York to L.A. in June of 1964 was no more Joan Didion than Norma Jeane Baker was Marilyn Monroe, or Marion Morrison was John Wayne, or, for that matter, Andrew Warhola was Andy Warhol. She was a native daughter, but only sort of. The California she grew up in—the Sacramento Valley—was closer in spirit to the Old West than to the sun-kissed, pleasure-mad movie colony. Just shy of 30, she’d recently married Dunne. Both had been working as journalists, she for Vogue, he for Time. Her first book, a novel, the traditional if not quite conventional Run River, had been published the year before. Critics hadn’t taken much notice; neither had readers. Hurt, likely a little angry too, she was ready for a new scene. Dunne was equally itchy to blow town. Plus, he had a brother in the industry, Dominick —Nick.

In his memoir Popism, Warhol wrote, “The Hollywood we were driving to that fall of ‘63 was in limbo. The Old Hollywood was finished and the New Hollywood hadn’t started yet.” Old Hollywood, of course, didn’t know it was finished. Was carrying on like it was show business as usual. And it still hadn’t wised up the following spring when the Didion-Dunnes arrived.

Nick, young though he was, was Old Hollywood. Professionally he hadn’t made it: a second-rate producer in a second-rate medium, TV. But socially he’d hit the heights. He and wife Lenny threw lavish, stylish parties, and lots of them. A month before the Didion-Dunnes showed, they’d thrown their most lavish and stylish, a black-and-white ball inspired by the Ascot scene in My Fair Lady. (That the ball—a ball!—wasn’t in color is a detail almost too on the nose. Soon the whole town would turn psychedelic, and such evenings would seem so old-fashioned as to have been in black and white even if they weren’t.) Among the splendidly monochromatic: Ronald and Nancy Reagan, David Selznick and Jennifer Jones, Billy Wilder, Loretta Young, Natalie Wood. Also present, Truman Capote, who, in a gesture either of rip-off or homage, would stage his own black-and-white ball in New York. Nick’s invitation would get lost in the mail.

In later years, Didion and Dunne would play a double game with Hollywood: they were participants who were also onlookers; supported by the industry but not owned by it; in the thick of it and above the fray. They seemed much less ambivalent in their early years. In their early years, they wanted in. A line invoked by both so often you know they must have believed it gospel is from F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Last Tycoon: “We don’t go for strangers in Hollywood.” How lucky for them then that they were the brother and sister-in-law of Nick, and thus part of the Hollywood family, if poor relations. And, as poor relations, they were given castoffs: clothes, Natalie Wood’s (for Didion); houses, too. They rented Sara Mankiewicz’s, fully furnished, though Mankiewicz did pack up the Oscar won by her late husband, Herman, for writing Citizen Kane.

So Didion and Dunne wanted in and got in, but they wanted in deeper. Hollywood’s appeal for writers isn’t hard to figure: it’s about the only place they can strike it rich. And doing it for the money seems to be how a writer stays respectable, at least in the eyes of fellow writers. Says writer Dan Wakefield, a friend of the couple’s from New York, “They didn’t give a shit about the movies except it was a way to make a lot of money. And I totally respect that.” Only maybe the Didion-Dunnes weren’t just tricking after all. Wrote Dunne, “The other night, after a screening, we went out to a party with Mike Nichols and Candice Bergen and Warren Beatty and Barbra Streisand. I never did that at Time. ” They were doing it then for love, too, if not of the movies, of the glamour and celebrity that movies bring. Says writer Josh Greenfeld, a friend of the couple’s from L.A., “Joan and John were star fuckers. They wouldn’t miss a party. They could do four in a night—come, see what had to be seen, go.” And Don Bachardy, the artist and longtime lover of Christopher Isherwood, then a reigning figure on the L.A. literary scene, recalls their ardent pursuit of Isherwood. “They were both highly ambitious, and Chris was a rung on the ladder they were climbing. I don’t like to tell on Chris, but he wasn’t very fond of either of them. I think he found her clammy.” (Isherwood already told on himself. He makes numerous unflattering references to Didion and Dunne—“Mrs. Misery and Mr. Know-All”—in his diaries.)

The basic plan, careerwise, seems to have been that Nick would provide Didion and Dunne with introductions and they’d try their hands, collective—it would be a team effort—at scriptwriting. Their hands would remain idle for seven years, not counting an episode of Kraft Suspense Theatre. Well, idle and full. In 1964, Didion struck up a relationship with a magazine highly receptive to her sensibility and interests, The Saturday Evening Post. It would become the primary home for her work until its publisher filed for bankruptcy in 1969. And in 1966, she’d have a baby—or, have a baby without quite having had a baby. She and Dunne adopted, at birth, a girl, Quintana Roo. So Didion had plenty to keep her occupied.

Besides, she didn’t need the movies to become a star.

Image may contain Human Person Indoors Room Living Room Furniture Couch Clothing Apparel and Female

ONE HAPPY FAMILY Joan, John, and Quintana, photographed by Julian Wasser in their L.A. home in 1968.

A Star Is Born, an Immaculate Conception

In 1968, Didion published Slouching Towards Bethlehem, a collection of essays mostly and most strikingly about California, and, with a single exception, composed entirely while living in her new hometown. Slouching would become a touchstone for a decade and an era, its readers more than mere readers but followers, devotees, fans. The critics were just as beguiled. The New York Times called it “a rich display of some of the best prose written today in this country.” And the writing is great: direct and matter-of-fact, yet lyrical and poetic and hypnotic, too—writing that casts a spell, though whether you’ve been enchanted or cursed isn’t wholly clear. The true triumph of Slouching, however, is Joan Didion, or, rather, “Joan Didion,” the central character in a book that famously denies that the center exists, or at least that it’s capable of holding; also, as it happens, the most enduring creation of Joan Didion.

We’re told at *Slouching’*s outset that it was written in a state of acute emotional distress. From the preface: “I went to San Francisco [for the title piece, about the hippie scene in the Haight] because I had not been able to work in some months, had been paralyzed by the conviction that writing was an irrelevant act, that the world as I had understood it no longer existed.” And many of the stories “Didion” tells are real-life horror stories: a suburban housewife who, one night when she was out of milk, set fire to her dumb lug of a husband; High Kindergarten, where children were given LSD; Howard Hughes. And yet the tone of the telling is noticeably, conspicuously not horrified; nor is it distressed, or even emotional; it’s the opposite, is composed, affectless, flat. There are, I should note, two places in the book where the tone changes, becomes tender. The first is in “John Wayne: A Love Song.” (Didion admirers like, I suspect, to believe that that “Love” is ironic—it’s not; she’s sweet on the Duke, who in his simplicity and stoicism represents to her a masculine ideal.) The second is in “Goodbye to All That,” her profile of her young self.

Like Warhol, “Didion” presents herself as an observer—no, a witness—to unspeakable acts. In fact, “Death and Disaster,” Warhol’s early-60s series depicting all manner of grisliness—car accidents, riots, suicides—could have been the title of Slouching, and maybe a better one. (The Yeats reference, in retrospect, seems a little alarmist.) “Didion” is absorbed, intensely, in what’s going on around her, but is not involved; her gaze fixed, even salivating, yet also vacant. Her motto might be: See everything, hear everything, do nothing. Still, her nothing is something, her extreme passivity a form of extreme aggression. She takes events, people, places that inspire violent and chaotic feelings—passion, hope, terror, despair—and subdues them, controls them, counteracting their awesome power simply by looking at them in a certain way. Her look, Warhol’s look, too—it’s aestheticizing, providing a psychic distance, a paradoxical kind of a cool. A burned-out cool. A cool that gives off heat.

The Strange Case of Earl McGrath

So New York had missed Didion’s star quality, its eye passing right over her. Not L.A., though. (Warhol, too, incidentally, would have to leave New York, go to L.A., to get discovered. It was the Ferus Gallery, on La Cienega, that gave him his big break, his first fine-arts show back in 1962, him and his soup cans.) L.A. knew how to talent-spot. But in 1968, it didn’t know much else. It was in a state of flux, or maybe crisis. The culture had swung counter, and the movies hadn’t swung along with it, not fully. Nineteen sixty-eight, remember, was the year of John Wayne’s The Green Berets, about what a super-fantastic idea the Vietnam War was. Music, not movies, had captured the hearts and minds of the younger generation. Old Hollywood, though, now knew it was Old. Wrote Nick Dunne, “Everything was changing…. People were starting to smoke pot…. Hairdressers started to be invited to parties.” And even if it wasn’t clear what exactly the New was, it was clear that Didion was part of it. She and Dunne began to move in different circles, most notably Earl McGrath’s.

Who is Earl McGrath? A mystery man I was never able to solve, is the short answer. Didion dedicated The White Album, her essay collection mainly about L.A. during the years she and Dunne and Quintana lived in a house on Franklin Avenue in Hollywood (1966–71), to him, which should give you some idea of his importance to her. He reminds me of Jay Gatsby, not for the obvious reason, though for that reason too—he threw killer parties—but because the claims made about him seem outlandish yet, somehow, plausible: “he ran Bobby Kennedy’s career”; “he ran Rolling Stones Records”; “he ran an art gallery”; “he was head of production for Twentieth Century Fox”; “he married an Italian countess”; “he gave Steve Martin his I’m-a-Little-Teapot routine.” All of that—some of that, none of that—though, was just a front, a cover. What he did really was get to know the ultra-hip and get them to know each other. Says artist Ron Cooper, “Earl is the Gertrude Stein of our era. He had a salon like Stein. I met Andy Warhol through him and Jack Nicholson and Dennis Hopper and Michelle Phillips and Michael Crichton and Joan and John, of course—and, oh, just an amazing roster of people.” Says singer-actress Michelle Phillips, “If you went to Earl’s, you were going to a party that you knew was going to be staffed and stuffed with the most interesting, fuckable people, always, always.”

Drugs were a big part of the scene. Says writer Eve Babitz, “Mostly pot and acid and speed—Dexedrine, Benzedrine. I thought Joan was more in control than we were, but I reread the The White Album. She didn’t sound in control, did she?” So was Harrison Ford. Says Babitz, “Harrison was a carpenter then, a terrible one. He built a deck for John Dunne and John was outraged it took so long. John really expected him to build it! And Earl was in love with Harrison. He let Harrison basically get away with murder as far as his carpentry was concerned. But Fred Roos [famed casting director for Francis Ford Coppola] hired Harrison and made him finish his project, and then got him in Star Wars. ”

Prince Harry’s Rift With Prince William Is Evident at Invictus Games Ceremony

By Erin Vanderhoof

RFK Jr. Says His Brain Was Partially Eaten by a Worm That Crawled Inside and Died: Everything You Need to Know

By Bess Levin

Baby Reindeer’s Real-Life Martha Speaks Out: Richard Gadd Is “Obsessed With Me”

By Savannah Walsh

Didion’s social life was now so vibrant, so vivid, so potent, her imaginative life became vulnerable to it. Says Babitz, “Michelle Phillips told the best stories in town. I remember her once lying down on the floor and telling that amazing story about Tamar Hodel. [Hodel, then 26, decided to kill herself after a love affair ended badly. She asked Phillips, then 17, to help. Phillips, believing it her duty as a friend, agreed. Hodel swallowed a bottle of Seconal. Phillips fell asleep beside her in bed. Fortunately, other friends came home in time to call an ambulance.] I guess Joan was listening.”

The Auteur Theory

In 1969, Didion completed her third book, Play It as It Lays. “Joan Didion” was back, no matter that she was now called Maria Wyeth, and Play It a novel. Maria, a B actress fast sliding down the alphabet, has an estranged director-husband and a brain-damaged child, and is telling her story from a sanatorium. Things she does: has sex, listlessly, takes drugs, also listlessly, bleeds a lot—from a botched abortion—cries even more—from the abortion, but for other reasons, too. In the climactic scene, she cradles her friend, the homosexual producer, BZ, in bed as he overdoses on Seconal (sound familiar?).

Play It is a Hollywood book, not just because it’s about Hollywood people, but because it’s a book that’s also a movie. Didion’s the star. (I should mention here that “writer” was only ever her fallback plan; as a child she’d wanted to act.) The author photo on the jacket, taken by Julian Wasser, is an arresting one—Didion was always a shrewd subject, understood how the camera should see her, had an actress’s sixth sense about lighting and mood—and shows a young woman, pretty and slight and troubled-looking. Between her fingers, a cigarette, rakishly angled, smolders. All decidedly Maria-ish. And if you’d caught the shots of Didion in Time in ‘68 (Wasser again), you’d know that, like Maria, who cruises the nerve pathways of the city to soothe hers—the San Diego Freeway to the Harbor to the Hollywood, and so on—she drives a Corvette. It’s a snap to picture her cracking hard-boiled eggs on her steering wheel, drinking Coca-Colas at gas stations.

Image may contain Sunglasses Accessories Accessory Human Person Clothing Apparel Skirt and Female

A STAR IS BORN Quintana, Joan, John, and his nephew Tony that same year.

Stars, though, weren’t really stars in Hollywood, directors were. And in Play It, Didion was that kind of star, too. If there’s a prose equivalent to freeze-frames and jump cuts, this book is full of them; chapters are fractured, one just 28 words long; and the amount of white on the pages makes them look like miniature movie screens. Plus, her eye is eerily close to that of a camera’s: all-seeing yet uncaring, a mode of perception both alienated and alienating.

And with Play It, Didion was able to return a favor. L.A. discovered Didion; now she was discovering it. Because if Play It actually were a movie, surely its opening credits would have read AND INTRODUCING L.A. The L.A. in Play It wasn’t the L.A. that existed in the popular imagination of the time: a sunny land of innocent, adolescent pleasures, Surfin’ U.S.A., Eden before the fall. It’s shadow L.A., jaded L.A., and it’s hell on earth, or, L.A. being L.A., hell in paradise. It’s the L.A. of plastic lemons and silver medallions and masseurs who want to be screenwriters. Didion intended, I think, to write a hate letter to L.A.; it’s a love letter, though, in spite of itself. For Auden, L.A. was “The Great Wrong Place.” It was for Didion, too, only her Wrong was so Wrong it was Right. She seduced even as she condemned. And there’s also this: the fact that Didion, the girl New Journalist, the novelist who’d figured out how to be a female Hemingway (a contradiction in terms, yet she’d done it), chose the city as her subject was its own kind of validation and recommendation. Says Babitz, “Joan made it O.K. to be serious about L.A.” Warhol made it O.K. before Didion, but only just. The profane assertion of his Marilyn Diptych (1962) was that movie stars had replaced religious icons as objects of worship; and, by extension, that L.A., home of Hollywood, was the country’s new spiritual mecca. What’s more, L.A., thanks to Warhol and Didion—maybe a handful of others—was becoming the country’s new cultural mecca, too. New York? How about Old Hat.

Psycho Killer, Qui Est-Ce Qu’il Est?

The times were wild and weird, and getting ever wilder and weirder. Didion was almost uncannily in touch with them. Her health, mental and physical, began to break down. After an attack of vertigo and nausea, she checked herself into a psychiatric clinic. Later she’d write, “An attack of vertigo and nausea does not now seem to me an inappropriate response to the summer of 1968.”

As bad as that summer was, though, it would get worse. Dark forces were gathering, gaining momentum. From The White Album: “I imagined that my own life was simple and sweet, and sometimes it was, but there were odd things going around town.... Everything was unmentionable but nothing was unimaginable.” And then the disciples of an aspiring musician and ex-con named Charles Manson slaughtered Sharon Tate, eight months pregnant, and four others at the house Tate rented with husband Roman Polanski on Cielo Drive, and suddenly everything was both. Didion: “Many people I know in Los Angeles believe that the Sixties ended abruptly on August 9, 1969.” Perhaps most unsettling of all: there was murder, but no murderer, not at first. Says Julian Wasser, “The cops didn’t know shit, as usual. Roman took me and Tommy Thompson [a journalist] and a psychic to the house. He’d just gotten back from Europe. It was his first time on the scene. The carpet had a three-foot circle of jellied blood. Roman was crying. He wanted me to take pictures to give to the psychic so he could find out who did it.” Says Michelle Phillips, “For a long time, nobody knew it was Manson. Everyone was a suspect. I started carrying a gun in my purse. To me, that was the end of the party.”

Manson embodied so many counterculture clichés he was an almost allegorical figure: a singer-songwriter who’d come to L.A. with a guitar and hopes of stardom. You could find one of him on every corner, at least the corners by the Troubadour and the Whisky. Bogeyman as Everyman. And the Manson “Family” was like some grotesque parody of the era’s peace-love-and-brotherhood ethos, the monster under the flower child’s bed.

Didion and the Manson murders were linked, if only in Didion’s mind. She sees occult significance in the fact that Polanski, at a party he attended with Tate, had spilled red wine on the dress she wore to her wedding, and that she and he were godparents to the same child, even if she can’t figure out exactly what that significance is, even if her cool intelligence won’t allow her to use the word “occult.” Yet there’s no question of the guilt in her tone. Is that because she felt somehow responsible for him? Did she believe he was a hallucination she’d conjured mid-migraine (her “vascular headache[s] of blinding severity”)? A vision sprung to life during her psychic collapse the summer before (from the doctor’s report: “In [the patient’s] view she lives in a world of people moved by strange, conflicted, poorly comprehended, and, above all, devious motivations”)? Her bad juju (“I remember a babysitter telling me that she saw death in my aura”) made flesh?

Or maybe these are the wrong questions. Maybe this is the right one: Did Didion believe herself so harmonically—or, rather, disharmonically—in tune with the vibrations being struck around her, so imaginatively sympathetic a participant in her time and place, in the melancholy and despair lurking beneath hippiedom’s blissed-out surface, in the hate that is the flip side of the Love Generation, that she became the medium of an evil spirit, the conduit through which it passed into the world, or did she believe she summoned it? In other words, was she Manson’s instrument or was he hers?

Who’s Afraid of John Gregory Dunne?

John Gregory Dunne was Didion’s husband, the father of her child, her first editor—that “in lieu of filing for divorce” clause, written, you’ll recall, in 1969, went through his red pencil before *Life’*s—and co-screenwriter. All of which gives you some idea of how essential to her he was. Not the whole idea, though. Here’s how essential: without Dunne there would have been no Didion, not Didion as we know Didion. But before I talk about him, I want to talk about Didion’s other mate, maybe her soulmate, if only in my imagination, Andy Warhol.

Didion is, and always has been, small, frail, quiet, recessive. As was Warhol. In so many ways, Didion was a Warhol who could pass, her smallness and frailness registering as pretty, gamine; her quietness and recessiveness as feminine, refined. She was, too, that least threatening figure—a wife. He, in contrast, was homely—blotchy-skinned and bulbous-nosed and bewigged—and obviously sexually Other. His weirdness was unconcealable, writ large. He had no choice but to turn it into personal style. In any case, these two mice became—not just against the odds, but seemingly against nature, certainly against their natures—social lions. How?

Entourages. The world’s rawness was too much for Warhol. A protective layer was necessary. Says Ferus co-owner Irving Blum, “Andy needed to travel with people—he used them as shields.” (It could easily be argued, by the way, that Warhol summoned his evil spirit. Valerie Solanas—a flamboyant oddball, just his type—was a member of his entourage. She’d written a play she thought he was going to produce. When she realized he wasn’t, she shot him. In a physical sense, she failed. Not in a metaphysical, though. Once her bullets entered his body on June 3, 1968—the summer that had Didion’s head spinning, stomach churning—it was the end of much of what was daring and original in his work.) Entourages, too, were good for the mystique.

Didion’s entourage was an entourage of one: Dunne. “Joan was very soft-spoken and shrinking,” says Don Bachardy. “John was very talky. He was her mouthpiece.” Didion, no doubt, is genuinely introverted. But she’s also somebody who, by her own admission, can spend “most of a week writing and rewriting and not writing a single paragraph.” She’s a control freak, basically. And conversation, as opposed to writing, is interactive, improvisatory. To engage in one you have to renounce a measure of control. Dunne’s garrulousness allowed her to take some of that control back, to pick and choose her spots. Says writer David Freeman, “John was the talker. I’ll tell you this, though. When she started talking, he knew to shut up.”

This, too: while shyness can be a symptom of insecurity, it can also be a weapon in a power play. Says Josh Greenfeld, “Joan’s weakness is her strength. It got John to run interference.” And run it he did. To get to Didion you had to go through Dunne. This was true socially—at parties, and on the telephone (it was he who always answered). And professionally. He did the meetings and the memos, the pushing around. The last sentence in a fax he sent to the Writers Guild when a studio was slow on payment: “[O]ur position is fuck them, let’s arbitrate.” He was Didion’s protector. And her caretaker. Says writer-actress Jennifer Salt, a one-time neighbor, “John was a very concerned and doting husband. A big part of their life was her migraines.”

So, essentially, their marriage was an endless re-enactment of a classic scenario: a damsel in distress, a big strong man coming to her rescue. (Big strong men, we know from Didion’s John Wayne profile, are very much her thing.) Or was it? Dot dot dot.

Image may contain Human Person Face John Gregory Dunne Anthony Hopkins Glasses Accessories and Accessory

The couple in New York City in 1983.

Dunne wasn’t Didion’s match artistically. Not so much a slight as it might sound. Dunne was a fine writer; Didion just happens to be more than that. And he seemed to have accepted his second-best status. Says Greenfeld, “John told Brian [Moore, the Irish novelist] he was walking on the beach one night and he ran into Jesus and Jesus said, ‘I love your wife’s work!’ ” Very smartly, too, Dunne carved out his own literary territory, his interests running to crooked cops and crooked crooks, gangsters and studio heads, i.e., gangsters by another name. Harder for Dunne to accept: that he wasn’t Didion’s match psychologically either. Greenfeld again: “What you see in John, you get in Joan. He came on blustering and tough, but he was softhearted.”

That Didion could wipe the floor with Dunne anytime she chose must’ve been disturbing for him. And confusing. The girl he’d married, a slip of a thing, bookish and wallflowerish, turned out to be this spooky genius, a poet of paranoia or possibly a clairvoyant of paranoia fulfilled. And those were boozy days. From Isherwood’s Diaries: “[Joan] drinks quite a lot. So does [John].” Dunne was a rager too. In that Life piece, Didion mentions “kicked-down doors.” Says Babitz, “Joan had migraines because she was married to John. He’d give anyone a migraine. He was an alcoholic and he broke down doors.” Often, though, when a man gets violent with a woman physically, it’s because he feels beat-up emotionally. Scratch a bully find a victim.

There’s a scene, very revealing, I think, in Vegas (1974), carefully described by Dunne as “a memoir” and “a fiction which recalls a time both real and imagined,” though in a letter to writer Jane Howard he admitted that the “real and imagined” was a fakeout, an attempt to throw his mother—“the Mum”—off the autobiographical scent. Vegas is about a writer who leaves his wife—also a writer—and child—a little girl, adopted—to live in Las Vegas, precisely what Dunne did for six months in the early 70s. (In lieu of divorce coming perilously close to divorce divorce.) The scene is a phone call between the protagonist and his wife:

“What’s new with you?” she said. “Jackie’s got me a date with a nineteen-year-old tonight. She’s supposed to suck me and fuck me.” “It’s research … You’re missing the story if you don’t meet her.” “But I don’t want to fuck her.” There was a long silence at the other end of the telephone. “Well, that can be part of the story, too,” she said. There seemed nothing more to say. I was the one who was supposed to be detached.

This isn’t a conversation. It’s warfare. And the wife defeats the husband. A no-contest contest. How she does it: by not doing anything. She exhibits neither shock nor rage nor sadness at the prospect of his getting together with a teenager. In fact, she encourages him to, all but dares him. Which is the exact moment he turns meek and little-boy, backs down and off. Plainly, he’s terrified of his wife. Well, why not? She’s a dangerous character. (The answer to the section’s opening question, by the way: Not Joan Didion.)

Interestingly, Quintana, at around this time, seems to have been driven to equal extremes to attract Didion’s attention. In her memoir Blue Nights, Didion tells a story of a five-year-old Quintana calling Camarillo, the state mental hospital, to ask what she should do if she was going crazy. Didion tells another story of Quintana, at the same age, calling Twentieth Century Fox to ask what she should do to become a movie star. Quintana was clearly desperate to turn herself into one of her mother’s characters—an insane person or a famous person, preferably both, like Maria Wyeth.

But back to Dunne: once this period—the publication of Play It, the book’s major-cultural-eventness—passed, he mellowed or was tamed, depending on your viewpoint. Either way, the marriage settled down. And by the 80s, Didion would be telling The New York Times that she and Dunne were “terrifically, terribly dependent on one another,” a statement that warms the heart or chills the blood, again depending on your viewpoint.

Kiss Me Deadly

In 1971, the Didion-Dunnes would move out of the house on Franklin Avenue to a house in Trancas, just north of Malibu. The couple’s careers as screenwriters would begin in earnest, starting with that year’s The Panic in Needle Park, and lasting until Dunne’s death in 2003. The moment they leave Hollywood to go Hollywood, though, is the moment I lose interest in them as Hollywood figures.

There is one movie of theirs, however, I do want to discuss: Play It as It Lays (1972). As I already said, the book is both book and movie. Didion’s temperament is a director’s in that her controlling intelligence is so, well, controlling. The world Maria inhabits is a contrived one—an artifice. Not for an instant do you believe that the story can end other than in calamity, that life’s random energies have a shot against tragedy’s classic structure. If a character burped or cracked a joke, you feel the whole thing would collapse. Which is why Play It, taken on its own terms, is profound, high art; and, not taken on its own terms, profoundly silly, high camp. Pauline Kael’s assessment of the book (she slammed it en route to slamming the movie) was so devastating because she laughed at it—“I found the … novel ridiculously swank, and I read it between bouts of disbelieving giggles”—and once you start laughing, you can’t stop.

A movie, by definition, is not taking the book on its own terms, since a movie is made by many people, even if one of them is a “Didion freak” (Frank Perry, the director, a self-description) and two others are Didion and Dunne (they wrote the script). The movie exposed the book. Showed how weak the central concept was, how purest-corn and junk-Hollywood: the glamour of desolation, the romance of despair, how low-life are those living the high life, etc. Only, unlike the junk-Hollywood product, Play It took itself seriously. The movie also showed that for Play It to work—and the book, whether you like it or not, does work—it needed the magic of Didion’s prose. Otherwise it’s just a bummer version of The Bad and the Beautiful.

This image may contain Human Person Advertisement and Poster

Play It as It Lays (1970).

It didn’t have to be. Didion’s first pick for director was Sam Peckinpah. Didion in a letter to Peckinpah: “I want you to [do the movie]—you are the only person … I can see taking it beyond where it is and bringing back a picture of the very edge.” Peckinpah seems, on the face of it, a counter-intuitive choice. The material was contemporary, urban, feminine. He was a director of Westerns, often set in the past, and extremely violent. Yet his violence was beautiful—sensuous and painterly—and he was a fatalist, and thus close to Didion in sensibility. Her hope, too, was that he would not just film the book—what Perry ended up doing—but reimagine it, and “[bring] back a picture of the very edge.” Or, maybe, over the edge. It always struck me as false that Maria was so tranquil behind the wheel. How much more joy would she have gotten from her rides if she’d left devastation in her wake? Is there a better way for one of the most alienated characters in modern literature to connect than inside her metal shell, her barest touch resulting in blood and guts and severed limbs? (Didion: “Actually, I don’t drive on the freeway. I’m afraid to.”) Peckinpah, I think, would have said what Didion couldn’t quite: that Maria—that Didion—was a victim who was also a victimizer. He’d have turned Play It into Warhol’s Orange Car Crash Fourteen Times at 24 frames per second.

That version, of course, never happened. The studio balked at Peckinpah. Missed opportunities are always a shame. This one, though, was especially shameful because it was also Didion and Dunne’s best opportunity to catch the American New Wave.

In 1969, the summer of Manson, Easy Rider roared onto screens trailing clouds of motorcycle exhaust and marijuana smoke. A new era in movies had begun. This new era, New Hollywood, was really an end-of-an-era era. Its decade was the 70s, and the 70s were less the 70s than the post-60s, the 60s once the light had been snuffed out. Its movies were, unsurprisingly, dark: innocence was lost or violated, promise unfulfilled, effort futile. Forget it, Jake, it’s Chinatown. And while Didion and Dunne were in New Hollywood, literally (their house in Trancas was a stone’s throw from New Hollywood Central, the houses of Julia and Michael Phillips, producers of Taxi Driver, and actresses Jennifer Salt and Margot Kidder, where every weekend people like Martin Scorsese, Steven Spielberg, and Paul Schrader—all unknowns then—could be found drinking wine, smoking grass, and talking movies), they were never of it, even if they’d occasionally attend its parties. I don’t think they quite knew what “it” was.

“A few decades hence, these years may appear to be the closest our movies have come to the tangled, bitter flowering of American letters in the 1850s.” Pauline Kael wrote those words in her introduction to Reeling, her collection of reviews, 1972–75, including that humdinger of Play It. In the 70s, movie culture would become central to American culture. Kael was its voice, which meant she was American culture’s voice, which meant Didion no longer was. Didion didn’t take the usurpation lying down. She went after Kael, writing in 1973, “The review of pictures has been … a traditional diversion for writers whose actual work is somewhere else.” No serious writer takes movies seriously, is, essentially, what she’s saying. And yet movies were, at that moment, it, the hot art form. So Didion, who missed nothing, had missed a major cultural shift. And just like that, the sharpest point on the cutting edge was dull, out of it, passé. That the movie she and Dunne are best known for is A Star Is Born (1976), a remake of a remake of a remake of a remake, tells, I think, the story of their Hollywood career.

So after 1969, Didion’s special extra intuition was gone. (Kael, incidentally, wouldn’t outlast her decade either. Her moment ended in 1979, when Warren Beatty, that skilled seducer, sweet-talked her into leaving The New Yorker for Paramount.) Didion would continue to be a great writer, but would cease to be a visionary one. While a number of her later books hit the best-seller list, they failed, with the exception of The White Album, published in 1979 though about the earlier period, to truly resonate. Her days as a cultural phenomenon were over.

Until the passing of Dunne and Quintana. In their deaths, Didion was resurrected professionally. The Year of Magical Thinking (2005) was a critical sensation—winner of the National Book Award—and a commercial one, selling a million-plus copies, far more than any other book in her career. And its sequel, Blue Nights (2011), was another smash. Why?

In this piece’s opening I called Didion a femme fatale. I said it to startle and I said it because it’s true. I suspect she’s one in life. I know she’s one in art. Her method, which is also her genius, has been to attenuate nature, strip it of its force and vitality. And then nature did that to her. Did it by aging her, taking away her youth and beauty. Did it again, and more violently, by taking away those she loved most. With just about anybody else, it would have ended there—heartbreak of that magnitude breaking the spirit and the will, as well. Not with Didion, though. She did it right back to nature. Magical Thinking and Blue Nights are loss and grief and pain transformed into meditations on loss and grief and pain; they’re loss and grief and pain aestheticized. Death has always been Didion’s great subject and theme, as it was Warhol’s. And in these memoirs, she’s confronting it directly, more than confronting it, besting it. Art won out over life, another way of saying the artist won out over the human being. It’s her triumph. It’s also her tragedy.

Joan Didion and John Dunne: Photos of Their Life in L.A.

Image may contain Human Person Home Decor Room Indoors Shelf Bowl Kitchen Pants Clothing Apparel and Mixing Bowl

Lili Anolik

Cocktail hour.

By signing up you agree to our User Agreement and Privacy Policy & Cookie Statement . This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.

Alfred Molina Answers the Proust Questionnaire

By Alfred Molina

Revisiting Clara Bow, the Scrutinized “It Girl” Who Inspired Taylor Swift’s New Song

By Joy Press

Harvey Weinstein’s Rape Conviction Overturned by New York Appeals Court&-What’s Next?

an image, when javascript is unavailable

By providing your information, you agree to our Terms of Use and our Privacy Policy . We use vendors that may also process your information to help provide our services. This site is protected by reCAPTCHA Enterprise and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.

California Native Joan Didion Understood Hollywood Better than Anyone

Anne thompson.

Share on Facebook
Share to Flipboard
Share on LinkedIn
Show more sharing options
Submit to Reddit
Post to Tumblr
Print This Page
Share on WhatsApp

Many Netflix watchers are catching up with actor-director Griffin Dunne’s documentary about his aunt, “ Joan Didion : The Center Will Not Hold,” following the news that the prolific writer died December 23 at age 87 from Parkinson’s. When President Barack Obama gave Didion the National Humanities Medal in 2012, he called her “one of our sharpest and most respected observers of American politics and culture.”

Didion not only chronicled the literati scene of New York in the 1950s and early ’60s but astutely dissected her home state of California. After graduating from UC Berkeley, she landed a job at Vogue in New York, where she penned movie reviews — until her pan of “The Sound of Music.” After marrying Time staffer John Gregory Dunne in 1964, the couple moved to Los Angeles and wound up becoming the ultimate Hollywood insiders. When Didion and Dunne later moved to New York City in 1988, they had lived in Los Angeles for 24 years.

Didion’s first novel “Run River” (1963) was set in her hometown of Sacramento, and her 2003 memoir, “Where I Was From,” looked back on her days in California. Didion and Dunne were part of the fabric of ’70s and ’80s Hollywood, writing countless essays and criticism. Didion wrote 19 books and, with Dunne, six screenplays, including the 1976 “ A Star is Born ” remake starring Barbra Streisand, and Al Pacino vehicle “The Panic in Needle Park.” (Unproduced was their widely admired Norman Mailer adaptation “The Deer Park.”) They adapted two of their novels, Didion’s bestseller “Play It as It Lays” (1970) and Dunne’s “True Confessions” (1977), into Hollywood movies, starring, respectively, Tuesday Weld as a B-movie actress, and Robert De Niro as a Monsignor who clashes with his homicide cop brother (Robert Duvall).

They knew the town better than anyone. “Los Angeles presents a real culture shock when you’ve never lived there,” she told British Vogue in 1993. “The first couple of years you feel this little shift in the way you think about things. The place doesn’t mean anything. Los Angeles strips away the possibility of sentiment. It’s flat. It absorbs all the light. It doesn’t give you a story. Then you start asking what it is to mean something. What does New York mean? Then you start telling yourself what New York means is a sentimental story.”

In her famous 1973 essay in The New York Review of Books, “Hollywood: Having Fun,” Didion skewered film reviewing as a “vaporous occupation” and disdained outsider coverage of Hollywood from the likes of New Yorker critic Pauline Kael. “Discretion is ‘good taste,’ and discretion is also good business,” she wrote, “since there are enough imponderables in the business of Hollywood without handing the dice to players too distracted to concentrate on the action.”

Didion loved explaining how Hollywood works. “The place makes everyone a gambler,” she wrote. “Its spirit is speedy, obsessive, immaterial. The action itself is the art form.” To read David O. Selznick’s memoir is “to get close to the spirit of actually making a picture, a spirit not of collaboration but of armed conflict in which one antagonist has a contract assuring him of nuclear capability.”

Fueling their writing were Didion and Dunne’s enthusiastic participation in the L.A. social scene. At their homes in Broad Beach and Brentwood, the couple threw dinner parties with “an incredible collection of people,” Griffin Dunne told me, “from the cinema world and journalism and cops and homicide detectives and D.A.s and movie stars,” including the likes of Mike Nichols, Candice Bergen, Warren Beatty and Barbra Streisand as well as their own young actor-carpenter, Harrison Ford. Didion not only hung out with rock stars Janis Joplin and Jim Morrison, but once cooked dinner for one of Charles Manson’s women. Many of these encounters wound up in her lauded collections “Slouching Toward Bethlehem” (1968) and “The White Album” (1979), as well as her descriptions of L.A. freeways and Santa Ana winds: “the wind shows us how close to the edge we are.”

Most Popular

What are you looking for?

Suggested search, from hollywood to malibu: mapping joan didion’s los angeles.

For nearly five decades, Joan Didion has been one of California’s most compelling literary voices. Her coverage of zeitgeist moments, from ’60s “be-ins” to the election of Ronald Reagan, helped usher in an era of journalism where reporting read as engagingly as a novel. She’s penned books on Miami and El Salvador, covered national politics and now resides in New York City, yet California remains her work’s true north.

Although she was born and raised in Sacramento, Didion’s personal and spiritual nerves are particularly rooted in Los Angeles. In 1965, after an early career as a magazine writer and editor in New York, Didion and her husband, the writer John Gregory Dunne, moved to L.A.

They raised their daughter in Malibu, collaborated on Hollywood screenplays and socialized with celebrities, politicians and iconoclasts. From the 1960s into the ’80s, Didion piloted her car down smoggy boulevards in pursuit of the stories that showed L.A. to itself.

Using a new book he edited, Joan Didion: The 1960s & 70s (Library of America, November 2019), David Ulin , assistant professor of English at USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences, creates a map of Didion’s Los Angeles for those wishing to follow in her steps — or tire tracks.

7406 Franklin Avenue, Hollywood

In 1966, Didion and Dunne moved to a tattered, sprawling mansion at 7406 Franklin Avenue. There, as Hollywood pulsed around her, Didion wrote her collection of essays Slouching Towards Bethlehem .

Its skeptical observations of life in countercultural Haight-Ashbury in San Francisco echoed the vibrations of her own neighborhood, which was also undergoing a renaissance of a mixed caliber. Cultists, dreamers and criminals shared the same sidewalks, and downed martinis elbow to elbow at Musso and Frank Grill.

“It was a really marginal area, with a lot of transients in and out,” says Ulin. “There were big houses that had been mansions and were now spiritual cults and communes. There was a real temporary aspect to the neighborhood. This dovetails with her own internal sense of the tenuousness of the city and the era.”

In 1968, on assignment for Parade , photographer Julian Wasser snapped an iconic photo of Didion posing with her white Corvette Stingray in the Franklin house’s driveway. It was the beginning of her very deliberate, stylized presence on the cultural map.

“There are tons of well-done images of her taken across the span of her life,” Ulin says. “In every one of them you get the sense of her manufacturing image. In terms of the style of her prose, it’s a very self-conscious prose style; it’s aware of itself as style. So, it also makes sense that she would have that awareness of herself in the public eye.”

110: The Harbor Freeway

Freeways, the concrete arteries of the southland, appear frequently in Didion’s writing. To her, driving them requires a near ecstatic communion. “Actual participation requires a total surrender, a concentration so intense as to seem a kind of narcosis, a rapture-of-the-freeway,” she writes in her essay On the Road .

In the summer of 1965, the Watts Riots lit the city aflame. In her essay Los Angeles Notebook , Didion said of that August, “For days, one could drive the Harbor Freeway and see the city on fire, just as we had always known it would be in the end.”

Highways lend themselves to Didion’s detached, observational character.

“On the one hand there’s proximity as she’s close enough to see it, but she’s also separate because she’s above it all rather than on the streets of the neighborhood,” says Ulin. On an L.A. freeway, you can drive by a wreck, a fire or a riot and get within arm’s distance without ever leaving your air conditioning.

St. John’s Hospital

Black-and-white photo of Joan Didion with her husband and daughter

By early June of 1968, both Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy had been assassinated, the Vietnam war significantly escalated and protests were rising up across the globe.

That summer, Didion checked herself into St. John’s Hospital, now Providence St. John’s Health Center, in Santa Monica for “vertigo/nausea.” Later she reflects in The White Album (in which she also published excerpts from her hospital records during the stay), “By way of comment I offer only that an attack of vertigo and nausea does not now seem to me an inappropriate response to the summer of 1968.”

Didion’s petite frame, combined with the raw anxiety of her writing, gave her a reputation of frailness. She used it to her advantage, however.

“That smallness, that frailty, that physical slightness is something that she uses to get people to lower their guard so she can actually see what the real story is as a reporter,” says Ulin.

“Her writing is anything but frail,” he continues. “There’s a real toughness, even when she’s revealing information about her own psychological condition. That act of self-revelation is anything but slight. That’s a pretty powerful move to make.”

Happier events also occurred at the hospital. In 1966, a physician at St. John’s facilitated the private adoption of their daughter, Quintana Roo, named after a Mexican state on the Yucatán Peninsula.

714 Walden Drive

Didion’s brother-in-law, TV producer and consummate networker Dominick Dunne, and his wife, Lemmy, lived in a Hollywood Hills home not far from Didion’s Franklin Avenue digs.

Dominick Dunne was essential to connecting his brother and sister-in-law to lucrative Hollywood gigs after their move west, says Ulin. “The first movie that Didion and Dunne wrote together, Panic in Needle Park , he produced it. He was very instrumental in helping them get work and also in becoming part of that social milieu.” Didion often attended star-studded gatherings at the house, where she studied California’s elite up close.

It was also where Didion learned of the gruesome Manson murders, while swimming in the Dunne’s pool on an August evening in 1969. She later positioned the events as marking an end to buoyant ’60s naivety. Her 1979 book The White Album shares its name with the Beatles’ album that contains “Helter Skelter,” the song Manson claimed bore subliminal messages directing his violence.

Detour to Delano

If you’re looking for a Didion field trip outside L.A., head three hours north to Delano, in California’s Central Valley. In August 1966, she and her husband traveled to this small town to cover the grape workers’ strike organized by the Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee.

Didion’s background in rural California was essential for Dunne’s fieldwork, says Ulin. “She had family history in Sacramento, which was very agricultural, and so she understood that territory in a way that Dunne, coming from the East Coast, did not.” The couple’s research later culminated in Dunne’s book Delano .

Didion and Dunne combined their talents on many projects together over their nearly 40 years of marriage. They produced screenplays, including A Star is Born and True Confessions , and wrote together for the The Saturday Evening Post .

33428 Pacific Coast Highway, Malibu

In 1971, Didion and her husband decamped to a rambling Malibu home floored with Spanish tile and decorated with a quilt sewn by Didion’s great-great-grandmother while on a westward wagon train in the 1800s.

Malibu was not all that different from their prior Hollywood neighborhood. It, too, was marginal, tacked onto the edge of the continent and hemmed in by a fire zone.

“They’re on a natural edge,” says Ulin. “I think that’s important in terms of her own sensibility and writing. For someone who is operating psychologically on that emotional fault line, she is putting herself geographically or physically into communities that are operating on their own fault line.”

Pummeled by the Pacific Ocean on one side and framed by tinder-dry hills on the other, Didion unraveled the Californian struggle with a nature both charming and cruel. In her essays, Malibu lifeguards pulled swimmers from the ocean, orchid growers tended their sensitive charges, and fires, spurred by Santa Ana winds, threatened humanity’s tenuous dominion over the land.

“Los Angeles weather is the weather of catastrophe, of apocalypse,” she writes in her 1965 essay The Santa Ana . “The violence and the unpredictability of the Santa Ana affect the entire quality of life in Los Angeles, accentuate its impermanence, its unreliability. The winds show us how close to the edge we are.”

david ullin
los angeles

Find anything you save across the site in your account

What We Get Wrong About Joan Didion

By Nathan Heller

In the spring of 1967, Joan Didion and John Gregory Dunne, freelance writers married to each other and living in Los Angeles, were engaged to write a regular column for the Saturday Evening Post . This was a good gig. The space they had to fill was neither long nor short—about twelve hundred words, a gallop larger than the Comment that opens this magazine. The Post paid them well, and Didion and Dunne each had to file one piece a month. The column, called “Points West,” entailed their visiting a place of West Coast interest, interviewing a few people or no people, and composing a dispatch. Didion wrote one column about touring Alcatraz, another on the general secretary of a small Marxist-Leninist group. The Post was struggling to stay afloat (it went under two years later), and that chaos let the new columnists shimmy unorthodox ideas past their desperate editors. Didion’s first effort was a dispatch from her parents’ house. A few weeks later, her “Points West” was about wandering Newport, Rhode Island. (“Newport is curiously Western,” she announced in the piece, sounding awfully like a writer trying to get away with something.) The column work left time for other projects, and Didion spent the spring through September of 1967 on a ten-thousand-word assignment about the hippie movement, the rest on a novel she’d been struggling with. At some point, an editor suggested that she had the makings of a collection, so she stacked her columns with past articles she liked (a report from Hawaii, the best of some self-help columns she’d churned out while a junior editor at Vogue ), set them in a canny order with a three-paragraph introduction, and sent them off. This was “ Slouching Towards Bethlehem ,” her first nonfiction book. It has claims to being the most influential essay collection of the past sixty years.

Didion, now eighty-six, has been an object of fascination ever since, boosted by the black-lace renaissance she experienced after publishing “ The Year of Magical Thinking ” (2005), her raw and ruminative account of the months following Dunne’s sudden death. Generally, writers who hold readers’ imaginations across decades do so because there’s something unsolved in their project, something that doesn’t square and thus seems subject to the realm of magic. In Didion’s case, a disconnect appears between the jobber-like shape of her writing life—a shape she often emphasizes in descriptions of her working habits—and the forms that emerged as the work accrued. For all her success, Didion was seventy before she finished a nonfiction book that was not drawn from newsstand-magazine assignments. She and Dunne started doing that work with an eye to covering the bills, and then a little more. (Their Post rates allowed them to rent a tumbledown Hollywood mansion, buy a banana-colored Corvette Stingray, raise a child, and dine well.) And yet the mosaic-like nonfiction books that Didion produced are the opposite of jobber books, or market-pitched books, or even useful, fibrous, admirably executed books. These are strange books, unusually shaped. They changed the way that journalistic storytelling and analysis were done.

Because a sentence of Didion is unmistakable, people often presume that her advances were in prose style. The opening of the “Slouching Towards Bethlehem” collection announced her voice:

The San Bernardino Valley lies only an hour east of Los Angeles by the San Bernardino Freeway but is in certain ways an alien place: not the coastal California of the subtropical twilights and the soft westerlies off the Pacific but a harsher California, haunted by the Mojave just beyond the mountains, devastated by the hot dry Santa Ana wind that comes down through the passes at 100 miles an hour and whines through the eucalyptus windbreaks and works on the nerves.

There’s the entwining of sensuous and ominous images. And there’s the fine, tight verbal detail work: the vowel suspensions (“ways an alien place”), the ricocheting consonants (“harsher . . . haunted . . . Mojave”), the softly anagrammatic games of sound (“subtropical twilights and the soft westerlies”). Didion worked hard at her sentences, and no magazine journalist has done better than her best. But style is just the baseline of good writing. Didion’s innovation was something else.

Most writers of nonfiction operate in the sphere of high craft: like a silversmith producing teapots, they work to create elevated and distinctive versions of known objects. A master will produce a range of creative variations, yet the teapots always remain teapots, and the marks of individuation rise from a shared language of form and technique. Didion’s nonfiction was produced in that craftwork tradition, but it operates more in the sphere of art: it declares its own terms and vernacular, and, if successful, conveys meaning in a way that transcends its parts.

The title essay of her second collection, “ The White Album ” (1979), offers the clearest glimpse of how that reimagination happens. The heart of the essay is a cluster of “Points West” columns: brief reports on protests at San Francisco State, a Huey Newton press conference, a studio visit with the Doors—her normal craftwork as a working writer. When composing the “White Album” essay, Didion lined those pieces up like flagstones in a path. Together, she knew, they had to tell a bigger story, because they came from the same place (coastal California) in the same time (1968) and from the same vantage (hers). But what was the story?

To figure it out, Didion started adding stones from elsewhere in the quarry: circumstances surrounding the production of the newsstand columns, details from her home life. She included an extract from a psychological evaluation she’d had that summer. (“The Rorschach record is interpreted as describing a personality in process of deterioration with abundant signs of failing defenses.”) She wrote about remembering a line by Ezra Pound on the drive to report at San Francisco State. She threaded these bits with what she called flash cuts, scene changes separated by space breaks; in other words, she started with the craft part—the polished sentences, the tidy magazine page—and built outward, collaging what was already published with what wasn’t, reframing and rejuxtaposing what had been previously pinned in pristine prose. This process of redigesting published craftwork into art is how Didion shaped her nonfiction books for fifty years. It made her farseeing, and a thorny voice about the way public stories were told.

The prickliness of Didion’s project was on my mind as I read her new collection, “ Let Me Tell You What I Mean ” (Knopf). “New” here refers mostly to the state of the binding, because the newest thing that Didion contributed is twenty years old. The foreword, very fruitful, is by Hilton Als . The volume’s keystone is a few “Points West” columns from 1968 which she in some cases had collaged into previous books but which have not been reprinted in their original, stand-alone form until now. In that sense, “Let Me Tell You What I Mean” is less a selected essays than a rejected essays, a director’s un-cut of her older work. Traditionally, this is the sort of collection squeezed out by itchy heirs after an author’s death.

Dog with assault rifle in its mouth startles humans.

Link copied

It’s happy news, then, that the book still offers some familiar pleasures. The earliest columns, from the late sixties, remain crisp and engaging on the page (not a given for late-sixties writing). Other essays, such as a piece on the photographer Robert Mapplethorpe, from 1989, are, if not exactly urgent, nice to have around. Didion stopped publishing new material in 2011, a silence that’s well earned but bittersweet in light of recent events, and “Let Me Tell You What I Mean” is meant to summon the old feelings. Yet the book ends up a study in the limits of Didion’s prose, because its parts, for all their elegance, don’t make a whole. Devoted readers will find the book unrecognizable as a Didion collection in any real sense.

To understand why, it is useful to go back to the summer of 1967, when Didion was writing her report on the hippies—the title essay of “Slouching Towards Bethlehem.” The late-sixties youth movements purported to be about community and coming together, but Didion saw them as a symptom of a shared society unravelling and public communication breaking down. (The title comes from a Yeats poem that begins, “Turning and turning in the widening gyre / The falcon cannot hear the falconer.”) “It was the first time I had dealt directly and flatly with the evidence of atomization,” she later explained. Struggling to describe this dissolution, she decided to express the problem structurally. The hippie essay, written as a series of pruned scenes from the Haight-Ashbury separated by breaks, marked her first true use of flash cuts.

The piece “failed to suggest that I was talking about something more general than a handful of children wearing mandalas on their foreheads,” Didion later wrote. But the concept of atomization, and the collage technique, stuck. When Didion was gathering essays for her first collection, she did something notable with a piece she called “Los Angeles Notebook.” She took one of her “Points West” columns, about the Santa Ana wind, and put a flash cut after it. She lopped off the opening to a critics piece she’d written on books by Helen Gurley Brown and dropped that in, followed by another cut. In this way, she built a new essay from the wholes and bits of old material, tracing out flares of life around Los Angeles in the mid-sixties. They were part of one story, but, crucially, they did not connect.

Didion had spent four years failing to write a novel called “ Play It as It Lays .” What she disliked in the work in progress, about an actress in Los Angeles, was that it smelled of “novel”; everything seemed formed and directed in a way that was untrue to life. In 1969, after reworking the “Los Angeles Notebook” essay, Didion saw how to make the novel work. “Play It as It Lays” (1970) is commonly said to be about anomie, but more specifically it’s about a world in insular pieces, of characters trapped in their Hollywood realms. (Didion envisioned a novel of tight scenes, consumed in a single sitting—a book written as a movie, in other words, and thus caged within the storytelling rhythms of the industry.) The novel’s short chapters, some of them less than a page, change vantage and jump characters among disparate spheres using freeways and white space. “I played and replayed these scenes and others like them, composed them as if for the camera, trying to find some order, a pattern. I found none,” one of her characters says. “Play It as It Lays” was Didion’s first fiction of atomization.

Didion went on to use the collage technique to assemble the long pieces in “The White Album” and the books that followed, reconsidering her own published craftwork and later bringing that scrutiny to texts produced by other people. Where she saw evidence of atomization in American society, she made efforts to push back.

“The only American newspapers that do not leave me in the grip of a profound physical conviction that the oxygen has been cut off from my brain tissue, very probably by an Associated Press wire, are the Wall Street Journal , the Los Angeles Free Press , the Los Angeles Open City , and the East Village Other ,” Didion wrote in a “Points West” column from 1968 which opens the new collection. She likes the alternative press not because it’s good or useful (“I have never read anything I needed to know in an underground paper”) but because it breaks past a communication barrier. These papers assume that the reader “will understand if they talk to him straight; this assumption of a shared language and a common ethic lends their reports a considerable cogency of style.”

Shared language and a common ethic are precisely what Didion had noticed coming apart in the supposedly liberated togetherness of the late sixties. And the problem, in her view, did not fade when the love beads went away. In “ Insider Baseball ,” her influential piece for The New York Review of Books , born of tagging along with the Presidential campaigns of 1988, she argued that the so-called “democratic process” had become unlinked from the people it was supposed to speak to and for:

Access to it is correctly limited to its own professionals, to those who manage policy and those who report on it, to those who run the polls and those who quote them, to those who ask and those who answer the questions on the Sunday shows, to the media consultants, to the columnists, to the issues advisers, to those who give off-the-record breakfasts and to those who attend them; to that handful of insiders who invent, year in and year out, the narrative of public life.

Politics had come to be programming produced for élites, by élites, in a bubble disconnected from others. If this warning seemed eccentric on the eve of electing an institutional Vice-President and, four years later, the Man from Hope, it does not seem so today. The problem Didion first identified in 1967 has been treated as a revelation in recent years.

Her position as a disaffected insider—hanging out with the Doors but crying foul on the Summer of Love, writing for the newsstand but declaiming its idiocy—made her an aggressive contrarian. In fact, her recent canonization notwithstanding, Didion spent most of her career as a magnet for daggers in the letters columns. “Between Joan Didion and me it is still a missed connection,” a reader complained in 1969, responding to a Life column she wrote for a while (abortively, owing to its unpopularity with editors). In The New York Review of Books a decade later: “Evidently where Joan Didion lives problems of love and psyche evaporate in a haze of margaritas by age twenty-one and folks can get down to the real business of living.”

That was in response to a searing broadside against the films of Woody Allen which Didion published in 1979. Allen had recently released “Annie Hall” and “Manhattan,” reaching his peak of appeal among people likely to read essays by Joan Didion in The New York Review of Books . She objected to the films’ urbane-sounding references (“the false and desperate knowingness of the smartest kid in the class”), and she was annoyed by characters’ superficial-seeming efforts to be deep (“They share sodas, and wonder ‘what love is’ ”). In Didion’s view, Allen’s movies were a simpleminded person’s idea of a smart person’s picture. She was needling her readers, naturally, but the objection also shows a lot about her narrative intelligence and about the way she should be read.

If atomization is one of the key concepts in Didion’s work, another is what she came to call “sentimentality”: belief in a story with a preordained shape and an emotional logic. That kind of storytelling was everywhere in America, she thought. And it was insidious, because it allowed destructive ideas to sneak in underneath the petticoats of right-thinking endeavors. One of the columns in the new collection picks apart a meeting of Gamblers Anonymous. What irked Didion was that although the meeting seemed to be about taking responsibility, it actually refracted blame. “I thought that it was simply the predilection of many of the members to dwell upon how ‘powerless’ they were, how buffeted by forces beyond their control,” she wrote. “There was a great deal of talk about miracles, and Higher Presences, and a Power Greater Than Ourselves”—prefab sentimental stories that let gamblers avoid seeing things squarely. Done well, contrarianism is based on the idea that what matters isn’t which team colors you wear but which goal the ball lands in when you kick it. Didion did it well and, as with the hippies , traced how a moment of supposed healing spun toward delusion and drove people farther apart.

Atomization and sentimentality exacerbate each other, after all: you break the bridges of connection across society, and then give each island a fairy tale about its uniqueness. Didion was interested in how that happens. One of her most frequently read essays is a late-sixties account of loving and leaving New York, “Goodbye to All That.” It tends to be remembered as a half-trite paean to a white-collar New York youth, a kind of classed-up precursor to the “ Emily in Paris ” Weltanschauung. Yet the essay’s actual point is astringent. New Yorkers’ mythology about their city’s sophistication and specialness, Didion suggested, was another sentimental narrative. She had found her place in town by embracing that view, but outgrew it in time—“at some point the golden rhythm was broken, and I am not that young any more,” she wrote. And so she moved to Los Angeles, where the grownups live.

This claim for California as a stronghold of urbanity and groundedness was contrary, even petulant. Didion had grown up in Sacramento and began her reporting from California at a moment when the national narrative of the West Coast—what went on there, what it meant—was shaped by editors and emissaries from New York. (That hasn’t changed.) But, where the Eastern press had decided that California stood for futurism, beaches, lush life, and togetherness, Didion insisted on a California of dusty houses, dry inland landscapes, fires and snakes, and social alienation. Like her contemporary the Bay Area poet Robert Hass, she was obsessed with the motions of mind but shy of abstractions; both realized that what is often called “the world of ideas” is vulnerable to tendentious manipulation. And so they pinned their ideas to details of landscape: this realization fixed to this tree, or the sight of the Bevatron at night, that one to a jasmine-covered porch—the Northern California style of intellection. What this meant was that thinking was an experiential process that emerged in movement from place to place—in the flash cuts—and you didn’t need a sentimental narrative in order to give it sense, as you did in New York.

Didion left the city in 1964, but this remained her perception when she returned twenty-four years later:

The insistent sentimentalization of experience . . . is not new in New York. A preference for broad strokes, for the distortion and flattening of character, and for the reduction of events to narrative, has been for well over a hundred years the heart of the way the city presents itself: Lady Liberty, huddled masses, ticker-tape parades, heroes, gutters, bright lights, broken hearts, eight million stories in the naked city; eight million stories and all the same story, each devised to obscure not only the city’s actual tensions of race and class but also, more significantly, the civic and commercial arrangements that rendered those tensions irreconcilable.

Man walks past movie theater called “Neurotoplex” that plays movies about neuroses.

This description of “distortion and flattening,” of reducing life to recognizable story lines, is from “ New York: Sentimental Journeys ,” a study of the Central Park jogger case that Didion wrote, in 1991, for The New York Review of Books . The case—in which a twenty-eight-year-old female banker was brutalized and raped and five youths of color were convicted, and then, decades later, exonerated—became a Rorschach blot, with some people (largely white) seeing a city “systematically ruined, violated, raped by its underclass” and others (largely of color) seeing a city “in which the powerless had been systematically ruined, violated, raped by the powerful.”

Didion saw something else: a city victimized by decades of fatuous thinking and poor planning. New York, she thought, had clung to sentimental narratives about melting pots and special opportunities—“the assurance that the world is knowable, even flat, and New York its center, its motor, its dangerous but vital ‘energy’ ”—to the extent of being blind to the fraying of its civic and economic fibre. In crisis, New Yorkers simply doubled down, appointing heroes or villains in the jogger case, trying to keep the fairy tale aloft. “Sentimental Journeys” was a controversial piece when it appeared, yet it offered a frame for New York’s dramas over the next three decades. Even more important, it insisted on a link between the fate of a society and the way that its stories were told.

What it meant to be a writer—imaginatively and morally—had interested Didion since she spent her teen-age years retyping Hemingway sentences, trying to understand the way they worked. Fifty years later, she wrote about his afterlives in “ Last Words ,” an essay for this magazine condemning the publication of books that Hemingway had deemed incomplete. To edit a dead author’s near-finished work for publication, Didion thought, was to assume that he or she was playing by the usual rules. But it was precisely not working in this consensus realm that made great artists great.

A common criticism of Didion suggests that the peppering of her prose with proper nouns (the Bendel’s black wool challis dress, the Grès perfume) is somehow unserious. (For whatever reason, these complaints usually come from men.) But the correct way to understand this impulse is in the lineage of front writing. As Adam Gopnik has noted in these pages, it is Hemingway who’s forever telling you which wines to enjoy while fighting in Spain, how to take your brasserie coffee—how to make his particular yours. Didion feminized that way of writing, pushing against the postwar idea that women writers were obliged to be either mini Virginia Woolfs, mincing abstractions from the parlor, or Shulamith Firestones, raging for liberation. Part of what Didion took from Hemingway, by her account, was a mind-set of “romantic individualism,” “looking but not joining,” and a commitment to the details that gave distinctiveness and precision to that outside view. A trip to the Royal Hawaiian in the midst of a rocky marriage, the right soap to pack for a reporting trip while your husband stays with the baby: in Didion’s work, these were as important in their hard details as Hemingway’s crabe mexicaine and Sancerre at Prunier. Hemingway mythologized his authorial life style so well that generations of writers longed to live and work his way. Didion saw what he was doing, and appropriated the technique.

Yet what made the modernists daring was sometimes a weak point of their endeavor: the writing doesn’t always let readers know how it wants to be read. Hemingway’s theory was that if you, the writer, could reduce what you saw in your imagination to the igniting gestures and images—don’t elaborate why you feel sad about your marriage ending; just nail the image of the burning farmhouse that launched you on that train of thought—then you could get readers’ minds to make the same turns at the same intersections, and convey the world more immersively than through exposition. He explained his theory rarely and badly (hence the endless rancid chestnuts about lean prose, laconic dialogue, and crossing important things out), but Didion didn’t miss the point. “When I talk about pictures in my mind I am talking, quite specifically, about images that shimmer around the edges. . . . 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,” she noted, in “Why I Write.” And yet she added in signposts Hemingway left out. A first-rate Didion piece explains its terms as it goes, as if the manual were part of the main text. She is perpetually on guard about saying stuff either not clearly enough (the title “Let Me Tell You What I Mean” emerges from her work) or so clearly as to be subject to “distortion and flattening,” and thus untrue to what she means.

“I wanted not a window on the world but the world itself. I wanted everything in the picture” is how she puts it in “Telling Stories,” an essay from 1978 included in the new collection. She is explaining why she lost, or maybe never had, a desire to write salable short stories—tightly constructed pieces hung on a “little epiphany.” For her, the key to capturing life on the page without the usual sort of reduction, she says in the same essay, was figuring out how to use the first person across time.

Didion’s “I” ended up nearly as known as Hemingway’s “and,” and carries the same mixed blessing of being caricatured more than characterized. The caricature has Didion as a histrionic oversharer—a kind of literary Tori Spelling. Yet her reasons for embracing the “I” were mostly technical. You had to let readers know who you were and where your camera stood, she thought. It meant that Didion was always in her own crosshairs, and eventually turned the contrarian impulse on herself.

One of the commonest motifs in Didion’s writing is, bizarrely, Oregon Trail-type survivalism. She had been taught that those who colonized California were “the adventurous, the restless, and the daring.” She had been raised to believe that, as her mother put it, California was now “too regulated, too taxed, too expensive.” In “ Where I Was From ” (2003), she finally put this origin story of heroic, contrary individualism under the glass.

Didion built the book in her usual way, setting down reported articles and weaving in flashes of personal context. What created California economically and politically, she showed, was actually constant support from the East-reaching web of American society, industry, and, especially, the federal government. “The sheer geographical isolation of different parts of the state tended to obscure the elementary fact of its interrelatedness,” she wrote. The refusal to acknowledge this public interrelatedness, to insist on the determining value of the personal, the private, and the exceptional, had been California’s fragmenting delusion, and her own. I suspect that “Where I Was From” is among the least read of Didion’s nonfiction books, which is unfortunate, because it’s her “Gatsby”: the book in which she scrutinized her most basic ideas of heroic particularism and found that she had not escaped “the blinkering effect of the local dreamtime.” That’s a moving thing for a writer to acknowledge, and a hard one. The final sentences of the book are Didion’s suggestion that she’s not quite ready, in her life, to give the sentimental story up.

The intense burst of mythologizing that attended Didion’s books about the deaths of her husband (“The Year of Magical Thinking”) and her daughter (“ Blue Nights ,” from 2011) arrived, then, with a certain weirdness. One can now order something called a “Didion dress,” modelled on her late-sixties wardrobe. Not long ago, in a bookshop, I came across a Picador Modern Classics edition of “Slouching Towards Bethlehem” shrunk down to pocket size, presumably to be carried in the way that certain people carry miniature versions of the Bible or the Constitution. I tried and failed to think of a writer who’d treat such a thing more mercilessly than the author of that book.

An artist who has spent years doing the work on her own terms should not look fashionability in the mouth. But it is odd to find Didion embraced by the world of mainstream sentimental thinking which she charged against for decades. One wonders whether the fans for whom she’s now an Instagram totem, or the many journalists who claim her, realize that she cast her career toward challenging precepts and paragons like theirs.

It matters only because everything matters. Didion once wrote, “Style is character,” and, because the phrase has seemed to apply to her life and work, it often gets quoted to mean that character comes down to nothing more than style. But the line, which appears in an essay about Georgia O’Keeffe, is actually about the burden of creative choice. “Every choice one made alone—every word chosen or rejected, every brush stroke laid or not laid down—betrayed one’s character,” Didion wrote. Reducing the world, as on the canvas or the page, is a process of foreclosing on its fullness, choosing this way and not that one, and how you make those choices reveals everything about the person that you are. Didion praised O’Keeffe for “hardness” in trying to render in art what sensible people told her was unrenderable. “ ‘The men’ believed it was impossible to paint New York, so Georgia O’Keeffe painted New York,” she wrote. She was impressed by O’Keeffe’s snubbing of those who received her work devotedly but unseriously: “This is a woman who in 1939 could advise her admirers that they were missing her point, that their appreciation of her famous flowers was merely sentimental.” And she lauded O’Keeffe’s frank engagement with her time. “She is simply hard, a straight shooter, a woman clean of received wisdom and open to what she sees,” Didion wrote, and she meant it, too. ♦

By signing up, you agree to our User Agreement and Privacy Policy & Cookie Statement . This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.

By Molly Fischer

By Inkoo Kang

Joan Didion’s Magic Trick

What was it that gave her such power?

Illustration of Joan Didion standing on a beach with several large houses on the cliffs behind her

Listen to this article

Listen to more stories on audm

Updated at 5:05 p.m. ET on July 22, 2022.

This article was featured in One Story to Read Today, a newsletter in which our editors recommend a single must-read from The Atlantic , Monday through Friday. Sign up for it here.

“T hink of this as a travel piece,” she might have written. “Imagine it in Sunset magazine: ‘Five Great California Stops Along the Joan Didion Trail.’ ”

Or think of this as what it really is: a road trip of magical thinking.

I had known that Didion’s Parkinson’s was advancing; seven or eight months earlier, someone had told me that she was vanishing; someone else had told me that for the past two years, she hadn’t been able to speak.

Explore the June 2022 Issue

Check out more from this issue and find your next story to read.

I didn’t want her to die. My sense of myself is in many ways wrapped up in the 40 essays in Slouching Towards Bethlehem and The White Album . I don’t know how many times I’ve read Democracy .

“Call me the author,” she writes in that novel. “Let the reader be introduced to Joan Didion.”

There are people who admire Joan Didion, and people who enjoy reading Joan Didion, and people who think Joan Didion is overrated. But then there are the rest of us. People who can’t really explain how those first two collections hit us, or why we can never let them go.

I picked up Slouching Towards Bethlehem in 1975, the year I was 14. I had met Didion that spring, although she wasn’t famous yet, outside of certain small but powerful circles. She’d been a visiting professor in the Berkeley English department, and my father was the department chair. But I didn’t read her until that summer. I was in Ireland, as I always was in the summer, and I was bored out of my mind, as I always was in the summer, and I happened to see a copy of Slouching Towards Bethlehem in a Dublin living room. I read that book and something changed inside me, and it has stayed that way for the rest of my life.

Over the previous two years people kept contacting me with reports of her decline. I didn’t want to hear reports of her decline. I wanted to hear about the high-ceilinged rooms of the Royal Hawaiian Hotel, and about all the people who came to parties at her house on Franklin Avenue. I wanted to go with her to pick out a dress for Linda Kasabian, the Manson girl who drove the getaway car the night of the murders. I wanted to spend my days in the house out in Malibu, where the fever broke.

In 1969, Didion wanted to go to Vietnam, but her editor told her that “the guys are going out,” and she didn’t get to go. When her husband had been at Time and asked to go, he was sent at once, and he later wrote about spending five weeks in the whorehouses of Saigon.

Being denied the trip to Vietnam is the only instance I know of that her work was limited by her gender. She fought against the strictures of the time—and the ridiculous fact of being from California, which in the 1950s was like being from Mars, but with surfboards.

black and white family photo of Joan Didion on a deck at home, smoking and looking at her husband and Quintana Roo

She fought all of that not by changing herself, or by developing some ball-breaking personality. She did it by staying exactly as she was—unsentimental, strong, deeply feminine, and a bit of a seductress—and writing sentence after sentence that cut the great men of New Journalism off at the knees. Those sentences, those first two collections—who could ever compete with them?

Slouching Towards Bethlehem and The White Album created a new vocabulary of essay writing, one whose influence is on display every day of the week in the tide of personal essays published online by young writers. Those collections changed the way many people thought about nonfiction, and even the way they thought about themselves.

A thousand critics have addressed the worthy task of locating the errors of logic in those essays and calling out the various engines that turn the wheels: narcissism, whiteness, wealth. Frustrated by the entire cult of Didion, they’ve tried to crash it down by making a reasonable case against its foundational texts. God knows, none of that is heavy lifting. Joan Didion: guilty as charged.

From the September 2015 issue: The elitist allure of Joan Didion

But what no one has ever located is what makes so many people feel possessive not just of the stories, but also of their connection to the writer. What is it about these essays that takes so many people hostage?

At a certain point in her decline, I was gingerly asked if I would write an obituary. No, I would not. I was not on that particular train. I was on the train of trying to keep her alive.

I wanted to feel close to her—not to the mega-celebrity, very rich, New York Joan Didion. I wanted to feel close to the girl who came from Nowhere, California (have you ever been to Sacramento?), and blasted herself into the center of everything. I wanted to feel close to the young woman who’d gone to Berkeley, and studied with professors I knew, and relied on them—as I had once relied on them—to show her a path.

The thing to do was get in the car and drive. I would go and find her in the places where she’d lived.

The trip began in my own house in Los Angeles, with me doing something that had never occurred to me before: I Googled the phrase Joan Didion’s house Sacramento . Even as I did, I felt that it was a mistake, that something as solid and irrefutable as a particular house on a particular street might put a rent in what she would have called “the enchantment under which I’ve lived my life.” What if it was the wrong kind of house? Too late: A color photograph was already blooming on the screen.

2000 22nd Street is a 5,000-square-foot home in a prosperous neighborhood with a wraparound porch and two staircases . The Didions had moved there when Joan was in 11th grade. It was a beautiful house. But it was the wrong kind of house.

photograph of large 2-story house with porch and enormous old trees on a corner lot

The Joan Didion of my imagination didn’t come from a wealthy family. How did I miss the fact that what her family loved to talk about most was property—specifically, “land, price per acre and C-2 zoning and assessments and freeway access”? Why didn’t I understand the implications of her coming across an aerial photograph of some land her father had once thought of turning into a shopping mall, or of the remark “Later I drive with my father to a ranch he has in the foothills” to talk with “the man who runs his cattle”?

Perhaps because they came after this beautiful line:

When we talk about sale-leasebacks and right-of-way condemnations we are talking in code about things we like best, the yellow fields and the cottonwoods and the rivers rising and falling and the mountain roads closing when the heavy snow comes in.

On my first morning in Sacramento, there was a cold, spitting rain, and my husband drove me to the grand house on 22nd Street , where people are always dropping by asking to look at “Joan Didion’s home.” It was the largest house on the block, and it was on a corner lot. (“ No magical thinking required ,” the headline on Realtor.com had said when it was listed for sale in 2018.)

I stood in the rain looking up at the house, and I realized that something was wrong. She had described going home to her parents’ house to finish each of her first four novels, working in her old bedroom, which was painted carnation pink and where vines covered the window . But it was hard to imagine vines growing over the upstairs windows of this house; they would have had to climb up two very tall stories and occlude the light in the downstairs rooms as well.

Later, I spoke with one of Didion’s relatives, who explained that the family left the house on 22nd Street not long after Joan graduated from high school. The house where she finished her novels, and where she brought her daughter for her first birthday, was in the similarly expensive area of Arden Oaks, but it has been so thoroughly renovated as to be almost unrecognizable to the family members who knew it. In fact, the Didions had owned a series of Sacramento houses. But myths take hold in a powerful and permanent way, and the big house on 22nd Street is the one readers want to see.

The neighborhood was very pretty, and the gardens were well tended. But Joan Didion wasn’t there.

In some ways, Sacramento seemed to me like a Joan Didion theme park. In less time than it takes to walk from Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride to the Pirates of the Caribbean, you could get from the Didions’ house on 22nd Street to a house they had lived in earlier, on U Street.

We drove around looking at places that I had read about almost all my life. Nothing seemed real, and there was almost no sign that Joan Didion had grown up there. If I lived in Sacramento, I would rename the capitol building for her. I would turn a park into the Joan Didion Garden, with wide pathways covered in pea gravel, as in the Tuileries.

I never imagined that I would see the two governor’s mansions she describes in “Many Mansions.” The essay contrasts the old governor’s mansion—a “large white Victorian gothic”—with the new, 12,000-square-foot one that was to be the Reagans’ home, but that was left unfinished after his second term. During this period she loathed the Reagans, but not for political reasons. She hated their taste.

The size of the house was an affront to Didion, as was the fact that it had “no clear view of the river.” But above all, she hated the features built into the mansion, things representative of the new, easy “California living” she abhorred. The house had a wet bar in the formal living room, a “refreshment center” in the “recreation room,” only enough bookcases “for a set of the World Book and some Books of the Month,” and one of those kitchens that seems designed exclusively for microwaving and trash compacting.

She didn’t just hate the house; she feared it: “I have seldom seen a house so evocative of the unspeakable,” she wrote. (This is why some people hate Joan Didion, and I get it. I get it.)

Then there’s the old mansion, which she used to visit “once in a while” during the term of Governor Earl Warren, because she was friends with his daughter Nina. “The old Governor’s Mansion was at that time my favorite house in the world,” she wrote, “and probably still is.”

In the essay, she describes taking a public tour of the old mansion, which was filled with the ghosts of her own past and also the crude realities of the present. The tourists complained about “all those stairs” and “all that wasted space,” and apparently they could not imagine why a bathroom might be big enough to have a chair (“to read a story to a child in the bathtub,” of course) or why the kitchen would have a table with a marble top (to roll out pastry).

It is one of those essays where Didion instructs you on the right kind of taste to have, and I desperately wanted to agree. But in my teenage heart of hearts, I had to admit that I wanted the house with the rec room. I kept this thought to myself.

When my husband and I arrived at the old governor’s mansion, I started laughing. Nobody would want to live there, and certainly nobody in the boundless Googie, car-culture future of 1960s California. (It looked like the Psycho house, but with a fresh coat of paint.) That said, we drove over to the house that was originally built for the Reagans and that the state had since sold, and it was a grim site : It looked like the world’s largest Taco Bell.

The funny thing about all of this is that at the time Didion wrote that essay, Jerry Brown was the governor of California, and he had no intention of living in any kind of mansion. Instead he rented an apartment and slept on a mattress on the floor, sometimes with his girlfriend, Linda Ronstadt. And—like every California woman with a pulse—Didion adored him.

This is Joan Didion’s magic trick: She gets us on the side of “the past” and then reveals that she’s fully a creature of the present. The Reagans’ trash compactor is unspeakable, but Jerry Brown’s mattress is irresistible.

Before we left Sacramento we made a final stop, at C. K. McClatchy Senior High School, Didion’s alma mater. There was one thing I wanted to see: a bronze plaque set into cement at the top of a flight of stairs. I couldn’t believe that it hadn’t been jackhammered out, but there it was.

This building is dedicated to truth liberty toleration by the native sons of the golden west. September 19, 1937

These plaques were once all over the state at different civic institutions, and especially in schools. The Native Sons of the Golden West is a still-extant fraternal organization founded to honor the pioneers and prospectors who arrived in California in the middle of the 19th century. The group’s president proclaimed in 1920 that “California was given by God to a white people.” The organization has since modernized, but you cannot look at the pioneers’ achievements without taking into account the genocide of California’s actual Native peoples. “Clearing the land” was always a settler’s first mission, and it didn’t refer to cutting down trees.

People from the East often say that Joan Didion explained California to them. Essays have described her as the state’s prophet, its bard, its chronicler. But Didion was a chronicler of white California. Her essays are preoccupied with the social distinctions among three waves of white immigration: the pioneers who arrived in the second half of the 19th century; the Okies, who came in the 1930s; and the engineers and businessmen of the postwar aerospace years, who blighted the state with their fast food and their tract housing and their cultural blank slate.

In Slouching Towards Bethlehem , there’s an essay called “Notes From a Native Daughter”—which is how Joan Didion saw herself. It’s generally assumed that she began to grapple with her simplistic view of California histor y only much later in life, in Where I Was From . But in this first collection, she’s beginning to wonder how much of her sense of California is shaped by history or legend— by stories, not necessarily accurate , that are passed down through the generations.

sepia-toned family photo of man in military uniform and woman with curled hair standing behind a young girl in dress and young boy in cuffed jeans, all squinting in bright sunlight

“I remember running a boxer dog of my brother’s over the same flat fields that our great-great-grandfather had found virgin and had planted,” she writes. And she describes swimming in the same rivers her family had swum in for generations: “The Sacramento, so rich with silt that we could barely see our hands a few inches beneath the surface; the American, running clean and fast with melted Sierra snow until July, when it would slow down.”

She’s writing about a feeling of deep rootedness not just to the land but to the generations of her own family who lived on it. But she already knows that it won’t last. “All that is constant about the California of my childhood is the rate at which it disappears,” she writes.

When my husband and I had arrived in town, we’d stopped for a cup of coffee at the McDonald’s at Old Auburn Road and Sunrise Boulevard. You could see how flat the terrain was and how obviously it had once been ranchland. Who had sold that beautiful land to the McDonald’s Corporation? The Didions. Then we went to a clutch of small, unlovely tract houses, and found the street sign I was looking for: Didion Court. The tract houses were there because, according to the author Michelle Chihara , Joan and her family had once again sold a parcel of land.

What happened to the yellow fields and the cottonwoods and the rivers rising and falling? None of my business, I guess.

Sacramento was a bust. I had the feeling that I could stay on the road forever and not understand Joan Didion. But as soon as we got on the freeway, it stopped raining, and after a while there were actual patches of sunshine and dry cement.

In Berkeley, things would begin to look familiar.

I was sitting on the floor of the “television room” in the Tri Delta sorority house on Warring Street in Berkeley. I hadn’t been in a sorority house in 40 years, but it all came back to me: the sleepy, underwater feel of the house at midday; the muffled sounds of a meal being prepared in the kitchen; the constant effort to keep a mild depression from growing; and the endless interest in candies and snacks.

The house was large and attractive, dove gray and—like all sorority houses—fortified. A gate, a locked door, a security camera, and a housemother, busy on the phone. The chapter’s president, Grace Naylor, gave me a tour and we chatted with a few girls sitting in the TV room. There was a wide staircase with a landing, perfect for making a dramatic entrance in a new dress or storming upstairs in a fit of anger. The rooms on one side looked out onto pretty Warring Street; the ones on the other side were filled with the view burned into the retinas of everyone who has ever lived in Berkeley: the beautiful campus and campanile, the flatlands, and beyond them the Golden Gate and the bay, the alluring city on the other side.

Naylor told me that until she’d gotten my email, no one had known that Joan Didion had lived in the house, although several members were fans of her writing. How could they possibly not know that, I wondered, and then was faced with the obvious answer: Didion had lived there 70 years ago.

When we sat down in the television room, I suddenly realized that I didn’t have a single question I could ask. What is it like to live in a sorority house that you recently discovered Joan Didion once lived in? I was at a loss. But Naylor was the chapter president of a top-tier sorority, and she certainly knew how to organize a house visit.

“All our old scrapbooks are in here,” she said, gesturing toward some cupboards, and I glanced at them, suddenly on high alert. Would I like to look through them to see if we could find one from Didion’s years in the house?

I thought two things simultaneously: Eureka! (which is the California state motto) and This is the most exciting thing that has ever happened to me .

The scrapbooks were piled in the cupboards and weren’t necessarily in the best condition—what were the chances of finding one from 70 years ago? They were at once just some old scrapbooks of minor sociological interest, and also a slice of Didion’s life that the other vultures hadn’t yet picked over. Regarding Joan Didion, Tri Delt, I was vulture No. 1.

We started shuffling through the crumbling scrapbooks, and then suddenly the 1954 volume appeared. Because Joan Didion is cool, and because UC Berkeley is cool, many people assume she was in some way part of the revolution. But she arrived at Berkeley a decade too early.

The 1954 scrapbook was a testament to the Tri Delt house being the next right place for a rich girl from Sacramento who had gone to ballet class and Sunday school. It contained a photograph of the winners of a father/daughter look-alike contest, and a press clipping describing “one of the Gayest Parties for the young set,” which had taken place “in the Pebble Beach home of Dr. and Mrs. A. Carol McKenny.” It also contained so many engagement announcements that marriage seemed to be not just one tacit aim of ballet class, Sunday school, and Tri Delt but the entire point.

Toward the end of the scrapbook and with the vague suggestion that even our tiny, troubled Joan Didion had something of her own to look forward to: a Daily Cal clipping announcing that two Berkeley undergrads were headed to New York to take part in the Mademoiselle magazine program. Didion’s selection for the program revealed, if nothing else, that the people who chose the winners had an uncanny ability to spot early talent, all the way from Sylvia Plath in the ’50s to Mona Simpson in the late ’70s. The famous era was the 1950s. Girls from around the country were brought to the city of dreams, housed in the Barbizon Hotel, taught about layouts and martinis, and—should the worst happen—given the names of certain Park Avenue doctors.

Didion’s editorship took place between her junior and senior years of college; when she returned to Berkeley, she moved out of the Tri Delt house and into an apartment. I didn’t have much hope for the little brown-shingled apartment building she had lived in after the Tri Delt house. The house on 22nd Street in Sacramento had been interesting, but cold. The sorority house had presented me with a historically accurate picture, but a remote one.

Yet I pulled open the wooden gate of 2520 Ridge Road and stepped into a little garden that was shaded and filled with dark-green plants—and just like that, her living ghost rushed past me. She lingered for a few moments, and then she left, stepping into the vivid past, wearing her dirty raincoat and heading to the seminar that most freighted and engaged her: the writing class of the great Mark Schorer, whom I knew very well when I was growing up. He was a very kind person and also a peerless literary critic, and he found in Didion’s early work evidence not just of a great writer. “One thinks of the great performers —in ballet, opera, circuses,” he said. “Miss Didion, it seems to me, is blessed with everything.”

And then Berkeley was over, and she headed back to New York because she had won the really big prize in the world of women’s magazines: the Prix de Paris at Vogue , which led to a job at the magazine. This was a marker of being the right kind of young woman—of having the right family, or the right schools, or the right wardrobe—in New York in the glamorous 1950s.

It had begun.

Joan Didion’s greatest essay is “Goodbye to All That.” It’s about the excitement and intoxication of being young in New York, from the moment she got off the plane “and some instinct, programmed by all the movies I had ever seen and all the songs I had ever heard sung and all the stories I had ever read about New York, informed me that it would never be quite the same again. In fact it never was.”

She had “come out of the West and reached the mirage,” and the epigraph to the essay is part of an old nursery rhyme:

How many miles to Babylon? Three score miles and ten— Can I get there by candlelight? Yes, and back again.

For years it was known as the greatest leaving–New York essay of all time. It’s about the revolving door, the way you can arrive there young, innocent, and new, but the very process of adapting to the city will coarsen and age you.

In 1996, a writer for New York magazine revealed something that had been carefully protected from the press, and that gives the essay a completely different meaning: What’s tearing her apart is a love affair that has ended with a man named Noel Parmentel. With that reading, you understand the essay’s insistently romantic tones: She can no longer bear to look at blue-and-white-striped sheets, to smell certain perfumes or Henri Bendel jasmine soap. “I cut myself off from the one person who was closer to me than any other,” she wrote.

Soon after coming to the city, she had fallen for Parmentel, a figure on the New York literary scene. A southerner who attended several parties a night, Parmentel was famous for getting drunk, insulting hostesses and guests, and letting loose with ethnic slurs. The heart wants what it wants.

Read: The things I would never do

In 2014, Parmentel agreed to be interviewed about the relationship by Tracy Daugherty, who wrote the indispensable biography of Didion, The Last Love Song . “She was better than all of them,” Parmentel said of the Vogue editors. “Far above those people in every way.” A lot of her colleagues at Vogue were jealous of her, he said: “This little nobody from Sacramento shows up in her little dresses and outshines them all. She’s smarter. Mannered. Better-bred.”

He helped her sell her first novel, which was in part dedicated to him, and which has an epigraph from the Robert Lowell poem “Man and Wife.” He would call her service and leave long messages; he would insult her, forget about her, reappear—but he wouldn’t marry her.

“This is the guy you ought to marry,” he famously told her about his mentee John Gregory Dunne. And—after visiting Dunne’s family home and noting the orderliness of its routines and the impeccable way that his mother kept house—she did.

The marriage “was a very good thing to do but badly timed,” Didion wrote. She was emotionally devastated, she didn’t know what to do with herself, and one night she and John ended up getting ferociously drunk at a party. They went to a diner for breakfast, and she cried. Later that day, he called her from his office at Time and asked her, “Do you mind if I quit?” She said no, and soon they were in California for a six-month trial that lasted 24 years.

image of a contact sheet of black and white photos of Didion with a Corvette, with two photos outlined in red grease pencil

Franklin Avenue

How many miles to Babylon? One and a half, as it turned out, but I didn’t know it yet.

I moved to Los Angeles in 1988 with a new job, a first husband, my Joan Didion books, and the gray-and-pink jersey dress I’d worn to my rehearsal dinner. Every day I drove through Hollywood on my way to the Valley, and I’d cross Franklin and think to myself, That must be the same Franklin Avenue that Joan Didion lived on .

I never went looking for the house, because Didion had explained in The White Album that it had been slated for demolition: “The owners were only waiting for a zoning change to tear the house down and build a high-rise apartment building.”

Once, it had been the most happening place in a certain world, the absolute crossroads of thrilling, louche Hollywood and the crackling world of ideas that were pouring in from the East.

Franklin Avenue Joan Didion is the one we all fell in love with. In that house she became the woman who walked barefoot on hardwood floors and onto airplanes, and went to the supermarket wearing a bikini. She’s the reason so many readers misunderstood the obvious fact of her conservatism—because she was cool. (How conservative? Throughout the ’60s she was famous for telling Hollywood friends that if she could she would vote for Barry Goldwater over and over again.)

She’s the one who paid the babysitter who told her she had death in her aura, then opened the French doors and went to sleep in the dark of a “senseless-killing neighborhood.” This is the Joan Didion who invented Los Angeles in the ’60s as an expression of paranoia, danger, drugs, and the movie business. The Joan Didion who took amphetamines to work and bourbon to relax, the tiny girl who was entirely in command of the helpless ardor she inspired.

The parties. How to account for what a huge hit the couple were almost as soon as they got to Hollywood? And also, how to account for Joan Didion, one of the century’s greatest prose stylists, doing all of that cooking, while being pestered by Nora Ephron for her Mexican-chicken recipe, keeping in mind the eccentric drinks orders of various rock-and-roll people (brandy and Benedictine for Janis Joplin), and clearing the drug takers from the landing outside her daughter’s bedroom?

Read: We sell ourselves stories in order to live

Those parties were something to see. But in 1979, Didion published The White Album and revealed that this period had been the hardest time in her life. In the opening pages of that collection, she reproduces part of her psychiatrist’s report, which caused a sensation; it was an advertisement for whichever idea you had of Joan Didion, either that she was bravely exposing what others might work hard to conceal, or that she was an exhibitionist.

In the report, she is said to have an “increasing inability of the ego to mediate the world of reality and to cope with normal stress,” and a “fundamentally pessimistic, fatalistic, and depressive view of the world around her. It is as though she feels deeply that all human effort is foredoomed to failure.” She is, the report reveals, being pushed “further into a dependent, passive withdrawal.”

Didion writes that things she had been taught all her life no longer seemed to apply, that the script for how she had been raised to lead her life was never meant to be improvised on. “It was hard to even get my attention,” she says; her mind was on other things.

It was also in this place—and in this heavy weather—that she raised her only child, Quintana, from infancy through age 5. The couple had adopted the little girl a few days after her birth at Saint John’s Hospital in Santa Monica, and she appears throughout these essays as a dream, a perfect child, almost as an abstraction. Her name alone—Quintana Roo, the name of a Mexican state—seemed to me, at 14, the perfect name for a baby: unique, mysterious, feminine. The kind of name a girl would give to a doll.

What really happened during those years? There is no reason, now, not to ask.

“We are here on this island in the middle of the Pacific in lieu of filing for divorce.”

Everyone who loves Joan Didion remembers that sentence—the shock of it, the need to race back up to the top of the essay to see if you’d missed something. “I had better tell you where I am, and why,” that essay, “In the Islands,” begins. She’s at the Royal Hawaiian Hotel in a high-ceilinged room, the trade winds making the long, translucent curtains billow. She’s with her husband and 3-year-old Quintana, “blond and barefoot, a child of paradise in a frangipani lei.”

But Didion hasn’t gone to Honolulu merely for the flowers or the trade winds. She is there “trying to put my life back together.”

When I first read The White Album , I was in my bedroom in my parents’ house and it was the deep middle of the night, and there it was, this flaming arrow. What could I do? Reach for my cellphone and type Did Joan Didion get divorced? There were no cellphones then. Reading, in those days, was just you and the writer, and all she had to reel you in with was a line of words. When I fell in love with Joan Didion, it was just the two of us and all of those electric sentences, and that was enough.

Everyone remembers that line about divorce, but no one seems to remember a different and perhaps more consequential line that appears later. She reports that during that week in Honolulu, husband and wife were considerate of each other, and no mention was made of “kicked-down doors, hospitalized psychotics, any chronic anxieties or packed suitcases.”

Kicked-down doors?

We all know about the famous and in many ways marvelous (in the sense of the miraculous, the supernatural) marriage of Joan Didion and John Gregory Dunne. We know about it from The Year of Magical Thinking and from countless interviews and profiles and perhaps from personal experience. We know that their lives and writing careers were so deeply intertwined that they were rarely apart. They kept to a daily schedule that was like a dream writing life, each writing in the morning, then breaking for lunch; each returning to work until the early evening, when they had drinks and dinner together. If Joan went to get her teeth cleaned, John read the newspapers in the waiting room.

Dunne was fantastic company; he loved gossip and he always had A-plus intel. Calvin Trillin wrote a novel, Floater , in which a character is based on Dunne. When they both worked at Time , Dunne was forever coming into Trillin’s office, dramatically holding up his hand, and saying, “ This you will not believe.” The Didion-Dunnes’ marriage was one long conversation between two writers completely in sync about their beliefs on writing and always interested in what the other had to say.

But Dunne also had a legendary and vicious temper, and he was an incredibly mean drunk. Even his pals reported as much, because it would be impossible to assess the man without admitting to these central facts of his nature. They had read about the kicked-down doors, and many who were close to the couple had witnessed more examples of his rage.

Susanna Moore, who was the couple’s close friend and lived with them for a while on Franklin Avenue, writes in her memoir, Miss Aluminum , that there was “love between them, and respect.” But she adds that Joan “was also afraid of him, given the violence of his temper.”

Moore recounts a time when she was out to dinner with the couple, and she mentioned a bit of gossip she’d heard: There was talk in town that Jann Wenner was gay. Dunne exploded in rage, and took after her in such a manner that he had to excuse himself from the table. As he walked away, Moore started to get out of her chair. “Joan grabbed my arm and begged me to stay, making me promise that I would not leave her alone with him.”

There weren’t words in those days for how a man’s rage could shape the life of a woman who lived with him, but we have one now: abuse .

Didion never spoke openly about Dunne’s rage until near the end of her life. In 2017 her nephew, Griffin Dunne, made a documentary about his aunt, The Center Will Not Hold , which is full of photographs and family memories. As far as I know, the interviews she gave him are, poignantly, her last statements to the public.

At one point, she’s talking about marrying Dunne and the idea of falling in love, and she almost flinches. “I don’t know what falling in love means. It’s not part of my world.”

Later, she adds: “He had a temper. A horrible temper.”

What would set him off? Griffin asks.

“Everything would set him off.”

Someone recently told me that the house on Franklin was, in fact, still there—and when I thought about it, I remembered that at the very end of the street, the apartments give way to rambling 1920s houses. That’s where she lived.

I drove west on Franklin until I got to Camino Palmero, where the zoning changes. I parked down the street from the house, realizing I’d been walking right past it for 30 years. With each step closer, I felt more emotional. And there it was, in better shape than when Didion had lived in it, the cracked front path now covered in smooth pavement, the house freshly painted white, the lawn in perfect condition. It’s a healing center now, for a new-age spiritual group.

I stood looking at it as though I had found the way to Manderley, as though it were possible to take something out of the dream of reading and into the bricks and mortar of the other thing. Life. The tall French doors looked into the living room where there had been so many parties, the doors Joan had opened before going to sleep.

The house on Franklin was the only one that brought tears to my eyes. But of course they were tears for myself, not her. When she was in New York, there was a song on all the jukeboxes: “But where is the schoolgirl who used to be me?”

Gone, gone, gone.

When Joan Didion was living in Malibu, she learned that in one of the canyons there was a nursery that grew only orchids, and she began to visit it. Even as a child she had loved greenhouses; once she was informed that the purchase of a five-cent pansy did not entitle her to “spend the day.”

The orchid nursery was owned by the Hollywood producer Arthur Freed and his brother Hugo, but it was in the care of Amado Vazquez, a gentle and courtly person, transmitting, “in his every movement, a kind of ‘different’ propriety, a correctness, a cultural reserve.” She spent hours in those greenhouses filled with “the most aqueous filtered light, the softest tropical air, the most silent clouds of flowers.” Vazquez seemed to assume she had her own reasons for being there, and he would speak only to offer her “a nut he had just cracked, or a flower cut from a plant he was pruning.”

This was before orchids were widely cloned, imported by the millions, and sold in Walmart and Trader Joe’s. This was when orchids were rare, expensive, often propagated by hand . And, as Didion eventually realized, Vazquez was “one of a handful of truly great orchid breeders in the world.”

Didion learned how to read the labels of the hybrids he was growing, two orchids cross-pollinated and resulting—with luck, and after four years—in a new variety: Amabilis x Rimestadiana = Elisabethae . Eventually, she learned that the orchids there were worth “ten thousand to more than three-quarters of a million dollars,” and occasionally she would watch “serious men in dark suits” come to talk with Hugo, their voices hushed, “as if they had come to inspect medieval enamels, or uncut diamonds.”

The passage about the nursery comprises some of the final pages of The White Album , and I have thought about it so many times. From the tumult of Slouching Towards Bethlehem and the near divorce to the danger of living in the “senseless-killing neighborhood” in a rented house slated for destruction—after all of that, she wants us to know, she had gotten to safety.

After seven years in Malibu, and very much against her own desires, she and Dunne moved to Brentwood—carefully groomed, hugely expensive, and with easy access to the best private schools—which was the beginning of the end of my great interest in her.

But in Malibu there was the house, and the crashing ocean, and Quintana was a little girl in elementary school, whose troubles had yet to emerge. Of all the things receding from Didion, Quintana was always the most urgent. Didion wrote two novels— A Book of Common Prayer and Democracy —about a daughter leaving her mother.

A few months after Didion and her family moved away, the notorious Agoura-Malibu firestorm roared through the canyons. Birds exploded in midair; more than 200 houses were destroyed; people waited on the beach to be rescued, because nowhere else was safe.

Shortly before the fire, Amado Vazquez had saved enough money to buy out the Freed brothers, and now the greenhouses were destroyed. He and Didion stood in the ruins, almost in tears. Years of his work destroyed, a fortune in stud plants.

One winter day, my husband and I made good time up the Pacific Coast Highway to Joan’s house. It had 132 private stairs down to the beach, and a long driveway. From the street, all you could see was the house number, 33428, on a simple, weathered sign. It wasn’t the kind of sign you associate with Malibu; it was the kind you associate with Stinson Beach or any of the other Northern California beaches where underplaying your hand is the thing to do, and putting your house number on a piece of driftwood nailed to the fence is the right way to do it. The setting was perfect. But the old house that she loved so much was gone, replaced with the modern one that’s there now.

The Didion-Dunnes would sometimes drive over the Ventura County line to eat fried fish. We did the same, eating in the huge open-air dining room at Neptune’s Net—established in 1956—and feeling very cheerful. That’s the thing about marriage: You can go for two whole weeks thinking, That’s it, we’ve gotten to the very bottom of things to talk about , but then you go for a drive on a sunny day and there you are, same as you ever were.

I hadn’t looked up the house on Franklin Avenue, because I thought it had been destroyed, and I had never looked up Vazquez’s nursery, because how could he have ever rebuilt it? But a few days before heading up the coast, I looked up the name— Zuma Orchids —and found it, about a mile up Zuma Canyon from the beach.

When I was young, I was so troubled for so long. My mind would rage beyond my control, and many times I would think of those trembling clouds of blossoms and that soft tropical air and wish I could go there, and now here I was, driving down a canyon road, all but deserted—and there it was.

I almost wanted to turn around. I realized—perhaps the lesson of the whole excursion—that I didn’t want these places to be real, because they lived so vividly in my mind. But I stepped through the greenhouse door and landed in Oz: more color and beauty than I could take in. An extremely kind man—Oliverio Alvarado—chatted with us. He had worked with Vazquez, who had died about a decade ago, and he welcomed us to look at the flowers. There were some of the common moth orchids, but there were other orchids, some so delicate and unusual that they lifted the flowers entirely out of the realm of Walmart and Trader Joe’s and once again elevated them to something precious and rare.

My husband picked out a few plants, and I worried that they would cost $10,000, but they didn’t. They were beautiful orchids, not stud plants. At one point Alvarado asked us how we had heard of the nursery—he must have seen something of the reverence I had for the plants, my sense of wonder.

I said that I had read about the nursery in a book by Joan Didion.

“Oh yes,” he said, brightening. “Amado made a hybrid for her.”

For a moment everyone was alive—Amado and also Joan and John and Quintana. But they’re all gone, of course. The difficult husband she adored, the difficult daughter she shaped her life around, and then Joan herself.

When I looked for the Joan Didion orchid, I couldn’t find it. But then I realized that I’d been looking for the wrong name.

Phal. James McPherson x Phal. Stuartiana = Phalaenopsis Quintana Roo Dunne

“When John Wayne rode through my childhood, and perhaps through yours,” Joan Didion wrote in Slouching Towards Bethlehem , “he determined forever the shape of certain of our dreams.”

The only John Wayne movie I’ve ever seen all the way through is The Searchers . But when Didion walked through the front door of my parents’ house when I was 14 years old, that’s what she did for me. She was a hot stock rising and I was a young girl falling, and she broke my fall.

From the January/February 2012 issue: Caitlin Flanagan on the autumn of Joan Didion

She was in Berkeley as a Regents’ Lecturer, and because my father was then the chair of the English department, he was sort of serving as her host. She came to our house for dinner, and she hardly said a word. But a week or so later, when my father said, “There’s something weird going on with Joan Didion and women,” that got my attention . Apparently, her office hours—usually the most monastic of an academic’s life—were being mobbed. Not just by students; by women from the Bay Area who had heard she was there and just wanted to see her. All of these women felt that Slouching Towards Bethlehem had changed them.

It wasn’t a book that was supposed to change anyone. Not only because that was by no means Joan Didion’s intent, but also because—look at the subjects. How can an essay about Alcatraz (as an attractive, mostly deserted place, not as a statement on either incarceration or the land theft perpetrated against California’s Indian tribes); an essay about a baby’s first birthday party; a forensic investigation of the marital tensions that led Lucille Miller to kill her husband—how can all of those add up to something life-changing?

Because in 1968, here was a book that said that even a troubled woman, or a heartbroken woman, or a frightened woman could be a very powerful person. In “Why I Write”—which was, in fact, the Regents’ Lecture—she famously described writing as an act of aggression , in which a writer takes control of a reader and imposes her own opinions, beliefs, and attitudes on that reader. A woman could be a hostage-taker, and what she held you hostage to were both shocking public events and some of the most interior and delicate thoughts a woman can have. This woman with the vanda orchid in her hair and her frequent states of incapacitation could put almost anyone under her power.

I had no power growing up, but I did have books and ideas, and I could be funny. I know I could have ended up being a magazine writer without ever having that chance experience. But what Joan Didion taught me was that it didn’t matter that I had such a messy, unenviable life—I could sit down, all alone, and write enough drafts to figure out what I thought about something and then punch it out into the culture.

Two years after her lecture, Mark Schorer died, and the year after that, my parents sold the house we lived in on Bret Harte Road. For reasons I don’t know, the current owner has allowed the house to return to nature. My mother’s flower beds are gone, and the lemon and lime trees, and the two glazed ceramic pots on either side of the front door that were always filled with flowers. Over the years, it’s been returning to the ground at the same rate I seem to be. When I was in Berkeley this fall, I only slowed down when I drove past it, because everyone was inside—Mark and my parents and so many of the professors who were in many ways my own professors. The only people who weren’t in there were my sister and me. The Flanagan girls—somehow the point of the whole thing.

I didn’t cry the day in December I learned Joan Didion had died , because I’d been told by so many people that it was going to happen soon. But I realized that in some part of my mind, I thought she’d pull it off, that she’d show illness and death a thing or two.

Read: Joan Didion was our bard of disenchantment

A couple of months later, during one of my endless Google searches, I came across one of those companies that track down addresses and phone numbers and public records. “We found Joan Didion!” it said, and offered to provide access to her cellphone number, address, email, and even “more!”

And for some reason, that was when I finally cut my losses.

I hadn’t gone looking for the actual Joan Didion or your Joan Didion or even “the reader’s” Joan Didion. I went looking for the Joan Didion who was partly a historical figure, and partly a great writer, and partly a fiction of my own design. And she lives right where she always has.

This article appears in the June 2022 print edition with the headline “Chasing Joan Didion.” It has been updated to reflect that New York magazine was the first publication to name and interview Noel Parmentel about his romantic relationship with Didion. The New York Times had previously reported that Didion was in a relationship in New York, but did not name Parmentel.

When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

To revisit this article, visit My Profile, then View saved stories .

When It Was Magic Time in New Jersey

By Joan Didion

Image may contain John Gregory Dunne Joan Didion Book Publication Indoors Library Face Head Person and Photography

Blessed with the gift for banter of a Calvin Coolidge and the conviviality of an Increase Mather, I am not what you would call a Television Natural. Although I once met a man on a plane who asked me what my line was, the man was not John Daly; none of my secrets would interest Garry Moore. And as for The Price Is Right , I not only have no idea what a fully-equipped Thunderbird costs, no idea what a fully-equipped pine-paneled snack bar costs, but in fact have some difficulty remembering, from paycheck to paycheck, what I cost.

Nonetheless, I once had my hour, however inadvertent, as a Television Personality: it wasn't "21" and it wasn't "64," but there I was, seen by the cognoscenti (all those acquaintances who could be alerted by telephone) for three consecutive nights on WNTA-TV, the New York channel which first gave the world not only me but Open End and Play of the Week.

As television careers go, mine began in relative ignorance (it ended, as things worked out, in much the same way) with a chance remark at a party that I was good at crossword puzzles. Since my bolt is in truth shot once I have hit upon the three-letter word meaning Japanese Sash, this was at best an overstatement of the facts, but it had been simply a case of wanting to seem agreeable: someone had said he liked to work crossword puzzles; did I?

Thirteen hours later, when I was called to account by an appeal to stand by as a contestant on what my informant called "some crossword show in Newark," I felt somewhat less agreeable. Uncomfortably, I could recall insisting, with a silvery laugh, that I was a perfect fiend for crossword puzzles, couldn't get enough of crossword puzzles; could remember suggesting in fact that we hunt up the crossword in that morning's New York Times.

At any rate, I assured myself that whatever Some Crossword Show In Newark involved, it could not be as disastrous as the time I had so convinced someone of my craze for dancing that he entered me in a dance contest at Small's Paradise in Harlem; nor could it be as bad as the morning I found myself, suffering from both vertigo and the recollection that I had only a week before declared my mania for skiing, on the chair lift at Squaw Valley.

Met Gala 2024 Red Carpet Looks: See Every Celebrity Outfit and Dress from Last Night

By Irene Kim

The Best Dressed Stars From the 2024 Met Gala

By Christian Allaire

At six-thirty that afternoon, I walked into a darkened Newark studio where Some Crossword Show was to begin at seven. (I appeared on the program two nights before I was certain of its name, Double Cross , partly because it seemed too late in the game to ask its name and partly because the pretty little girl who ran things referred to it as "Magic Time." I was pretty much in the dark as to whether "Magic Time" was some bit of televisiana in current usage among the In-group or simply the name of the program; her vox angelica delivery suggested the first hypothesis, but the sheer frequency of delivery lent considerable credence to the latter.)

I had been accompanied to Newark that night by the very acquaintance toward whom my modest claim had been directed; we were to be, he announced with misguided confidence, partners. Not long after he had remarked cheerfully that with any luck we would get our chance tonight and not long after I had stumbled on a cable, run my stocking, and burst into tears while attempting to reply in kind, we were apprehended by a young woman in a dirndl and flat-heeled shoes whose function in the operation never did become clear; my first thought was that she was scheduled to do her impression of a field-hockey captain from Wellesley, but we were never to know because she never appeared again. Assuring us that "the others" (Wellesley girls? Crossword fiends?) would arrive " toute suite , angels," she loped off, pausing only to add heartily: "You'll recognize Allyn Edwards, natch."

She was wrong there, but before long a man showed up who so clearly assumed that he had been recognized that I assumed he was Allyn Edwards, whoever Allyn Edwards was. (He was, in fact, the quizmaster.) For several minutes the three of us exchanged portentous simpers, and after five minutes we even exchanged a few words: I had an ashtray, and he wanted it.

Next in was the pretty little girl who wanted to know if we were ready for Magic Time. She wanted to be called "Mary Ann," and there was an interlude of deceptive merriment before she produced a clipboard so large that it might have held all the cues for fifty-two weeks of the Como show, frowned prettily, and asked me, in so many words, what made me interesting. "You know," she prompted. "Outside-interest-wise."

It was soon clear that nothing did, Mary-Ann-wise. Although she brightened when my partner said he had gone to Harvard ("We once had another very bright contestant; not only was he a graduate of Harvard," and here she paused meaningfully, "but he also worked for BBDO."), I could offer no such gimmick. With the delicate deliberation of a huntress hot on the track of the biggest game of all, Mary Ann asked then if the two of us were "friends." When we denied this canard, she abandoned her clipboard in perceptible disgust.

It was about this time when I first asked Mary Ann how to play the game. (So far were we from having the answers that we did not even have the rules.)

"It couldn't be simpler," she said suspiciously. "There's nothing to it."

My partner assured her that we would doubtless catch on, but would, nonetheless, appreciate some sketchy information.

Mary Ann glanced furtively at her watch and began edging toward the set. "You arrived late, you know." "The game," I repeated. "What is it."

"You've certainly watched it," she said, with an air of settling the question for once and all. Although we denied it, there was no convincing Mary Ann, who was by then conveying the distinct impression that she would, if pressed further, take the Fifth. She handed me a folding chair, put one finger to her lips (it was Magic Time), and we spent the next fifteen minutes watching the Champions (an affable army sergeant and a radio and television performer, equally affable, named John Reed King) down the Challengers, on grounds which eluded me. I decided that it had perhaps been an affability contest.

It was fortunate that my partner employed those fifteen minutes more constructively, because before you could have said Here's-Barbara-Britton-for-Revlon (unhappily for Double Cross , you couldn't have), there we were, introduced to Greater New York as a couple of advertising copywriters, a biographical note which was in my case inaccurate. Before I could stall for time by correcting it, however, we had plunged on into the game, whatever the game was. Representing, spuriously or no, the great wordplay tradition of Bruce Barton and Raymond Rubicam, I glanced at the monitor, watched myself smirk fatuously, and failed to identify a five-letter word meaning Huckster.

Nonetheless, the half-hour ended in a dead heat. Promising to appear the next night, we learned that the fun had just begun: part of the package was a dinner for the contestants at the Essex House in Newark.

The New York Times once called WNTA-TV a "three-ring circus." I don't know about that, but this was a three-ring dinner. At the head of the table, Mary Ann mourned For Love or Money , a network quiz which had at one time carried a peculiar merry sadism out across America: F or Love or Money contestants were offered a choice between merchandise in the hand and an undisclosed amount of money in the bush, and the entertainment lay in watching their greed trip them up. For Love or Money was a table topic of greater interest than you might think, because John Reed King, one of the evening's Champions, had been its master of ceremonies. Mary Ann twinkled mischievously as she described Mr. King's way of telling contestants that they had passed up the combination-refrigerator-freezer-and-spin-drier for three cents cash. Unfortunately both for Mr. King and for Mary Ann, who had worked on the show, CBS dropped For Love or Money late one Friday afternoon while Mary Ann was alone in the office working (quite superfluously, as the situation developed) on the Monday show. Mary Ann became gamer and gamer during this recital: That's Show Biz , as I feel certain she would have been the first to say had not the affable sergeant beaten her to it.

It seemed that the sergeant was in show business himself, kind of, in a manner of speaking; he made training films for the Strategic Air Command. Although he was, every time I turned his way, panning in over Great Falls, Montana, the sergeant was no man to drop all his eggs over Great Falls. He had recently completed, he told me, a novella . "I mean a short novel," he explained. "A fictional work."

Apparently on a theory that we might all improve our dispositions at dinner and emerge, at Magic Time, as veritable Tic-Tac-Dough contestants, we were asked to dinner, the next night, before the program. We had that night a new pair of nonplussed standbys, both of whom worked for the same paper company and neither of whom could persuade anyone to explain the rules. Vis-à-vis their bewilderment, the sergeant's geniality, and Mary Ann's determination, even I was touched by an uneasy camaraderie.

Although the central principle of the game still eluded me, I was pronounced a Champion that night, apparently because my partner rang a bell and announced that the double answer to what was called "the double cross clue," both make good catches , could be nothing but Yogi Berra and June Bride. How he arrived at this answer gnaws at my imagination still, but Mary Ann and I both counted him a credit to Harvard. Wondering expansively if together we might not crack prime network time, I managed to get off, ad lib, a mild witticism: "Good for you, Bob," I said, and Mr. Edwards smiled approvingly. I parlayed that coup by smiling proudly at what I thought was the studio audience, and my elation was dampened not at all by the discovery that the scattered applause at our success had originated in a drove of duck-tailed gnomes snapping their fingers and dripping pizza around the set, hangers-on from the preceding program, Hy Lit's Teenage Dance Party.

Our moment of glory was, however, short-lived: on the following night those paper salesmen proved astute enough to figure out that the new double cross clue, ways to go, meant Airship and Dogsled . When I confided that I had been thinking more along the lines of High Road and Low Road , my partner comforted me by declaring that I had an extremely poetic turn of mind and could scarcely have been expected to notice that High Road and Low Road did not have exactly the same number of letters as there were spaces.

Combined, our winnings for the three nights totalled two pen-and-pencil sets, two bottles of "L'Aimant" Eau de Cologne, and two books by Bergen Evans; prizes which, in retrospect, more or less guaranteed that the fix had not been in. Although Mr. Edwards seemed to think that we had won two transistor radios as well, Mary Ann motioned no. I began to think that Mr. Edwards understood the rules about as well as I did, or possibly that Mary Ann made them up as the game progressed. There was about the entire program, as far as that went, something hauntingly suggestive of Tonight We Improvise.

Double Cross did gain me the interest and concern of all my friends, if not of the Internal Revenue. I received midnight calls from five acquaintances, three of whom wanted me to know that I could get better prizes and 3 ¼% besides by depositing $25 in the New York Savings Bank. (I countered with the fact that the New York Savings Bank would not transport me to and from Newark in a Carey Cadillac, as Double Cross would and did. As one of them conceded, "Sweetie, you got interests in Newark, this is strictly the deal.")

A sixth friend, after trying three bars, all tuned in on Men of Annapolis , caught my act right in the NTA offices in the Coliseum Building. He was first stopped at the door by a man (reportedly wearing a George Raft suit and a J. Press tie) who said they didn't have any television sets at NTA. Pressed, he allowed finally that NTA did, after all, have a set; had, in fact, two sets, and before long my friend was helping me on from a cobbler's bench arranged tastefully in front of one of them. When his disgust with my performance became audible, he was brought up short by the gentleman in the George Raft suit, who banged the cobbler's bench, delighted. "We hooked you," he crooned. "When you start talkin' back to the set, sweetheart, we got you hooked."

Nonetheless, my fan had the Double Cross monkey off his back before he was even downstairs, and can offer no more leads than I can as to what became of Double Cross . All America knows what happened to the fast guns: to the boys who shot it out way out there where the ratings began, to the women who stood beside them. But what of Mr. Edwards? What of Mary Ann? Whither the magic that was in Newark?

The Definitive Voice of Entertainment News

Subscribe for full access to The Hollywood Reporter

site categories

Joan didion, screenwriter and iconic american author, dies at 87.

She and her late husband, John Gregory Dunne, wrote 'The Panic in Needle Park' and 'True Confessions,' and she adapted her grief-filled novel 'The Year of Magical Thinking' for Broadway.

By Cheryl Cheng

Cheryl Cheng

Share this article on Facebook
Share this article on Twitter
Share this article on Flipboard
Share this article on Email
Show additional share options
Share this article on Linkedin
Share this article on Pinit
Share this article on Reddit
Share this article on Tumblr
Share this article on Whatsapp
Share this article on Print
Share this article on Comment

Joan Didion, the intensely personal journalist and author who teamed with her late husband John Gregory Dunne to write the screenplays for such films as The Panic in Needle Park and True Confessions , has died. She was 87.

Didion, whose best-selling masterpiece The Year of Magical Thinking documented her struggle to cope with the sudden 2003 death of Dunne and was adapted as a one-woman Broadway play, died Thursday at her home in New York due to complications from Parkinson’s, Didion’s publisher, Knopf, told The Hollywood Reporter.

The Year of Magical Thinking won the National Book Award and was a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize, sold in excess of a million copies and spent more than 24 weeks on The New York Times bestseller list.

“People would stop me in airports and tell me what it had done for them,” she said in a 2011 interview with New York magazine.

“Nothing I read about grief seemed to exactly express the craziness of it, which was the interesting aspect of it to me — how really tenuous our sanity is.”

Didion wrote The Year of Magical Thinking in 88 days, deciding to “write it fast so it would be raw, because I had the feeling that was the texture it ought to have.”

She added: “I found it amazingly easy to write. It was like sitting down and crying. I didn’t even have the sense that I was writing it. I’m usually very conscious of the rhythm of sentences and how that’s working. I didn’t even give that any thought.”

THR Newsletters

More from The Hollywood Reporter

Ron howard, joe russo, john carpenter and more pay tribute to roger corman: “profound loss to cinema”, cannes workers turn pre-fest meet into strike rally, box office: ‘kingdom of the planet of the apes’ shows heat with $56.5m u.s. opening, $129m globally, susan backlinie, the first victim of the shark in ‘jaws,’ dies at 77 , roger corman, giant of independent filmmaking, dies at 98, john krasinski on getting bradley cooper, george clooney, ryan reynolds to join ‘if’: “most yeses of my career”.

International edition
Australia edition
Europe edition

‘The role of the novelist is to imagine’: Rebecca F Kuang photographed in Boston, Massachusetts

Rebecca F Kuang: ‘I like to write to my friends in the style of Joan Didion’

The author of bestseller Yellowface on her agent’s fears about publishing the novel, the joys of a social media purge and being a workaholic who gets bored easily

R ebecca F Kuang, 27, is an American writer. She and her family emigrated to the US from Guangzhou, China, when she was four; she grew up in Dallas, Texas. Her first novel, The Poppy War , a grimdark fantasy with a plot drawn from elements of the second Sino-Japanese war, was published in 2018. Two sequels followed. A fourth novel, the bestselling Babel , set in 1830s England, came out in 2022. Kuang followed this with a controversial departure: Yellowface . A contemporary melodrama in which a white author steals the manuscript of a dead, far more successful Asian-American novelist and passes it off as her own, it wickedly satirises identity politics in the world of publishing. It comes out in paperback this month. Kuang has postgraduate degrees from both Oxford and Cambridge Universities, and is currently a doctorate student at Yale.

Is it true that your agent cautioned against publishing Yellowface when you first told her about the idea? Yes, that’s true. She was a bit stunned, caught off guard. “I’m really worried it’s going to offend people,” she said. But I was convinced both by its strength as a story, and by what I was trying to say, so I asked her to get second reads from other people at her agency – and to her credit, she did. She really stuck her neck out.

Were you nervous as publication approached? It’s risky to bite the hand that feeds you. I might have been nervous if this had been my first book, but I’d been through the whole publishing cycle four times already. I’d got used to the idea that no matter what you say, some people will really resonate with it and love your work, and some people will think you’re absolute trash. There’s no perfect story that appeases everybody, and if there was, it would be so trite and boring and toothless, it wouldn’t be worth producing. I knew some reactions to this book would be polarised.

Yellowface has lots to say about identity politics, especially the notion that only certain people are allowed to write certain stories. What do you feel about this idea personally? Where does it leave the imagination? I think people should write about whatever they like. The role of the novelist is to imagine. If everyone only wrote from their own perspectives, we’d only ever write memoirs, autobiographies or autofiction. That would be very limiting. Many men have written about women very badly, but that’s an issue of craft, not biological qualification.

What about social media? Your narrator, June , is terrorised by publishing Twitter. Our relationship with social media is so extremist. I’d like not to have an Instagram account, but I like to see my friends wearing pretty dresses, and to stay connected with them. What has been really helpful for me is a book by Cal Newport called Digital Minimalism . He encourages a digital purge, then a very selective bringing back into your life of the social media tools you think work for you. It broke my addiction entirely. I severely limit my Instagram time now.

And cancel culture? Does it exist? I find a lot of this so disingenuous. The shape of an internet takedown would go something like this: somebody would err, and often there would be pretty genuine complaints about their conduct. But there’s also a really big spectrum of what counts [as bad behaviour]. It could be something quite egregious and harmful, and it could also be something as silly as misrecognising a breakfast cereal. We conflate all of these scales of harm. Anyway, someone would air this complaint, and then there would be a back and forth with that complaint, and then, very quickly, it would spread to the corners of the internet, and those with no stake in it at all would spread disinformation. Nobody would ever seem interested in the truth, or in reparations, or in genuinely understanding what happened. It’s so self-serving and frivolous.

Are you from a bookish family? My dad came to the US to study electoral engineering in grad school, and part of the way he taught himself English was by reading the classics. When I was a child, there were always classics around the house. He encouraged me to read way above my age and, to be honest, my understanding. We read George Orwell’s Animal Farm together. I just thought it was about some animals that were really mean to each other.

Did you always want to be a writer? It’s hard for me to say because I can’t remember a time when I wasn’t able to write. My mum [a translator] encouraged me to keep a diary, and every time we went on a family holiday or something happened at school, she’d say: “OK, write two pages about it.” I always had a notebook with me.

Which writers are an influence on you? Susanna Clarke ’s Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell is a lingering influence. So is AS Byatt’s Possession . Sylvia Plath is a recent obsession. I reread The Bell Jar and then this brilliant biography of her by Heather Clark, which got me interested in her journals and letters. Joan Didion is an obsession. I like to write my friends letters in the style of Joan Didion.

What book do you have by your bedside right now? My bedroom’s far away, but I’ll tell you what’s by my desk: Marina Keegan’s The Opposite of Loneliness . It’s a really special book. She was younger when she died than I am now; she was killed in a car crash a few days after she graduated from Yale, and her parents worked with some professors to put this collection of her essays and short fiction together. I’ve been asked to write an introduction to the 10th-anniversary edition. I think a lot about female genius, and careers that end too early, and the potential we never get to see.

after newsletter promotion

You’re still only 27, and you’ve already published five books. Are you very driven? I do set high goals for myself, but really I just think I’m a compulsive workaholic. It’s very hard for me even to sit still in a movie. I’m very bad at going on holiday. I can’t just sit by the ocean and relax. I need to be doing something.

Is the plan in the future to combine an academic career with a writing life? That’s definitely my hope. Teaching is a vocation for me. I’m passionate about being in the classroom. I feel like it’s a kind of magic, an important kind of work that’s distinct from writing novels. But the job market is really discouraging. I don’t know if there will be posts available when I’m on the market in two or three years’ time.

What are you working on now? My next book is set in the 80s. It’s a fantasy novel, but it’s very different from The Poppy War trilogy. It’s Neil Gaiman meets… Lewis Carroll. There’ll be a big emphasis on nonsense and riddles and mysteries. It’s an entirely new genre. I like to feel like I’m moving forward. I get bored very easily.

Yellowface by Rebecca F Kuang is published in paperback by the Borough Press (£9.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com . Delivery charges may apply

Books interview

More From Forbes

12 books for dealing with grief, bereavement or loss.

Share to Facebook
Share to Twitter
Share to Linkedin

Joan Didion, author of "The Year of Magical Thinking," speaks at the College of Marin in Kentfield, ... [+] California in February, 1977.

Grief is a profound and complicated experience. The process of grief entails far more than just sadness—it often takes control, and fills us with countless confusing and exasperating emotions. Yet through it all, many people find the most solace in the written word.

Books about loss can be a comforting companion. They offer us unexpected insights and stories—and sometimes even laughter—through the most unimaginably challenging times. Whether it’s a novel that transports you to another world, a memoir that shares the rawness of loss or a self-help guide with practical advice, books on grief can be a powerful means to rediscover life after loss.

Top Books On Grief And Grieving

In this list, I’ve gathered 12 books for bereavement that approach grief from different angles. Each provides a unique perspective on navigating the path toward acceptance and peace. Based on user reviews and therapist recommendations, these books can be a thoughtful gift for a grieving friend or a meaningful addition to your personal post-loss journey.

1. When Breath Becomes Air by Paul Kalanithi

When Breath Becomes Air is a poignant memoir from the late Dr. Paul Kalanithi, a neurosurgeon diagnosed with terminal lung cancer at the age of 36. The 2016 biography offers a candid look at Kalanithi’s journey—from a dedicated surgeon to a patient facing his own mortality—as he grapples with the transition from saving lives to understanding the value of his own.

This book is an ideal read for anyone trying to come to terms with terminal illness—their own or of a loved one. Its raw and introspective narrative can resonate deeply with anyone who has faced loss or is searching for meaning while anticipating grief. You can find the memoir at Penguin Random House .

Apple iPhone 16 Pro Design Upgrade Shines In New Leak

It s possible the russian army is tricking the ukrainian army with a fake offensive, ufc st louis results bonus winners from night of memorable finishes, 2. on grief and grieving by elizabeth kübler-ross & david kessler.

On Grief and Grieving is a seminal work by Elisabeth Kübler-Ross and David Kessler, published in 2005. The book explores the well-known five stages of grief—denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance—providing a framework for understanding the complex emotions that accompany loss.

Through real-life examples and compassionate insights, the authors delve into how these stages manifest and how to navigate them. This book is particularly beneficial for those seeking structure in their grieving process, those who appreciate a more clinical approach to understanding grief or those seeking a guided path through mourning. It can be purchased at Simon & Schuster .

3. Notes On Grief by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Notes on Grief by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie is a bittersweet reflection on loss. The 2021 memoir follows Adichie’s experience with the sudden death of her father, exploring the waves of emotion, memory and deep sense of absence that follow such a significant loss. Through a series of intimate essays, Adichie shares her grief with raw honesty and vulnerability.

This book is an ideal purchase for those who appreciate heartfelt narratives and are seeking comfort from someone who knows and understands the reality of unexpected grief. It can be especially helpful for those looking for a sense of shared experience, and the solace that can come from knowing they’re not alone in their feelings of loss. You can find the memoir at Penguin Random House Canada .

4. The Long Goodbye by Meghan O’Rourke

The Long Goodbye by Meghan O’Rourke is a touching memoir, published in 2011, that explores the deep and complex emotions that accompany the loss of a loved one. O’Rourke reflects on her experience of losing her mother to cancer, the slow unraveling of her life and the process of rebuilding in the aftermath.

The book provides an unrefined account of the pain, confusion and disorientation that often follows the death of a close family member. The Long Goodbye is especially valuable for those coping with long-term illness—either themselves or vicariously—offering a voice that speaks to the drawn-out nature of grief. O’Rourke’s memoir can be found at Penguin Random House .

5. The Grieving Brain: The Surprising Science Of How We Learn From Love And Loss by Mary Frances O’Connor

The Grieving Brain by Mary-Frances O’Connor is an enlightening exploration of the neuroscience behind grief, published in 2022. O’Connor, a renowned neuroscientist and grief expert, delves into the brain’s response to loss and provides a scientific perspective on the grieving process.

She explains how different areas of the brain contribute to the experience of grief, covering topics like why grief can be so overwhelming and how it evolves over time. This novel is ideal for readers seeking insight on why we grieve, and how we can learn to cope with loss from a logical, research-based, neurological standpoint. You can find the book at HarperCollins .

6. The Year Of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion

The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion, a profound memoir published in 2005, is a deeply personal account of grief and loss. Didion explores the sudden death of her husband, writer John Gregory Dunne, and the subsequent confusion and shock that followed.

Through her candid and introspective retelling, Didion delves into the surreal experience of grief, and the struggle to accept reality while yearning for the impossible. This book is ideal for those who have lost a partner or spouse, as it offers a compassionate exploration of the chaotic emotions that often accompany this profound loss. You can find Didion’s memoir at Penguin Random House .

7. A Monster Calls by Patrick Ness

A Monster Calls by Patrick Ness is a compelling and emotionally charged novel. Published in 2011, the story follows a young boy coping with his mother’s terminal illness, who is visited by a monster. Through a series of intense and often unsettling tales, the monster helps him confront his deepest fears and the harsh realities surrounding him.

This book masterfully weaves together elements of fantasy and psychological depth. It’s particularly suited for younger readers and teens dealing with grief, as it helps readers make sense of the complex and unimaginable nature of grief. However, its universal themes and gripping storytelling make it resonant for anyone seeking an empathetic portrayal of the grieving process. You can find the novel on the Walker website.

8. PS, I Love You by Cecelia Ahern

PS, I Love You by Cecelia Ahern is a heartwarming novel that was published in 2004. The story follows a young widow struggling to cope with the sudden loss of her husband. Before his death, he writes a series of letters containing instructions and messages intended to help her navigate her grief. As she reads, she slowly heals, finds hope and learns to live without him by her side.

This book is ideal for those seeking an uplifting approach to grief, with moments of humor and warmth amid sorrow. It is an ideal novel for those who have lost a partner or spouse, or anyone looking for a comforting read that celebrates love even in the face of loss. The novel is available from Hachette .

9. It’s OK That You’re Not OK by Megan Devine

It's OK That You're Not OK by Megan Devine—a grief advocate and psychotherapist—is a compassionate guide to navigating grief, published in 2017. It offers a refreshing perspective on loss, challenging conventional wisdom about how people “should” grieve. She emphasizes that grief is not something to be fixed or rushed, but instead embraced as a natural part of the healing process.

This book is ideal for those who feel external pressure to “move on” quickly, as it validates the diverse emotions that often accompany grief. It creates a safe space to explore the realities of living with loss—without judgment or pressure to conform. You can find the book on the Sounds True website.

10. Bearing The Unbearable: Love, Loss, And The Heartbreaking Path of Grief by Joanne Cacciatore

Bearing the Unbearable by Joanne Cacciatore is a powerful exploration of bereavement, published in 2017. Cacciatore, a leading grief counselor and researcher, delves into the profound pain that comes with losing a loved one, shares personal stories from her own experience and those of her clients, and emphasizes that grief is a natural response to love and should be honored rather than suppressed.

This guide is best suited for those dealing with deep and intense grief, particularly after the loss of a child or a tragic event. It is an ideal read for people seeking empathy and practicality following profound loss. You can find the book at Explore .

11. Grief Is The Thing With Feathers by Max Porter

Grief Is the Thing with Feathers by Max Porter is an innovative and poetic novel published in 2015. It tells the story of a family reeling from the sudden death of their mother, with the central figure being a shape-shifting character who enters their lives to help them navigate the aftermath. The narrative alternates between the perspectives of the grieving father and his two young sons, exploring the confusing and sometimes surreal emotions that accompany grief.

This book is an ideal purchase or gift for those who appreciate experimental narratives and poetic storytelling. It’s especially suited for readers seeking a more abstract and metaphorical exploration of grief, offering an imaginative approach to understanding the process of healing. The novel is available from Faber .

12. It’s Okay To Laugh: (Crying Is Cool Too) by Nora McInerny Purmort

It's Okay to Laugh by Nora McInerny is a heartfelt and humorous memoir published in 2016. McInerny describes her journey through a series of major life events, including the loss of her husband to brain cancer, the miscarriage of her child and the death of her father—all within a short span of time. Despite the heaviness of these experiences, she brings a lighthearted and irreverent approach to her storytelling, balancing grief with moments of humor and warmth.

This book is ideal for those who believe that laughter can be a healing balm, even during loss and grief. McInerny’s honest and relatable voice offers a refreshing perspective on navigating grief with a touch of humor. You can find the memoir at HarperCollins .

Bottom Line

Books can be an unexpected source of comfort and enlightenment during times of grief. These 12 carefully selected books span memoirs, guides and novels, each offering a unique perspective on bereavement. Whether you’re seeking empathy, guidance or a touch of humor, these books can empower you through your journey of healing and remembrance.

Editorial Standards
Reprints & Permissions

Join The Conversation

One Community. Many Voices. Create a free account to share your thoughts.

Forbes Community Guidelines

Our community is about connecting people through open and thoughtful conversations. We want our readers to share their views and exchange ideas and facts in a safe space.

In order to do so, please follow the posting rules in our site's Terms of Service. We've summarized some of those key rules below. Simply put, keep it civil.

Your post will be rejected if we notice that it seems to contain:

False or intentionally out-of-context or misleading information
Insults, profanity, incoherent, obscene or inflammatory language or threats of any kind
Attacks on the identity of other commenters or the article's author
Content that otherwise violates our site's terms.

User accounts will be blocked if we notice or believe that users are engaged in:

Continuous attempts to re-post comments that have been previously moderated/rejected
Racist, sexist, homophobic or other discriminatory comments
Attempts or tactics that put the site security at risk
Actions that otherwise violate our site's terms.

So, how can you be a power user?

Stay on topic and share your insights
Feel free to be clear and thoughtful to get your point across
‘Like’ or ‘Dislike’ to show your point of view.
Protect your community.
Use the report tool to alert us when someone breaks the rules.

Thanks for reading our community guidelines. Please read the full list of posting rules found in our site's Terms of Service.

Find anything you save across the site in your account

Joan Didion’s Longtime Upper East Side Apartment Sells for $5.4 Million

By Katie Schultz

Joan Didion seated on the back of cream sofa in her apartment looking out window lined with glass lamps builtin...

Literary icon Joan Didion’s Upper East Side apartment has officially sold, according to the New York Post . The 1928-built co-op unit was listed in January 2023 for $7.5 million, about a year after the famed writer died inside the home at the age of 87. It underwent a couple of generous price cuts before entering into contract in January of this year. Last week, the dwelling finally changed hands in a $5.4 million deal.

Didion and her husband, the writer John Gregory Dunne, bought the four-bedroom, five-bathroom abode in 1988 and used it as their primary residence. The Slouching Towards Bethlehem author was an active member of the co-op board during her 33-year tenancy in the building. Dunne died in the roughly 3,600-square-foot home in 2003.

Don't miss the AD PRO-exclusive workshop—Photo Finish: How to Showcase Your Project

The residence is located just a block from Central Park in the neighborhood of Lenox Hill. It offers picturesque window views of the nearby Gothic Revival -style St. James Church. A split-level living and dining area features herringbone floors and a wet bar. The space is warmed by a wood-burning fireplace flanked by pale blue built-in shelving.

Other highlights include a cozy library den, a home office , and an eat-in kitchen with vintage wooden cabinetry and a high-end double range. A small staff wing connects to the kitchen through a butler’s pantry.

As chef Joshua Weissman welcomes AD into his Austin home in the latest episode of Open Door, he jokes that he doesn’t actually live in a kitchen.

In 2022, an auction of Didion’s belongings grossed nearly $2 million. Among the most iconic pieces in the 224-item catalog were the writer’s Celine sunglasses, which fetched $27,000. A Victorian-style rattan peacock chair, which Didion was photographed sitting in, sold for $28,000.

Joan Didion in rattan peacock chair in her Upper East Side apartment

Didion seated on her rattan peacock chair in her Upper East side apartment.

The buyer of the Year of Magical Thinking memoirist’s New York City pad is not publicly known. Whoever they are, they nabbed the final—and perhaps most intimate—piece of the legend’s estate.

A Loving Daughter, Obsessed With Her Parents’ Misery, Seeks Its Roots

Inspired by her own family’s past, Claire Messud’s “This Strange Eventful History” unfolds over seven decades and two wars.

Share full article

This illustration shows a pentagonal table, viewed from above and surrounded by five white chairs. The table is covered by a cloth on which we see miniature scenes of domestic life — a couple getting married, a mother pushing a stroller, someone typing at a computer — as well as images of a mosque, a palm tree, an airplane, and, in the center of the cloth, a large, fiery explosion.

By Joan Silber

Joan Silber’s most recent books of fiction are “Secrets of Happiness” and “Improvement.” Her novel “Mercy” will be out in 2025.

THIS STRANGE EVENTFUL HISTORY, by Claire Messud

“Maman and Papa had always talked about how much they loved Algiers, how much a part of them it was … the most beautiful city on earth.” So thinks 8-year-old François, a French diplomat’s kid who’s lived all over, as he, his mother, little sister and aunt flee Europe ahead of the invading German Army in 1940 to shelter with relatives in Algeria, his family’s homeland but one new to him.

Readers of Claire Messud’s other superbly written novels will recognize the agile precision of her prose in her newest one, “This Strange Eventful History,” and some will nod at the mention of North Africa. A French household with Algerian roots is at the center of her second novel, “ The Last Life ” (1999), and tales of the pied-noir branch of her family are folded into her essays on Albert Camus in “ Kant’s Little Prussian Head and Other Reasons Why I Write ” (2020) .

After a prologue citing her new novel’s sources in her own family history, the narrative moves along from 1940 to 2010, across three generations and five points of view, channeling the intimacy of fiction. We begin with young François in 1940, dutifully trying to watch over his whiny little sister, and then get a chapter with a more well-informed set of worries from his father, Gaston, a naval attaché who’s being sent to Beirut (still under French control) and is desolate in wartime without his wife. The book then leaps ahead 13 years to François’s arrival at an American college. Each section is absorbing, and the leap has our attention; we want to know who François turns out to be.

Family members keep relocating across the globe — Buenos Aires, Sydney, the French Mediterranean coast, Connecticut — and their thoughts (largely unspoken) are filled with disappointments, bearable and unbearable. Denise, François’s fragile sister, is elated by an intense crush and then gutted by it. Barbara, the Canadian wife François loves but never quite understands, mocks her own failure to be a Frenchwoman and hates hosting her in-laws — “three-course meals, the linen napkins, the bloody siesta, the rituals as ineluctable as Catholic Mass. The agony of it.” Gaston, the family patriarch, knows by the time he’s in his 50s that “the world had transformed around him, and he couldn’t seem to adapt.” His granddaughter, Chloe, who, we’re led to think, grows up to be the writer of this saga, watches her parents with rueful love — “I felt the burden of their misery like a magnet at once drawing me home.”

As the book moves over seven decades, our sympathies are dispersed — no single character owns the story and no one crisis governs the plot; our eye is on the group. It’s a risky but solid structure, ambitiously packed with material. What’s striking is the way Messud manages to let time’s passage itself supply great feeling.

How sorry we are to see François, whom we knew as a staunch child, become a man lonely in his marriage. How dismayed we are to see Barbara, his wife, happiest as a stylish young mother in law school, lapsing into an older woman confused by dementia.

For much of the novel, no one speaks of Algeria. I kept wondering if the book had opted to cover only private sorrows. Early on, in a chapter set in Algiers in 1953, Denise is sideswiped by a car and, recalling the incident a few years later, thinks the car may have been driven by an anti-French insurgent. But this memory is quickly dropped.

Only after 300 pages is there a fierce discussion of the Algerian war for independence — the long and bloody conflict, from 1954 to 1962, in which France’s atrocities against Algerians eventually lost it international support. François’ daughter, Chloe, a young woman in her 20s, utters the familiar “truism” that the French should not have been in Algeria in the first place, enraging her aunt, Denise, and her otherwise placid grandfather, Gaston.

Denise is still angry that the fleeing French and harkis — Algerians loyal to the French — were treated badly in France. Gaston’s defense of the more than 100 years of occupation is darker. He points out that the United States and Australia, where Chloe has happily lived without shame, “are simply more successful examples of settler colonialism — no less unjust, no less brutal, simply with a fuller obliteration of the native cultures.” He argues against “the danger of hypocrisy” as he cites the abundant company France has in historical shame.

A final chapter, flashing back to 1927, reveals a shocking fact about Gaston and his wife, dating to their time as a young couple. We’ve had hints of this secret but not ones we could have deciphered. Messud makes a point of tying the hidden scandal to the truth that “the country” in which the couple’s rule-breaking love — I won’t give away any more — was forged “does not belong to them, has never belonged to them.”

I wasn’t entirely persuaded by the link to political entitlement and was hungry for a longer comment on the meaning of the couple’s secret. This lingering wish was a mark of how attached I had become to this family, how mysteriously resonant my time with them had been.

THIS STRANGE EVENTFUL HISTORY | By Claire Messud | Norton | 428 pp. | $29.99

Explore More in Books

Want to know about the best books to read and the latest news start here..

The complicated, generous life of Paul Auster, who died on April 30 , yielded a body of work of staggering scope and variety .

“Real Americans,” a new novel by Rachel Khong , follows three generations of Chinese Americans as they all fight for self-determination in their own way .

“The Chocolate War,” published 50 years ago, became one of the most challenged books in the United States. Its author, Robert Cormier, spent years fighting attempts to ban it .

Joan Didion’s distinctive prose and sharp eye were tuned to an outsider’s frequency, telling us about ourselves in essays that are almost reflexively skeptical. Here are her essential works .

Each week, top authors and critics join the Book Review’s podcast to talk about the latest news in the literary world. Listen here .

Op-Ed: I thought Joan Didion’s essay would ruin my life. But something else happened

A police officer looks at the charred Volkswagen Beetle in which Gordon E. Miller was found dead, in San Bernardino.

Show more sharing options
Copy Link URL Copied!

Many people have been influenced by Joan Didion’s writing. But few of us can tell you what it was like to be the subject of one of her essays.

One of her most famous, “Some Dreamers of the Golden Dream,” which appeared in her book, “Slouching Towards Bethlehem,” is about my family. It is, in particular, about my mother, Lucille Miller, who was convicted of killing my father in one of the most infamous murder trials in California history.

To be the subject of a famous author’s work is both thrilling and devastating. Over the years, I have cycled through many emotions before coming to a kind of peace about my family’s strange connection to this iconic writer.

At the time of my father’s death, we lived in Alta Loma, a new subdivision of San Bernardino County. My father was a well-established dentist who hated his career and wanted to be a physician. My mother was an upwardly striving housewife who was deeply unhappy in her marriage and in love with the husband of one of her best friends.

One night in October 1964, as we three children slept, my mother and father drove in our black VW bug to the store for milk. On the way home, as my father slept in the passenger seat, the car caught fire and he burned to death.

My mother, who maintained her innocence until the day she died, was found guilty of setting the fire and murdering him. I was 14. My brother Guy was 10, and our little brother Ron was 8.

Didion’s essay is not sympathetic, but it helped make her famous. And rightfully so; she was able, by focusing on my mother, to rip apart the tissue of lies that California newcomers tell themselves about how life will be better, different, happier here.

“Here,” wrote Didion, “is the last stop for all those who come from somewhere else, for all those who drifted away from the cold and the past and the old ways. Here is where they are trying to find a new life style, trying to find it in the only places they know to look: the movies and the newspapers. The case of Lucille Marie Maxwell Miller is a tabloid monument to that new life style.”

My mother hated Didion’s essay and taught her children to hate it too. She believed it was Didion’s revenge on her for turning down an interview request. Whether it was or not, I think my mother made a huge mistake refusing to talk to Didion.

Didion would probably have found my mother to be a sympathetic character. Yes, she was vain, but she was small like Didion. At the time of her trial, she weighed less than a hundred pounds, even though she was pregnant with our little sister, Kimi, to whom she gave birth at St. Joseph’s Hospital in San Bernardino. She had petitioned Gov. Edmund G. Brown to have her baby away from the prison so Kimi would not have to bear that stigma.

At the time she was convicted, I believed deeply in my mother’s innocence. As Didion wrote about me: “‘She didn’t do it,’” Debbie Miller cried, jumping up from the spectators’ section. ‘She didn’t do it.’”

Now I’m not so sure. I think I need my mother to be guilty because she suffered so much, and no innocent person should pay such a price. I believe her infidelities doomed her. She was also stoic during her trial, hardly seeming like a grieving pregnant widow. The lines of her mouth turned down, making her look cold.

My mother spent seven years in prison and was paroled in 1972. If she wasn’t a criminal before she went to prison, prison turned her into one. Using her children to supply contraband, she ran the entire illicit alcohol supply in the prison and was never caught. She tried but failed to ever make a legitimate income once she was released. She died of breast cancer, broken and estranged from her children in 1986.

I struggled with addiction, got sober and became an English teacher in an all-girls school in Los Angeles. For years, I had been ashamed of Didion’s essay. I thought it was cruel, portraying us as a more upscale Joad family, only from Oregon instead of the Dust Bowl, having moved to California to find a nonexistent Golden Dream.

I remember one day in the early 1990s hearing a colleague musing about “Some Dreamers,” weighing the merits of teaching it to his seniors in conjunction with “The Great Gatsby,” both stories about strivers run amok.

I was horrified. I had never talked about that essay, not in high school, not in college, with one exception, my best friend Jill Bickett, chairman of our English Department to whom I immediately ran with this information. I feared some student might ask if the “Debbie” in the essay was related to me. One excited student might pass on the news to her parents, who would then call the school demanding to know if one of their teachers had been hired without revealing her sullied and infamous past. I would be called in, excuses would be made; the school couldn’t be embarrassed this way. I certainly understood, didn’t I?

I knew that essay would one day ruin my life and now it was happening. The situation worked itself out. I don’t remember how. I just remember I was assured the essay wouldn’t be taught.

Then a few weeks later, I sat on my pink couch at home in Venice looking through my books on writing for a good descriptive essay describing a place that reflected the author’s feelings. I found myself once more reading Didion’s essay, and then I read it again.

It had caused me to keep silent about my past, interfere in my colleague’s curriculum decisions out of fear of what could happen to me. I saw that Didion’s descriptions of us, where we lived, and my mother were in fact spot on. I was an adult. My mother was dead. Didion was a genius. I was free to have my own opinions. It was then that I saw what Didion saw. I knew my mother hadn’t fooled her. We were a modern day Joad family. My burdens were lifted.

I decided to write to Didion. I wanted her to know what had become of us. My baby sister, Kimi, died of lung cancer at the age of 25 in March 1991. Guy is a dentist. Ron is a high school English teacher.

My letter began, “Dear Joan Didion, I am anxious, angry, and jealous as my fragile self-esteem evaporates. I just can’t seem to avoid ‘Some Dreamers of the Golden Dream.’ It helped to make you famous, but it’s my life.”

I anxiously awaited her reply. Her letter arrived a month later in November 1991. It began, “Dear Debra Miller, I’ve begun this letter so many times, because there’s no real way to tell you how moved I was (am) by your letter.” Then her letter moves away from me and talks about the weird relationship between an author and her subject. She continues, “as a writer I tend to compartmentalize the people and events I’ve written about — the writer goes in, tries to understand the story, as if the act of writing it down completed the situation, became the truth. I guess I think writers need to do this, have to do this to maintain the nerve to write anything at all. But of course it’s an illusion.”

“I’m glad you wrote to me, ”she concluded. “Thank you –”

Six years later I met Didion and her husband John Gregory Dunne at the Directors Guild in Beverly Hills. My husband’s daughter, Robin Abcarian, The Times columnist, was to interview Didion onstage about her latest novel, “The Last Thing He Wanted.” Robin cautioned me that Didion was famously shy and that I shouldn’t expect more than a hello, nice to meet you.

But that’s not what happened. When Robin introduced me to her backstage, she threw her arms around me, called her husband over to meet me, then tucked her arm in mine and escorted me into the auditorium and sat me down beside her. When an excerpt of the essay was read, focusing on the moment my father burned to death, she grabbed my arm and gave it a hug. Years of mortification melted away.

Sometime after that, I gave my colleagues permission to use the essay in their classes. I also gave them permission to tell their students that Ms. Miller was “Debbie,” the 15-year-old who cried out for her mother when the judge read the guilty verdict. I told my story to each junior English class, inviting students to ask me anything they wanted. It was intimidating to them, but it was rewarding for me.

Today, I’m proud to be the subject of a Joan Didion essay, and inspired by her, I’m working on my own memoir.

When people find out who I am they’re often shocked and then fascinated. I know they think that Debbie must have ended up a drug-addicted hooker on Sunset Boulevard. But that’s not what happened; I like seeing how the contradiction between what should have been and what is registers on their faces.

When I heard that Didion had died, the loss felt so personal to me. I called my brother Ron to talk about what she had meant in our lives. If not for her essay, I would not be the woman I am today — a woman to tell her own story, who survived and flourished rather than succumb to the darkness that consumed my mother and beckoned me.

Debra Miller is a retired high school teacher in Los Angeles.

A young actress, an obsessed stalker and a Hollywood murder that changed America

May 8, 2024

Gustavo and mom on the day of his christening in a family photo.

Column: My Mami’s hard life, cut short right when it was about to get really good

April 28, 2024

Long Distance in the Same City Illustration by Key Xin / For the Times for Holly Yeo essay

L.A. Affairs: I was new to Los Angeles. Was driving 70 miles for love worth it?

April 19, 2024

A cure for the common opinion

Get thought-provoking perspectives with our weekly newsletter.

You may occasionally receive promotional content from the Los Angeles Times.

More From the Los Angeles Times

Speaker of the House Mike Johnson, R-La., joined at left by Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, Rep. Chip Roy, R-Texas, talks to reporters about requiring American citizenship to vote in national elections, as they introduce the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act, at the Capitol in Washington, Wednesday, May 8, 2024. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite)

Calmes: Our elections have integrity. These politicians do not

May 12, 2024

A mother and daughter reflect on their relationship through time.

My family’s generations of mothering

In this courtroom sketch, defense attorney Susan Necheles, center, cross examines Stormy Daniels, far right, whose real name is Stephanie Clifford, as former President Donald Trump, left, looks on with Judge Juan Merchan presiding during Trump's trial in Manhattan criminal court, Tuesday, May 7, 2024, in New York. (Elizabeth Williams via AP)

Abcarian: The porn star with a well-deserved place in American history

Commentary: Mother’s Day without our matriarchs

May 11, 2024

IMAGES

Remembering Joan Didion, famed author, screenwriter, New Journalist: A
Why Joan Didion Matters More than Ever
the best discoveries in the joan didion documentary
Joan Didion’s New Essay Collection Reveals The Process Of A Legendary
Joan Didion’s Essay ‘Goodbye to All That’ Optioned for Screen
Joan Didion’s New Essay Collection Reveals The Process Of A Legendary

VIDEO

Tra il racconto e il saggio: Charles D'Ambrosio
The White Album
Guaymas, Sonora by Joan Didion (1965)
John Lydon Talks Princess Diana
"We Tell Ourselves Stories In Order To Live." (A View From Los Angeles)
Marrying Absurd by Joan Didion (1967)

COMMENTS

Read 12 Masterful Essays by Joan Didion for Free Online, Spanning Her
The essay appears in 1967's Slouching Towards Bethlehem, a representative text of the literary nonfiction of the sixties alongside the work of John McPhee, Terry Southern, Tom Wolfe, and Hunter S. Thompson.In Didion's case, the emphasis must be decidedly on the literary—her essays are as skillfully and imaginatively ...
How the Manson murders changed Hollywood, according to Joan Didion
As Joan Didion wrote in her essay "The White Album," the title piece of her 1979 collection, "Many people I know in Los Angeles believe that the Sixties ended abruptly on August 9, 1969 ...
Hollywood: Having Fun
"You can take Hollywood for granted like I did, or you can dismiss it with the contempt we reserve for what we don't understand. ... Literature Fiction Poetry Biography & Memoir In Translation Essays. ... Joan Didion. Joan Didion (1934-2021) was the author, most recently, of Blue Nights and The Year of Magical Thinking, among seven other ...
Joan Didion on Hollywood's Diversity Problem: A Masterpiece from 1968
In an essay titled "Good Citizens," written between 1968 and 1970 and found in the altogether indispensable The White Album (public library) — which also gave us Didion on driving as a transcendent experience — she turns her perceptive and prescient gaze to Hollywood's diversity problem and the vacant pretensions that both beget and ...
How Joan Didion the Writer Became Joan Didion the Legend
Didion dedicated The White Album, her essay collection mainly about L.A. during the years she and Dunne and Quintana lived in a house on Franklin Avenue in Hollywood (1966-71), to him, which ...
Joan Didion dead at 87: Essential books, essays to read now
Joan Didion, masterful essayist, novelist and screenwriter, dies at 87. Dec. 23, 2021. A number of additional magazine pieces from her early career are collected in her final published work ...
Joan Didion's Best Books: A Guide
But Didion wrote about Hollywood, too. One of her most astute essays, "Hollywood: Having Fun," was first published in The New York Review of Books in 1973, then lightly revised and published ...
Joan Didion Was Our Bard of Disenchantment
Didion lived, for a time, in Hollywood; her work lives in Hollywood too. She used jump cuts to get from one moment in time to the next. She was attuned, always, to the framing of scenes.
California Native Joan Didion Understood Hollywood Better ...
December 24, 2021 10:14 am. Author Joan Didion at home in Hollywood. Julian Wasser photographer. Many Netflix watchers are catching up with actor-director Griffin Dunne's documentary about his ...
Writers salute Joan Didion as a singular influence
Joan Didion, masterful essayist, novelist and screenwriter, dies at 87. Dec. 23, 2021. Writers in Los Angeles were crushed by the news but gratefully indebted to a woman whose keen observations ...
Joan Didion's "Let Me Tell You What I Mean" on inspirations
Let Me Tell You What I Mean. By Joan Didion. Knopf: 192 pages, $23. If you buy books linked on our site, The Times may earn a commission from Bookshop.org, whose fees support independent ...
From Hollywood to Malibu: Mapping Joan Didion's Los Angeles
Using a new book he edited, Joan Didion: The 1960s & 70s (Library of America, November 2019), David Ulin, assistant professor of English at USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences, creates a map of Didion's Los Angeles for those wishing to follow in her steps — or tire tracks. 7406 Franklin Avenue, Hollywood.
On Self-Respect: Joan Didion's 1961 Essay from the Pages of
December 23, 2021. Joan Didion, author, journalist, and style icon, died today after a prolonged illness. She was 87 years old. Here, in its original layout, is Didion's seminal essay "Self ...
Joan Didion, California, and the "Impersonally Personal"
Joan Didion than Norma Jeane Baker was Marilyn Monroe . . . . She was . a native daughter, but only sort of." People who say they have been to . Hollywood, or to Big Sur or San Diego, have not, Didion claims, truly . Joan Didion, California, and the "Impersonally Personal"
There's a reason Joan Didion's work endures: she changed the way we
Didion is a favourite writer of young women. Her instructions for packing (leotards and bourbon and cashmere shawls and … a typewriter) are republished in fashion magazines, and her look (ironic ...
What We Get Wrong About Joan Didion
January 25, 2021. "I wanted not a window on the world but the world itself," Didion wrote. Illustration by Malika Favre. In the spring of 1967, Joan Didion and John Gregory Dunne, freelance ...
Joan Didion's Magic Trick
This is the Joan Didion who invented Los Angeles in the '60s as an expression of paranoia, danger, drugs, and the movie business. The Joan Didion who took amphetamines to work and bourbon to ...
When It Was Magic Time In New Jersey By Joan Didion
When It Was Magic Time in New Jersey. By Joan Didion. May 12, 2024. Blessed with the gift for banter of a Calvin Coolidge and the conviviality of an Increase Mather, I am not what you would call a ...
New York Public Library Acquires Joan Didion's Papers
By Jennifer Schuessler. Jan. 26, 2023. It was April 1957, and Joan Didion was writing to her family in California about her job as a copywriter at Vogue. "Work is dull and tedious," she wrote ...
Joan Didion dies; writer chronicled culture with cool detachment
Joan Didion, masterful essayist, novelist and screenwriter, dies at 87. Didion bridged the worlds of Hollywood, journalism and literature in a career that arced most brilliantly in the realms of ...
Joan Didion Dead: 'Magical Thinking' Author Was 87
Joan Didion, the journalist and ... Knopf, told The Hollywood Reporter. ... Berkeley, she won a Vogue essay contest, whose first prize was a job at the magazine's New York office.
Rebecca F Kuang: 'I like to write to my friends in the style of Joan
Joan Didion is an obsession. I like to write my friends letters in the style of Joan Didion. ... and her parents worked with some professors to put this collection of her essays and short fiction ...
A Conversation With Colm Tóibín
Joan Didion's distinctive prose and sharp eye were tuned to an outsider's frequency, telling us about ourselves in essays that are almost reflexively skeptical. Here are her essential works .
12 Best Books On Grief, Bereavement Or Loss
The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion, a profound memoir published in 2005, is a deeply personal account of grief and loss. Didion explores the sudden death of her husband, writer John ...
Column: Joan Didion, California and the enduring power of 'our special
Joan Didion on May 1, 1977. Her 1993 New Yorker essay "Trouble in Lakewood" still resonates.
Book Club: 'James,' by Percival Everett
Norman Mailer's 1984 essay for The New York Times, ... Joan Didion's distinctive prose and sharp eye were tuned to an outsider's frequency, telling us about ourselves in essays that are ...
Joan Didion, and the struggle to see yourself clearly
Didion bridged the world of Hollywood, journalism and literature in a career that arced most brilliantly in the realms of social criticism and memoir. Dec. 23, 2021
Joan Didion's Longtime Upper East Side Apartment Sells for $5.4 Million
Last week, the dwelling finally changed hands in a $5.4 million deal. Didion and her husband, the writer John Gregory Dunne, bought the four-bedroom, five-bathroom abode in 1988 and used it as ...
Book Review: 'This Strange Eventful History,' by Claire Messud
Joan Didion's distinctive prose and sharp eye were tuned to an outsider's frequency, telling us about ourselves in essays that are almost reflexively skeptical. Here are her essential works .
Op-Ed: I thought Joan Didion's essay would ruin my life. But something
Didion's most famous essay was about my mother's murder trial, set in California's broken dream. ... I'm proud to be the subject of a Joan Didion essay, and inspired by her, I'm working on my ...