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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.

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20 great articles and essays by joan didion, on life and death, goodbye to all that, on morality, on self respect, fixed opinions, or the hinge of history, insider baseball, the women's movement, slouching towards bethlehem, the shopping center, the american frontier reinvented, in sable and dark glasses, marrying absurd, the promises martha stewart made—and why we wanted to believe them, 150 great articles and essays.

On Keeping a Notebook

Why i write, the santa ana, some dreamers of the golden dream, fire season in los angeles, the white album, the year of magical thinking, political fictions.

About The Electric Typewriter We search the net to bring you the best nonfiction, articles, essays and journalism

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

On Self-Respect: Joan Didion’s 1961 Essay from the Pages of Vogue

By Joan Didion

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-respect: Its Source, Its Power,” which was first published in Vogue in 1961, and which was republished as “On Self-Respect” in the author’s 1968 collection, Slouching Towards Bethlehem. Didion wrote the essay as the magazine was going to press, to fill the space left after another writer did not produce a piece on the same subject. She wrote it not to a word count or a line count, but to an exact character count.

Image may contain Book Text Page Paper and Newspaper

Once, in a dry season, I wrote in large letters across two pages of a notebook that innocence ends when one is stripped of the delusion that one likes oneself. Although now, some years later, I marvel that a mind on the outs with itself should have nonetheless made painstaking record of its every tremor, I recall with embarrassing clarity the flavor of those particular ashes. It was a matter of misplaced self-respect.

I had not been elected to Phi Beta Kappa. This failure could scarcely have been more predictable or less ambiguous (I simply did not have the grades), but I was unnerved by it; I had somehow thought myself a kind of academic Raskolnikov, curiously exempt from the cause-effect relationships that hampered others. Although the situation must have had even then the approximate tragic stature of Scott Fitzgerald's failure to become president of the Princeton Triangle Club, the day that I did not make Phi Beta Kappa nevertheless marked the end of something, and innocence may well be the word for it. I lost the conviction that lights would always turn green for me, the pleasant certainty that those rather passive virtues which had won me approval as a child automatically guaranteed me not only Phi Beta Kappa keys but happiness, honour, and the love of a good man (preferably a cross between Humphrey Bogart in Casablanca and one of the Murchisons in a proxy fight); lost a certain touching faith in the totem power of good manners, clean hair, and proven competence on the Stanford-Binet scale. To such doubtful amulets had my self-respect been pinned, and I faced myself that day with the nonplussed wonder of someone who has come across a vampire and found no garlands of garlic at hand.

Although to be driven back upon oneself is an uneasy affair at best, rather like trying to cross a border with borrowed credentials, it seems to me now the one condition necessary to the beginnings of real self-respect. Most of our platitudes notwithstanding, self-deception remains the most difficult deception. The charms that work on others count for nothing in that devastatingly well-lit back alley where one keeps assignations with oneself: no winning smiles will do here, no prettily drawn lists of good intentions. With the desperate agility of a crooked faro dealer who spots Bat Masterson about to cut himself into the game, one shuffles flashily but in vain through one's marked cards—the kindness done for the wrong reason, the apparent triumph which had involved no real effort, the seemingly heroic act into which one had been shamed. The dismal fact is that self-respect has nothing to do with the approval of others—who are, after all, deceived easily enough; has nothing to do with reputation—which, as Rhett Butler told Scarlett O'Hara, is something that people with courage can do without.

To do without self-respect, on the other hand, is to be an unwilling audience of one to an interminable home movie that documents one's failings, both real and imagined, with fresh footage spliced in for each screening. There’s the glass you broke in anger, there's the hurt on X's face; watch now, this next scene, the night Y came back from Houston, see how you muff this one. To live without self-respect is to lie awake some night, beyond the reach of warm milk, phenobarbital, and the sleeping hand on the coverlet, counting up the sins of commission and omission, the trusts betrayed, the promises subtly broken, the gifts irrevocably wasted through sloth or cowardice or carelessness. However long we postpone it, we eventually lie down alone in that notoriously un- comfortable bed, the one we make ourselves. Whether or not we sleep in it depends, of course, on whether or not we respect ourselves.

Joan Didion

To protest that some fairly improbable people, some people who could not possibly respect themselves, seem to sleep easily enough is to miss the point entirely, as surely as those people miss it who think that self-respect has necessarily to do with not having safety pins in one's underwear. There is a common superstition that "self-respect" is a kind of charm against snakes, something that keeps those who have it locked in some unblighted Eden, out of strange beds, ambivalent conversations, and trouble in general. It does not at all. It has nothing to do with the face of things, but concerns instead a separate peace, a private reconciliation. Although the careless, suicidal Julian English in Appointment in Samarra and the careless, incurably dishonest Jordan Baker in The Great Gatsby seem equally improbable candidates for self-respect, Jordan Baker had it, Julian English did not. With that genius for accommodation more often seen in women than in men, Jordan took her own measure, made her own peace, avoided threats to that peace: "I hate careless people," she told Nick Carraway. "It takes two to make an accident."

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Like Jordan Baker, people with self-respect have the courage of their mistakes. They know the price of things. If they choose to commit adultery, they do not then go running, in an access of bad conscience, to receive absolution from the wronged parties; nor do they complain unduly of the unfairness, the undeserved embarrassment, of being named corespondent. If they choose to forego their work—say it is screenwriting—in favor of sitting around the Algonquin bar, they do not then wonder bitterly why the Hacketts, and not they, did Anne Frank.

In brief, people with self-respect exhibit a certain toughness, a kind of moral nerve; they display what was once called character, a quality which, although approved in the abstract, sometimes loses ground to other, more instantly negotiable virtues. The measure of its slipping prestige is that one tends to think of it only in connection with homely children and with United States senators who have been defeated, preferably in the primary, for re-election. Nonetheless, character—the willingness to accept responsibility for one's own life—is the source from which self-respect springs.

Self-respect is something that our grandparents, whether or not they had it, knew all about. They had instilled in them, young, a certain discipline, the sense that one lives by doing things one does not particularly want to do, by putting fears and doubts to one side, by weighing immediate comforts against the possibility of larger, even intangible, comforts. It seemed to the nineteenth century admirable, but not remarkable, that Chinese Gordon put on a clean white suit and held Khartoum against the Mahdi; it did not seem unjust that the way to free land in California involved death and difficulty and dirt. In a diary kept during the winter of 1846, an emigrating twelve-year-old named Narcissa Cornwall noted coolly: "Father was busy reading and did not notice that the house was being filled with strange Indians until Mother spoke about it." Even lacking any clue as to what Mother said, one can scarcely fail to be impressed by the entire incident: the father reading, the Indians filing in, the mother choosing the words that would not alarm, the child duly recording the event and noting further that those particular Indians were not, "fortunately for us," hostile. Indians were simply part of the donnée.

In one guise or another, Indians always are. Again, it is a question of recognizing that anything worth having has its price. People who respect themselves are willing to accept the risk that the Indians will be hostile, that the venture will go bankrupt, that the liaison may not turn out to be one in which every day is a holiday because you’re married to me. They are willing to invest something of themselves; they may not play at all, but when they do play, they know the odds.

That kind of self-respect is a discipline, a habit of mind that can never be faked but can be developed, trained, coaxed forth. It was once suggested to me that, as an antidote to crying, I put my head in a paper bag. As it happens, there is a sound physiological reason, something to do with oxygen, for doing exactly that, but the psychological effect alone is incalculable: it is difficult in the extreme to continue fancying oneself Cathy in Wuthering Heights with one's head in a Food Fair bag. There is a similar case for all the small disciplines, unimportant in themselves; imagine maintaining any kind of swoon, commiserative or carnal, in a cold shower.

But those small disciplines are valuable only insofar as they represent larger ones. To say that Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton is not to say that Napoleon might have been saved by a crash program in cricket; to give formal dinners in the rain forest would be pointless did not the candlelight flickering on the liana call forth deeper, stronger disciplines, values instilled long before. It is a kind of ritual, helping us to remember who and what we are. In order to remember it, one must have known it.

To have that sense of one's intrinsic worth which, for better or for worse, constitutes self-respect, is potentially to have everything: the ability to discriminate, to love and to remain indifferent. To lack it is to be locked within oneself, paradoxically incapable of either love or indifference. If we do not respect ourselves, we are on the one hand forced to despise those who have so few resources as to consort with us, so little perception as to remain blind to our fatal weaknesses. On the other, we are peculiarly in thrall to everyone we see, curiously determined to live out—since our self-image is untenable—their false notions of us. We flatter ourselves by thinking this compulsion to please others an attractive trait: a gift for imaginative empathy, evidence of our willingness to give. Of course we will play Francesca to Paolo, Brett Ashley to Jake, Helen Keller to anyone's Annie Sullivan: no expectation is too misplaced, no rôle too ludicrous. At the mercy of those we can not but hold in contempt, we play rôles doomed to failure before they are begun, each defeat generating fresh despair at the necessity of divining and meeting the next demand made upon us.

It is the phenomenon sometimes called alienation from self. In its advanced stages, we no longer answer the telephone, because someone might want something; that we could say no without drowning in self-reproach is an idea alien to this game. Every encounter demands too much, tears the nerves, drains the will, and the spectre of something as small as an unanswered letter arouses such disproportionate guilt that one's sanity becomes an object of speculation among one's acquaintances. To assign unanswered letters their proper weight, to free us from the expectations of others, to give us back to ourselves—there lies the great, the singular power of self-respect. Without it, one eventually discovers the final turn of the screw: one runs away to find oneself, and finds no one at home.

6 Essays By Joan Didion You Should Know

Joan Didion is lauded as one of the best literary journalists to emerge from the New Journalism school in the ’60s, among Tom Wolfe , Terry Southern and Hunter S. Thompson, and one of California’s wittiest contemporary writers . Best known for her sharply reported stories that service frequently dystopian and despondent cultural commentary, even Didion’s more journalistic works are in part personal essay. It’s precisely her authorial presence that lends credence, honesty and depth to her work. Her subjectivity makes her observations all the more resonant, and in a way, more accurate too. Here’s a look at some of the California writer’s greatest hits.

‘some dreamers of the golden dream’.

‘This is a story about love and death in the golden land, and begins with the country,’ the essay begins. Making good on her promise, this piece reports a lascivious tale of adultery and murder in San Bernardino County in 1966. In true Didion form, however, atmosphere and place play characters just as important as the perpetrators and, in that way, this piece is about much more than the details of a single crime.

‘John Wayne: A Love Song’

Though this essay presents itself as an ode the great American frontiersman of the silver screen, it charts a loss of innocence – personal, though perhaps also cultural – against Wayne’s larger than life persona . ‘In a world we understand early to be characterized by venality and doubt and paralyzing ambiguities, he suggested another world… a place where a man could move free, could make his own code and live by it.’

Having kept a notebook from the age of five, Didion considers the compulsion to capture our lives. She writes, ‘however dutifully we record what we see around us, the common denominator of all we see is always, transparently, shamelessly, the implacable ‘I.” This observation seems especially fitting for a writer who candidly reports through the filter of the self.

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Cover for Joan Didion’s Slouching Towards Bethlehem

‘On Self Respect’

This philosophical musing pays homage to the wrestling with the self that perhaps writers know best. It was first published in Vogue magazine in 1961, where it can be found in its original form . ‘To assign unanswered letters their proper weight, to free us from the expectations of others, to give us back to ourselves – there lies the great, the singular power of self-respect.’

‘The Santa Ana’

Didion calls upon the eerie desert mythology of the Santa Anas, the wicked winds that brings a tangible unease and tension to Los Angeles whenever they blow through the city. In this essay, LA is not always sunny as it’s so often portrayed. In this strange ode to place, Didion writes, ‘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 shows us how close to the edge we are.’

‘Goodbye to All That’

In one of Didion’s most known essays, she recounts a love affair with New York City that calls upon the city’s deeply arresting aura with delicious turns of phrase: ‘I would stay in New York, I told him, just six months, and I could see the Brooklyn Bridge from my window. As it turned out the bridge was the Triborough, and I stayed eight years.’

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The essential Joan Didion: An L.A. Times reading list for newcomers and fans alike

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Joan Didion, who died Thursday at 87 , produced decades’ worth of memorable work across genres and subjects: personal essays, reporting and criticism on pop culture, political dispatches from at home and abroad and, near the end of her career, a bestselling memoir and a follow-up. Whether you’re a newcomer looking for a place to start or a reader looking to dive deeper, here’s a guide to Didion’s writing, start to finish:

The ‘personals’

If any subset of her work made Didion’s reputation for “inevitable” sentences, it is the personal essays collected in “Slouching Towards Bethlehem” (1968) and “The White Album” (1979). These pieces, starting with “On Self-Respect” in 1961, and originally published in magazines such as Vogue, the American Scholar and the Saturday Evening Post, have come to be appreciated as models of the form, elliptical, poetic, punctuated with the author’s eye for telling detail and lacerating self-awareness. Didion’s essays carefully revealed, and concealed, the correspondent’s inner life: As she once wrote of husband John Gregory Dunne — in a piece he edited — “We are here on this island in the middle of the Pacific in lieu of filing for divorce.”

Didion later described these essays as having been written under “crash circumstances” — “On Self-Respect” was improvised in “two sittings,” she reflected in 2007 , and written “not just to a word count or a line count but a character count” — yet they produced an astonishing number of unforgettable phrases: “I’ve already lost touch with a couple people I used to be” ( “On Keeping a Notebook,” a personal favorite); “That was the year, my twenty-eighth, when I was discovering that not all of the promises would be kept” ( “Goodbye to All That,” which invented the modern “leaving New York” essay); “We tell ourselves stories in order to live” (“The White Album,” possibly the definitive rendering of the end of the ‘60s).

Joan Didion, masterful essayist, novelist and screenwriter, dies at 87

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

A number of additional magazine pieces from her early career are collected in her final published work , “Let Me Tell You What I Mean ” (2021), and her observations of self and culture from the 1970s are central to her travelogue “South and West” (2017).

"Slouching Towards Bethlehem," by Joan Didion

The counterculture reporting

In and among the “personals” of “Slouching” and “The White Album” are Didion’s cucumber-cool lacerations of the late ‘60s, casting twin gimlet eyes on the delusions of both the rock-ribbed squares and the child revolutionaries. From the gaudy populism of the Getty and the Sacramento Reagans to a requiem for John Wayne, the marriage of bad taste and bad money fills in where the center fails to hold. The title essay of “The White Album” swirls with Jim Morrison, the Manson “family,” Linda Kasabian’s famous dress, Huey P. Newton and all the rest as Didion bravely declines to make sense of it all. The title essay in “Slouching” culminates, likewise, in the senseless final image of a 3-year-old boy, neglected and imperiled in a hippie squat. “On Morality” and “The Women’s Movement” exude the skeptical libertarianism that distanced her from the madness.

To see not just where the nation moved but where Didion did, it’s worth reading the early California pieces, including “Notes from a Native Daughter,” followed by “Where I Was From” (2003), which utterly demolishes California’s disastrous myth of self-reliance step by step, anatomizing its dependence on government largesse from the days of the Gold Rush — the water, the power, the military-industrial muscle. And finally she goes in on herself: the pioneer woman who never was.

Throughout her career, Didion was best known for her nonfiction, but her five novels conjure an equally pungent sense of place and time. Her first book, “Run River ” (1963) — inspired, she later wrote, by profound homesickness — is a family melodrama about the descendants of pioneers that draws heavily on Didion’s Sacramento upbringing. Perhaps her most famous novel, “Play It As It Lays” (1970), is set in a very different California: the Hollywood of the late ‘60s and early ‘70s, suffused with the anomie of its dissolute heroine, Maria Wyeth. (Her opening monologue famously begins with an ice-cold allusion to Othello: “What makes Iago evil? Some people ask. I never ask.”)

But Didion’s most underrated writing may be found in three novels that reflected her growing interest in — and suspicion of — America’s empire abroad. Set in the fictional Central American nation of Boca Grande, “A Book of Common Prayer” (1977) features both acid satire of corrupt U.S.-backed regimes and a tragic riff on the tale of Patty Hearst, as protagonist Charlotte Douglas searches for her daughter Marin, who is on the lam with a Marxist terrorist organization. Her interest in U.S. interference in the region and the absurdities of the late Cold War reappears in her final work of fiction, “The Last Thing He Wanted ” (1996), about a reporter and a government official who fall in love amid a secret arms-dealing operation reminiscent of Iran-Contra.

Joan Didion, wearing a white shirt, stands in the hallway of her apartment, next to a portrait of her late husband

Entertainment & Arts

Photos: Joan Didion, masterful essayist, novelist and screenwriter, dies at 87

Photos from the life of Joan Didion, who chronicled California, politics and sorrow in ‘Slouching Towards Bethlehem’ and ‘Year of Magical Thinking.’

It is “Democracy” (1984), though, that gathers these personal and political themes into the most extraordinary whole, tracing a history of violence and exploitation from the colonization of Hawaii through the dawn of the atomic age to produce Didion’s answer to the Vietnam War novel. She even casts herself as narrator: “Democracy,” set in the early 1970s, is told from the perspective of “Joan Didion,” whose focused repetitions and circular logic as she attempts to piece together the tale of a U.S. senator, his wife and her lover presage those of her blockbuster memoir, “The Year of Magical Thinking” (2005).

The political commentary

Though most Joan Didion primers begin, as this one does, with the personal essays, my introduction to Didion — and one I recommend if you would like to become as obsessed with her writing as I am — came through “Democracy” and the essays in “Political Fictions” (2001). Beginning in the 1980s, when she forged a close working relationship with legendary New York Review of Books editor Robert Silvers, Didion shifted the focus of her reporting away from culture: She relayed searing descriptions of war-torn El Salvador in “Salvador” (1983), captured the the conspiratorial fever surrounding much of U.S.-Cuba politics in “Miami” (1987) and detailed the ways in which Sept. 11 became a jingoistic cudgel in “Fixed Ideas” (2003).

But for their exceedingly thorough and ultimately devastating authority, there may be no better place to go to understand our current political disaster, and the media’s role in it, than Didion’s dispatches from the presidential campaigns of 1988 (“Insider Baseball”) and 1992 (“Eyes on the Prize”), her exasperated reflections on the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal (“Clinton Agonistes”) or her poisonously funny takedown of Bob Woodward (“The Deferential Spirit,” 1996), author of books “in which measurable cerebral activity is virtually absent.”

She also applied the technique in the damning “Sentimental Journeys” (collected in 1992’s “After Henry ”), detailing the process by which politicians and the press railroaded the Central Park Five in the hothouse atmosphere of late-’80s New York.

"The Year of Magical Thinking," by Joan Didion

The late memoirs

Despite a career in which she befriended celebrities like Natalie Wood and Tony Richardson — and employed Harrison Ford as a carpenter — Didion reached the height of her prominence with her bestselling memoir, “The Year of Magical Thinking, ” published in 2005. While she had experimented with the form two years prior in “Where I Was From,” it was her heartbreakingly lucid dissection of grief that captured the imagination of the broader public, earning her wide acclaim and the National Book Award. “Magical Thinking” recounts a year in Didion’s life in which she grappled with Dunne’s 2003 death from cardiac arrest and daughter Quintana Roo’s serious illness, combining her readings of Sigmund Freud and Emily Post with vivid memories from one of 20th century literature’s most intimate marriages. Her follow-up , “Blue Nights” (2011), which looked back on Quintana’s untimely death in 2005, offered a more caustic vision, searching her relationship with her daughter for moments she wrong-footed herself while revealing her own declining health. In the process she developed a late style all her own — incantatory and poetic but never (God forbid) sentimental.

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Matt Brennan is a Los Angeles Times’ deputy editor for entertainment and arts. Born in the Boston area, educated at USC and an adoptive New Orleanian for nearly 10 years, he returned to Los Angeles in 2019 as the newsroom’s television editor. He previously served as TV editor at Paste Magazine, and his writing has also appeared in Indiewire, Slate, Deadspin and numerous other publications.

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‘I’m a liar. I’m a thief. I’m capable of almost anything.’

JOAN DIDION

We are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not..

From the essay “On Keeping a Notebook” in Slouching Towards Bethlehem

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Photo: Jerry Bauer

1934–2021

About joan didion.

Joan Didion was a journalist, novelist, memoirist, essayist, and screenwriter who wrote some of the sharpest and most evocative analyses of culture, politics, literature, family, and loss. She won the National Book Award in 2005 for The Year of Magical Thinking .

THE ARCHIVE

The new york public library acquires the papers of joan didion and john gregory dunne.

JOAN DIDION BOOKS

biography & memoir .

Joan Didion Blue Nights book cover with a portrait of Joan Didion and her infant daughter, Quintana Roo Dunne.

ESSAYS

Joan Didion Let Me Tell You What I Mean book cover with a portrait of Joan Didion.

FICTION

Joan Didion Run River book cover with a photo of tree branches reflected in water

WORLD POLITICS

Joan Didion Salvador book cover with a portrait of Joan Didion

THE NATIONWIDE BESTSELLER

Let me tell you what i mean.

With a foreword by Hilton Als, these pieces from 1968 to 2000, never before gathered together, offer an illuminating glimpse into the mind and process of a legendary figure. They showcase Joan Didion’s incisive reporting, her empathetic gaze, and her role as “an articulate witness to the most stubborn and intractable truths of our time” ( The New York Times Book Review ).

THE LATEST

JANUARY 27, 2023

New york public library acquires joan didion’s papers.

The joint archive of Didion and her husband, John Gregory Dunne, includes manuscripts, photographs, letters, dinner party guest lists and other personal items.

NEW YORK TIMES »

MEMORIAL SERVICE

A celebration of the life of joan didion.

On September 21, 2022, the Cathedral Church of Saint John Divine hosted a celebration of Joan Didion’s life and work.

Joan Didion’s Estate Is Heading to Auction

By Jessica Ritz

ARCHITECTURAL DIGEST »

Joan Didion Talks to Hari Kunzru About Loss, Blue Nights, and Giving Up the Yellow Corvette

By Hari Kunzru

LITERARY HUB »

Joan Didion and the Opposite of Magical Thinking

By Zadie Smith

THE NEW YORKER »

Joan Didion’s Magic Trick

By Caitlin Flanagan

THE ATLANTIC »

Our Lady of Deadpan

By Darryl Pinckney

NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS »

Remembering Essayist Joan Didion, a Keen Observer of American Culture

By Terry Gross

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Didion’s Prophetic Eye on America

By Michiko Kakutani

Joan Didion and the Voice of America

By Hilton Als

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By Frank Bruni

THE DOCUMENTARY

The center will not hold.

Joan Didion reflects on her remarkable career and personal struggles in this intimate documentary directed by her nephew, Griffin Dunne.

PBS NEWSHOUR

Remembering joan didion.

“She captured moments in American culture with penetrating clarity and style,” says PBS News Hour’s Jeffrey Brown in this remembrance of the life and work of Joan Didion.

Gathered here are some of the files, photographs, manuscripts, notes, book jackets, and other items connected to Joan Didion’s life and legacy. We’re making this remarkable body of work accessible to everyone and will be adding stories and galleries as new items become available.

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Let Me Tell You What I Mean by Joan Didion review – elegant essays spanning four decades

Rejection letters, California dreams and clear reflections on writing in a collection that explores self-doubt

I n the first essay of this new volume of previously uncollected pieces, Joan Didion makes a case against newspapers. Too often, she argues, their reporting style rests on “a quite factitious ‘ objectivity’”, which “lends the entire venture a mendacity” by failing to make explicit the writer’s own particular set of influences and biases. Didion praises instead magazines that cultivate a personal voice, and which aim to impart character and atmosphere rather than straightforward information: “They assume that the reader is a friend, that he is disturbed about something, and that he 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.” Often, she concludes, the real story is “the story not in the newspaper”.

This could be read as a slanted manifesto for Didion’s own style. Across her 60-year career, from her landmark essay collections Slouching Towards Bethlehem (1968) and The White Album (1979), through her formally innovative novels, to her devastating 2005 memoir The Year of Magical Thinking , Didion has established a way of narration that focuses not so much on events as on subtexts, atmospheres and perceptions. She is usually present in her essays as a voice rather than a character, observer rather than participant – though the boundaries regularly blur. Yet even when she’s not saying directly what she’s feeling, it’s there in the architecture of every cool, clear sentence, in the sounds, gestures and images on which she chooses to focus her attention.

At university, Didion writes here in mock self-deprecation, “I would try to contemplate the Hegelian dialectic and would find myself concentrating instead on a flowering pear tree outside my window and the particular way the petals fell on my floor”. Half of the 12 essays in this collection were written for the Saturday Evening Post in the late 1960s, while the latest is from 2000; in them we see Didion exploring the possibility of that attention to detail, working out who exactly the “I” in her writing is, and what it is she’s seeing.

Didion’s essay collections have always included overtly personal moments – “We are here on this island in the middle of the Pacific in lieu of filing for divorce,” she writes in “In the Islands” from The White Book , adding: “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.” This new collection contains several pieces of relatively straight autobiography: a funny essay describing the pain of her rejection from Stanford and subsequent summer spent “in sullen but mild rebellion” (“On Being Unchosen by the College of One’s Choice”); “Telling Stories”, which describes how out of place the 19-year-old Didion felt in the writers’ workshop she took for a semester in 1954, attempting to remain inconspicuous by shrinking into her raincoat while others regaled the group with experiences that seemed far more redolent of the “writer’s life” – international, glamorous, drug-induced – than anything Didion had known growing up in Sacramento. (She went on to take a job composing advertising copy for Vogue, which she credits with teaching her to write.) The same essay includes a ream of rejection letters for an early short story widely condemned as too depressing: “I’m sorry,” wrote a representative of Good Housekeeping magazine, “we are seldom inclined to give our readers this bad a time.”

But the pieces most revealing of Didion’s self are those that discuss the act of writing itself. In “Why I Write” (1976) Didion directly confronts the question of the first person – of what it means for a writer to assume an identity on the page and a relationship with an invisible reader. “In many ways,” she observes, “writing is the act of saying I, of imposing oneself upon other people, of saying listen to me, see it my way, change your mind .” In another essay, on Hemingway’s style, she parses precisely how the very grammar of his sentences reveal “a certain way of looking at the world”: Didion too has a specific way of looking that binds together all her work, whether she’s watching Nancy Reagan pretend to pick flowers for a photoshoot, attending a meeting of Gamblers Anonymous or a reunion of airforce veterans in a Las Vegas hospitality suite, or parsing the mission statement of Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia LLC. Didion writes of “needing room in which to play with what I did not understand”. Her pieces often feel ambiguous, even ambivalent, and her detachment can at times be bemusing: the reader is left wondering where her stake is grounded in the stories she tells. Yet her particular skill lies in asking questions too far-reaching to be contained on the page, that reverberate far beyond the essay, as her images lodge themselves in the reader’s conscience.

The collection – expansively introduced by Hilton Als – touches on many of the themes that run through Didion’s work: the power of illusion, which she learned about at Vogue and later in Hollywood; the unspoken dynamics of makeshift, often precarious communities; the dangerous thrill of pursuing dreams. Recalling San Simeon, the castle on a hill in California which she would glimpse from the highway as a child, she reflects on the impact of knowing that just beyond reach lay this opulent paradise of shimmering turrets and battlements. “San Simeon,” she writes, “was an imaginative idea that affected me, shaped my own imagination in the way that all children are shaped by the actual and emotional geography of the place in which they grow up, by the stories they are told and the stories they invent.” There’s an echo here of Didion’s most famous line: “We tell ourselves stories in order to live.” In that essay – “The White Album” – Didion describes a period between 1966 and 1971 when she “I began to doubt the premises of all the stories I had ever told myself”. Let Me Tell You What I Mean , its chapters largely rooted in this discombobulating period, is a valuable addition to the literature of self-doubt and self-awareness, an elegant untangling of what and why we remember and forget.

Joan Didion

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Out of Bethlehem

By Louis Menand

Didion in Golden Gate Park San Francisco in April 1967 reporting the story that became “Slouching Towards Bethlehem.”...

In the late spring of 1967, Joan Didion, accompanied by a photojournalist named Ted Streshinsky, began making trips from Berkeley, where she was staying, to Haight-Ashbury, to do research for a piece on the hippies for The Saturday Evening Post . Didion was thirty-two, and she had been a magazine writer for eleven years. She and her husband, John Gregory Dunne, had moved from New York City to Southern California three years earlier, and, in March, 1966, they had adopted a daughter and named her Quintana Roo, after an area on the Yucatán Peninsula.

In the summer of 1967, the Haight was a magnet for people looking for a place to do drugs. Didion hung out mainly with runaways and acidheads. She met people like Deadeye, a dealer, and his old lady, Gerry, who wrote poetry but gave it up after her guitar was stolen. Deadeye tells Didion he is looking for a ride to New York City. She shows him a sign offering a ride to Chicago. He asks her where Chicago is.

She meets Jeff and his fifteen-year-old girlfriend, Debbie, who has run away from home. Didion asks them about their plans. “We’re just gonna let it all happen,” Jeff says. She meets Steve, who says, “I found love on acid. But I lost it. Now I’m finding it again. With nothing but grass.” She meets Vicki, who dropped out of Laguna High, “because I had mono,” and followed the Grateful Dead to San Francisco. She meets a Hare Krishna named Michael, whose brother-in-law explains that “if everybody chanted there wouldn’t be any problem with the police or anybody,” and a five-year-old named Susan, who takes LSD and informs Didion that she is in High Kindergarten.

Didion got plenty of material, but she had no idea how to make a story out of it. Under deadline pressure, she decided to create a verbal montage of scenes from the Haight. She chose a phrase from Yeats’s “The Second Coming” for the title, and, in September, “The Hippie Generation: Slouching Towards Bethlehem,” with photographs by Streshinsky, was a cover story in The Saturday Evening Post . An editor at Farrar, Straus & Giroux, Henry Robbins, encouraged Didion to turn the piece into a book. Nine months later, “Slouching Towards Bethlehem” appeared as the title essay in her first collection of nonfiction. It is the phrase everyone knows Joan Didion by.

“Slouching Towards Bethlehem” is a classic of what was later named the New Journalism. Didion used a vernacular voice that mimicked the laid-back aimlessness of Haight speech. More New Journalistically, she adopted a Haight personality. She blended into the scene; she internalized its confusions. She gave readers the sense that she was putting herself at risk by reporting this story, that she might get sucked into the Haight abyss and become a lost soul, too:

We drink some more green tea and talk about going up to Malakoff Diggings in Nevada County because some people are starting a commune there and Max thinks it would be a groove to take acid in the diggings. He said maybe we could go next week, or the week after, or anyway sometime before his case comes up. Almost everyone I meet in San Francisco has to go to court at some point in the middle future. I never ask why.

“Slouching Towards Bethlehem” is not a very good piece of standard journalism, though. Didion did no real interviewing or reporting. The hippies she tried to have conversations with said “Groovy” a lot and recycled flower-power clichés. The cops refused to talk to her. So did the Diggers, who ran a sort of hippie welfare agency in the Haight. The Diggers accused Didion of “media poisoning,” by which they meant coverage in the mainstream press designed to demonize the counterculture.

The Diggers were not wrong. The mainstream press (such as the places Didion wrote for, places like The Saturday Evening Post ) was conflicted about the hippie phenomenon. It had journalistic sex appeal. Hippies were photogenic, free love and the psychedelic style made good copy, and the music was uncontroversially great. Around the time Didion was in San Francisco, the Beatles released “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band,” and soon afterward the Monterey Pop Festival was held. D. A. Pennebaker’s film of the concert came out in 1968 and introduced many people to Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, and Ravi Shankar. Everybody loved Ravi Shankar.

Ravi Shankar did not use drugs, however. The drugs were the sketchy part of the story, LSD especially. People thought that LSD made teen-age girls jump off bridges. By the time Didion’s article came out, Time had run several stories about “the dangerous LSD craze.” And a lot of Didion’s piece is about LSD, people on acid saying “Wow” while their toddlers set fire to the living room. The cover of the Post was a photograph of a slightly sinister man, looking like a dealer, in a top hat and face paint—an evil Pied Piper. That photograph was what the Diggers meant by “media poisoning.”

There was nothing unusual about finding, at the core of a life-style trend of which the use of controlled substances is an integral feature, a group of full-time dropouts. Seven years earlier, the sociologist Ned Polsky had gone to Greenwich Village and the Lower East Side to study the Beats. He found the same mixture Didion found in San Francisco: runaways and people who, when he interviewed them, rehearsed the Beat mantras. Having a job is selling out; politics are a drag; and so on. What they all had in common, Polsky concluded, was drugs. Only a small proportion were addicts, but a Beat’s day was basically about buying and taking drugs.

And there weren’t that many of them. Most of the people who walked around the Village looking like Beats in 1960, like most of the people who walked around San Francisco or Berkeley or Cambridge looking like hippies in 1967, were weekend dropouts. They were contingent rebels. They put on the costumes; they went to the concerts and got high; and then they went back to school or back to work. It was a life style, not a life.

Even if you factored in the contingent leisure force, the hippie counterculture was small. The sensationalized press coverage of the period has left a permanent image of the late nineteen-sixties as a time when everyone was tripping or stoned. In 1967, when Didion’s article came out, only one per cent of college students reported having tried LSD. In 1969, only four per cent of adults said they had smoked marijuana. Recreational drug use soared in the nineteen-seventies, but the press was no longer interested. The whole thing had stopped being sexy.

Didion presented her article as an investigation into what she called “social hemorrhaging.” She suggested that what was going on in Haight-Ashbury was the symptom of some sort of national unravelling. But she knew that, at the level of “getting the story,” her piece was a failure. She could see, with the X-ray clarity she appears to have been born with, what was happening on the street; she could make her readers see it; but she couldn’t explain it.

In the preface to the book, she noted that no one had understood the article. “I had never gotten a feedback so universally beside the point,” she wrote. A few years later, in a radio interview on KPFR, she blamed herself. “Usually on a piece there comes a day when you know you never have to do another interview,” she said. “You can go home, you’ve gotten it. Well, that day never came on that piece. . . . That piece is a blank for me still.”

People liked the collection “Slouching Towards Bethlehem” (though it was not, at first, a big seller). People were intrigued by “Play It as It Lays,” Didion’s second novel, which came out two years later (though it got some hostile reviews). Mainly, though, everyone was fascinated by the authorial persona, the hypersensitive neurasthenic who drove a Corvette Sting Ray, the frail gamine with the migraine headaches and the dark glasses and the searchlight mind, the writer who seemed to know in her bones what readers were afraid to face, which is that the center no longer holds, the falcon cannot hear the falconer, the story line is broken.

Didion created the part—she was a master of the author photo—and she could have played it right up to the final curtain. But, after “Slouching Towards Bethlehem” and “Play It as It Lays,” she completely reassessed not only her practice as a journalist but her understanding of American life, her politics, and even the basis of her moral judgments. She decided she wanted to get what she had failed to get with the hippies. She wanted to get the story.

Tracy Daugherty’s “The Last Love Song” (St. Martin’s) is a biography of Joan Didion written partly in the style of Joan Didion, a style of ellipses, fragments, and refrains. This is not what you ideally want in a biography. The point of a biography is to reveal what’s behind the ellipses. Daugherty operated under difficulties, though. He was unable to persuade Didion to coöperate, and it’s obvious that many people close to Didion refused to talk to him as well.

That doesn’t mean that he wasn’t thorough. He had access to Didion’s papers, housed at Berkeley, and a large amount of information was already out there. For someone with a reputation for being guarded and tongue-tied, Didion did a lot of promotion. She went on book tours and submitted to profiles. She did radio; she did television; she talked to Publishers Weekly . It added up.

She also wrote obsessively about herself—not only in her memoirs, “The Year of Magical Thinking,” about the death of her husband, and “Blue Nights,” about the death of her daughter, but in reported pieces and in personal essays, which she started producing almost as soon as she started publishing. (She eventually got bored with the genre and gave it up. “I didn’t want to become Miss Lonelyhearts,” she said.) She once delivered a lecture called “Why I Write.” She began by pointing out that the sound you hear in those three words is “I, I, I.”

Much of “The Last Love Song” is therefore an intelligent and elegant paraphrase of things Didion has already said or written. There is some sniping from the odd acquaintance or estranged friend, but revelations weren’t in the cards. The “real” Didion Daugherty shows us is just the obverse of the image: ambitious (hence the anxiety), controlling (hence the brittleness), and chic (hence the Corvette).

You could work up a dichotomy here, but it doesn’t get you very far. Didion and Dunne made an excellent living as Hollywood screenwriters and script doctors. They lived in Malibu and then in Brentwood Park, O.J.’s old nabe, and were part of the Hollywood talent élite. Dunne’s brother Dominick was a producer for movies and television; their nephew was Griffin Dunne, the actor. And Didion knows something about fashion and style—she began her career at Mademoiselle and Vogue . But there’s no reason that any of this should be incompatible with one day writing about death squads in El Salvador.

John Dunne was a gregarious man, a social drinker and a raconteur, and he and Didion worked up a sort of Penn and Teller routine. One sang, the other mostly didn’t. They rarely gave separate audiences. If you asked to speak to one, you almost invariably spoke to both, even on the telephone. “I was at first surprised that John Dunne sat through most of the interview and did nearly all the talking,” Susan Braudy wrote after interviewing Didion for Ms ., in 1977. Didion’s explanation is that she isn’t a talker; she’s a writer. “I’m only myself in front of my typewriter,” she finally told Braudy. There is no reason to doubt this. The person we’re interested in is the person on the page.

It’s a common mistake, in assessing Didion’s work, to interpret her sensibility as a reflection of the times—to imagine, as Daugherty puts it, that she has “always spoken for us.” That’s certainly not the way she has presented herself. In a column she started writing for Life in 1969, she introduced herself as “a woman who for some time now has felt radically separated from most of the ideas that seem to interest other people.” She’s not like us. She’s weird. That’s why we want to read her.

Didion came from a family of Republicans. She was born in Sacramento in 1934, a fifth-generation Californian. Her father started out in insurance, speculated in real estate, and ended up spending most of his career in the military, a very California trifecta. Turned down by Stanford, Didion attended Berkeley, in an era when campus life was socially conventional and politically dormant. In 1955, she won a guest editorship at Mademoiselle and spent a few months in New York City. A year later, she won a similar contest at Vogue , and she moved to New York in the fall of 1956 and began her magazine career there. Leaving home, she later said, “just seems part of your duty in life.”

Didion worked at Vogue for ten years. She continued to write for Mademoiselle , and, in 1960, she began contributing to National Review , William F. Buckley’s conservative magazine. She wrote pieces about John Wayne, her favorite movie star, and, in the 1964 Presidential election, she voted for Barry Goldwater. She adored Goldwater. It was hardly a surprise that she found Haight-Ashbury repugnant. Her editors at the Post understood perfectly how she would react. They designed the cover before she handed in the piece.

Didion’s transformation as a writer did not involve a conversion to the counterculture or to the New Left. She genuinely loathed the hippies, whom she associated with characters like Charles Manson, and she thought that the Black Panthers and the student radicals were both frightening and ridiculous. She found Jim Morrison kind of ridiculous, too. Polsky, in his study of the Beats, had dismissed the theory, endorsed by some social critics in the nineteen-fifties, that disaffected dropouts are potential recruits for authoritarian political movements. Didion never rejected that theory. She thinks that dropouts are symptoms of a dangerous social pathology.

What changed was her understanding of where dropouts come from, of why people turn into runaways and acidheads and members of the Symbionese Liberation Army, why parents abandon their children on highway dividers, why Harlem teen-agers go rampaging through Central Park at night, why middle-class boys form “posses” and prey sexually on young girls—and, above all, why the press fixates on these stories.

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Didion later said that her period of self-doubt began around 1966. “Everything I was taught seems beside the point,” she wrote in Life in 1969. “The point itself seems increasingly obscure.” She had said something similar in her piece about the hippies: “We had somehow neglected to tell these children the rules of the game we happened to be playing.”

Most readers would have had a hard time knowing exactly what rules she was talking about, or what “the point” was that everything seemed beside. She probably didn’t have a very clear idea herself. Her moment of insight came in 1971 or 1972, during a summer visit with Quintana, then five or six, to Old Sacramento, an area of the city reconstructed to look like downtown Sacramento, where Didion’s father’s great-grandfather owned a saloon, circa 1850.

She began telling Quintana about all the ancestors who had once walked on those sidewalks, and then she remembered that Quintana was adopted. Quintana had no relationship to Old Sacramento and its sidewalks and saloons. And this thought made her realize, as she put it later, that, “in fact, I had no more attachment to this wooden sidewalk than Quintana did: it was no more than a theme, a decorative effect.” Looking back, she decided that this was the moment when the story she had grown up with—“the entire enchantment under which I had lived my life”—began to seem foreign.

Didion described the Old Sacramento episode in her book about California, “Where I Was From.” That book, with its grammatically pointed title (the phrase, of course, is “where I am from”), was published in 2003, but she had tried to write it thirty years earlier. She decided to wait until her parents were dead.

She also changed her publishing venue. She began writing for The New York Review of Books in 1973, at first about the movies, but increasingly about politics. Her editor there, Robert Silvers, was one of the people not interviewed by Daugherty, and this leaves a major hole in the biography. For Silvers was the key figure in Didion’s journalistic transformation. Her books “Salvador” (1983), “Miami” (1987), and “Political Fictions” (2001) are all based on pieces she wrote for him.

In 1988, after she and Dunne returned to New York, she began writing for The New Yorker as well. Daugherty didn’t interview her editors there, including Robert Gottlieb and Tina Brown. Yet many of the essays in the nonfiction collection “After Henry” (1992) and important parts of “Where I Was From” were first published in The New Yorker . (Full disclosure: you are reading this piece in The New Yorker .)

“Where I Was From” is the central book in Didion’s career. The subject is American self-deception. The California version has to do with what Didion calls “the crossing story as origin myth.” This is the legend of the pioneers in covered wagons who trekked across the Rockies and settled the state, the men and women who made the desert bloom—Didion’s ancestors. It’s a story about independence, self-reliance, and loyalty to the group. Growing up, Didion had been taught that for the generations that followed the challenge was to keep those virtues alive. There was always a new wave of settlers ready to sell out the pioneer spirit.

After the Old Sacramento moment, Didion came to see the whole pioneer mystique as bogus from the start. The cultivation of California was not the act of rugged pioneers, she decided. It was the act of the federal government, which built the dams and the weirs and the railroads that made the state economically exploitable, public money spent on behalf of private business. Didion called it “the subsidized monopolization” of the state.

Big business had always run California. First, there were the ranches, then the corporate agribusinesses, and then, after the Second World War, the aeronautics industry, Boeing and Douglas, Lockheed and Rockwell. Defense contracts and government-funded infrastructure kept these businesses flush. Everyone else was a pawn in the game, living in a fantasy of hardy individualism and cheering on economic growth that benefitted only a few.

Social stability was a mirage. It lasted only as long as the going was good for business. When conditions got cheaper elsewhere or defense contracts shrank or mergers became appealing, the plants were shut down, workers were laid off, and the middle-class dream vanished in the smog. “This process,” Didion wrote, “one of trading the state to outside owners in exchange for their (it now seems) entirely temporary agreement to enrich us . . . had in fact begun at the time Americans first entered the state, took what they could, and, abetted by the native weakness for boosterism, set about selling the rest.”

When the social structure starts to crack is when the dropouts and the delinquents and the crazies turn up. These are not people who don’t know the rules. These are people who can see, without understanding why, that the rules no longer make sense. But, once people like that are thrown out of the system, once they become druggies or panhandlers or abusers of various sorts, no one wants them back in. They get scapegoated. Individual moral failure is taken to be the problem. It can’t be the system.

Part of wagon-train morality was leaving the weakest behind to freeze in the mountain passes. Survival, not caring, is what Didion thinks that ethos finally boiled down to—“careless self-interest and optimism,” the California mentality. California’s answer to the problem of broken people was to build more prisons to put them in.

Didion’s most famous work in this mode is “Sentimental Journeys,” her article on the Central Park Jogger, which appeared in The New York Review in 1991. “Sentimental Journeys” is not really about the crime—the beating and rape in Central Park, in 1989, of a young white professional named Trisha Meili * —and it’s not about the trial of the mostly African-American teen-agers who were supposed to have confessed to it. The article is really about the coverage.

There were 3,255 reported rapes in New York City in 1989, some of them horrific. The press and the politicians seized on the Jogger story, Didion thought, because they saw a way to make it into an exemplary tale. The key to that story was that Meili, although terribly battered, survived. Her personal fortitude could be made a symbol of the fortitude that all true New Yorkers display when the healthy frictions inherent in the city’s “gorgeous mosaic,” as its mayor, David Dinkins, called it, spin temporarily, if tragically, out of control. Nous sommes the Jogger.

Didion argued that Meili’s story was milked to distract attention from the city’s underlying problems—specifically, the decay of its economic base, a condition that had been laid bare by the stock-market crash of October 19, 1987, Black Monday. “Stories in which terrible crimes are inflicted on innocent victims,” she wrote, “have long performed as the city’s endorphins, a built-in source of natural morphine working to blur the edges of real and to a great extent insoluble problems.” (Son of Sam may have performed a similar role in the nineteen-seventies, the “Bronx is burning” decade.)

Didion thinks that this is why the press latches on to stories like the Jogger’s. It’s not because those stories tell us who we are. It’s because they don’t. They leave unexamined and untouched the class antagonisms and economic failures that are the underlying causes of socially destructive events. Personal stories feed the American illusion that the system is never the cause of anything. Those stories are always about fortitude, character, loyalty to the group.

The journalistic nut of the Jogger piece is the case of Laurie Sue Rosenthal. She was the mistress of an assistant city commissioner for elevator and boiler inspections, a man named Peter Franconeri, who happened to own an apartment at 36 East Sixty-eighth Street, between Madison and Park, and a house in Southampton. On the night of April 26, 1990, Rosenthal called her parents, in Queens, from the Sixty-eighth Street apartment and said she was being beaten. Sometime after that call, she died. In the morning, Franconeri rolled her body up in a carpet, put it out with the building’s trash, and went to work.

The story did get into the papers, but officials downplayed the significance. “There were some minor bruises,” said a spokeswoman for the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner. A police officer complained to a reporter about Franconeri, “Everybody got upside down because of who he was. If it happened to anyone else, nothing would have come of it. A summons would have been issued and that would have been the end of it.”

Essentially, it was. Laurie Sue Rosenthal was determined to have suffered an accidental death from the combined effects of alcohol and Darvocet. Franconeri pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor and got seventy-five hours of community service. The suspects in the Jogger case got sentences of five to fifteen years, for crimes including a rape that, it turned out, they had not committed. But the Central Park suspects did not belong to what Didion called “the conspiracy of those in the know, those with a connection, those with a rabbi at the Department of Sanitation or the Buildings Department or the School Construction Authority or Foley Square, the conspiracy of those who believed everybody got upside down because of who it was, it happened to anybody else, a summons gets issued and that’s the end of it.”

“Sentimental Journeys” was a brilliant interpretation of the Jogger story, and an impressive display of journalistic intuition. Didion was right to suspect that the accused teen-agers were wrongly convicted, something that was not established until 2002. She was wrong to suspect, though, that the city was on the rocks. Her hunch was that a shift from manufacturing to financial-services jobs was unsustainable. It did look that way for a while. But after 1992 the market took off, real-estate values along with it, and the city has not looked back. It is no longer fear of violent crime that is driving the middle class out of Manhattan.

Didion has always disliked interviewing. This is partly a matter of temperament: she doesn’t think on her feet; she thinks in front of a keyboard. But it’s also because she is convinced that you don’t learn anything from interviews. “It doesn’t matter to me what people say to me in the interview,” she has said, “because I don’t trust it.” She considers reporters who fetishize the personal interview vacuous. “In any real sense,” she wrote in a piece on the best-selling books by the Washington Post’s Bob Woodward, “these books are ‘about’ nothing but the author’s own method.” She prefers documents, and most of her political journalism is based on a careful reading of newspaper stories, press releases, hearing transcripts, and the like.

This makes her later work, particularly the pieces collected in “Political Fictions,” which treat subjects like the Iran-Contra affair and the Starr Report, seem a little more like literary criticism than like reporting. Didion was an English major at Berkeley at a time when close reading was the gold standard in literary analysis, and Daugherty suggests that those methods stuck with her. She has said as much herself.

There is a small but immitigable fallacy in the theory of close reading, though, and it applies to political journalism as well as to the reading of poetry. The text doesn’t reveal its secrets just by being stared at. It reveals its secrets to those who already pretty much know what secrets they expect to find. Texts are always packed, by the reader’s prior knowledge and expectations, before they are unpacked. The teacher has already inserted into the hat the rabbit whose production in the classroom awes the undergraduates.

Didion interprets the political text of American life according to a set of beliefs about disparities of wealth and class. She arrived at those assumptions worthily: by analyzing her own education and experience. And that’s what she sees when she reads the newspaper or follows a campaign. She is never less than amazed by the willingness of everyone in the press to pretend, in the name of keeping the show going, that American life is really not about money and power.

In 1988, she covered Michael Dukakis’s campaign for President. Dukakis was having “regular guy” problems running against George H. W. Bush, a Connecticut blueblood who had somehow managed to trans-class himself into a self-made Texan. It was just the sort of non-issue issue that Didion thinks has completely divorced electoral politics from the needs of the actual electorate. To address the guy gap, Dukakis and his aides came up with the plan of having the candidate, whenever his plane landed somewhere, play catch with his press secretary on the tarmac. Reporters duly filmed this performance, often in hundred-degree heat, to be shown on the evening news. It was, as Didion wrote, “a repeated moment witnessed by many people all of whom believed it to be a setup yet most of whom believed that only an outsider, only someone too ‘naïve’ to know the rules of the game, would so describe it.”

She thinks that this is how what she calls “the permanent political class”—the press, the talk-show experts, the campaign strategists, the political parties, even the candidates themselves—has rigged the game. Everyone knows that what you see in politics is fake or confected, but everyone’s O.K. with that, because it’s all been focus-grouped.

One topic that Didion does like to talk about is writing. “I learned a lot of fictional technique” from script writing, she explained to Hilton Als, in an interview in 2006. And the novels are screenplay-like. She told Als that she became impatient with “the conventions of writing,” like description. Her scenes tend to be story-boarded—this character is here, that character is there. The main action is the dialogue.

You can see from the deftness and precision of that dialogue why she and Dunne were in such demand as script doctors. Although Didion’s novels are lurid enough, much of the speech is comic, in a gimlet-eyed, dead-end sort of way. But the books are literary caterpillars, texts that seem to be seeking their ultimate realization in the form of a motion picture.

The fiction has been influential: Bret Easton Ellis, who went to college with Quintana, is a sworn disciple. But Didion’s nonfiction is what sets her apart. Daugherty thinks that it was the Vogue years that made the prose Didionesque, and this seems right. Didion is the quintessential magazine writer. Her books are short. “I always aim for a reading in one sitting,” she told Als, and that is how people normally read magazine pieces. The job of the magazine writer is never to give readers a reason to stop before they reach the end.

The No. 1 sin in print journalism is repetition. Pages are money; editorial space is finite. Writers who waste it don’t last. Conditions demand a willingness to compress and a talent for concision. The ellipses and the refrains that characterize much of Didion’s writing are methods of economizing the exposition and managing the reader’s experience, ways of getting the reader to participate in the job of making sense of whatever it is, hippies or someone who once wrote about hippies, that the writer is trying to think through. ♦

* An earlier version of this article misspelled Trisha Meili’s last name.

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80 Free Essays & Articles by Joan Didion

Posted by John | Jul 11, 2017 | Essays , Famous Authors | 0 |

Joan Didion, born 5th December 1934 is an American author, well known for her amazing writing works and her literary journalism. Her novels and essays explore the disintegration of American morals and cultural chaos, where the overriding theme is individual and social fragmentation. A sense of anxiety or dread permeates much of her work. Her notable and popular books include The Year of Magical Thinking (2005) , Slouching Towards Bethlehem (1968) , Play It as It Lays (1970) , Democracy (1984) and many more. Her breakthrough came when she won first place in the Prix de Paris essay contest sponsored by Vogue, and was awarded a job as a research assistant at the magazine, having written a story on the San Francisco architect, William Wilson Wurster.

After 7 years at Vogue, she wrote her first fiction novel, Run, River (1963) . 5 years later, after gotten married to John Gregory Dunne, she published her first work of nonfiction, Slouching Towards Bethlehem . It’s basically a collection of magazine pieces about her experiences in California. Spanning over 54 years from the day of her first book till today, Joan Didion has published over 18 books, 5 of them fictions and 13 nonfictions. She has also written 6 screenplays.

Goodbye to All That

by Joan Didion

Didion’s pratices “New Journalism” as her writing style, where writers tend to turn away from “just the facts” and focus more upon the dialogue of the situation and the scenarios that the author may have experienced. This can help to represent the truth and reality through the author’s eyes.

Didion’s Slouching Towards Bethlehem exemplifies much of what New Journalism represents as it explores the cultural values and experiences of American life in the 1960s. Didion includes her personal feelings and memories in this first person narrative, describing the chaos of individuals and the way in which they perceive the world. Here Didion rejects conventional journalism, and instead prefers to create a subjective approach to essays, a style that is her own. – Wikipedia.

“I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear.” – Joan Didion

Most of the essays listed below are only viewable as online articles. So no downloadable versions in PDF or EPUB. Majority of these essays and articles come from major online magazines such as Vogue, The New York Review of Books and The New Yorker. We have also provided a lits of the main pages where you can find all of Didion’s works within these sites, so feel free to browse based on your reading preference.

18 Free Essays by Joan Didion

Marrying Absurd
The Santa Ana
On Morality
On Self Respect
Some Dreamers of the Golden Dream
In Sable and Dark Glasses
On Keeping a Notebook
Why I Write
Fixed Opinions, or The Hinge of History
Insider Baseball
The Women’s Movement
EveryWoman.com
Joan Didion, The Art of Nonfiction No. 1
The Teachings of Speaker Gingrich
The Case of Theresa Schiavo

62 Free Essays from Various Online Magazines

2 Essays by Vogue
49 Essays by The New York Review of Books
4 Essays by Genius
7 Essays by The New Yorker

Joan Didion in her New York City apartment, 73 years young.

Image credit achievement.org

We hope you enjoy reading the marvelous works of Joan Didion as much as we’ve enjoyed compiling them. Don’t forget to leave your comment if we’ve missed out any important information. We’ll also be covering more authors in the future in regards to their essay portfolios, so stay tuned, bookmark our site and don’t forget to subscribe to our newsletter to get the latest postings as they’re posted. Happy reading!

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How Joan Didion broke free

Joan Didion has died aged 87. In this essay, Leo Robson explored how the chronicler of American counterculture was tormented by neuroses – until she learned to turn them to her advantage.

By Leo Robson

Joan Didion – the author of three memoirs, two political travelogues, five novels, and now, with Let Me Tell You What I Mean , seven collections of essays – was born in northern California, in 1934. Her upbringing was somewhat fraught. Her father drank and suffered breakdowns, her mother intoned the dirge-like motto, “what difference does it make?”, and Sacramento County unfolded its annual cycle of fire, flooding, wind and drought. Meanwhile, beady, small-boned Joan passed the time reflecting on the fact – or so it seemed to her – that nothing matters, and scratching away in the notebook she had been handed, at the age of five, to stop her “whining”.

As a means of psychic survival – to keep the world from “eating her up”, in the words of the critic Alfred Kazin – she generated an array of defences and dependencies which are now part of Didion lore: the nicotine and nosebleeds, the sunglasses and sweet tooth. There was also, Christopher Isherwood reported in his diary, a voice that she wielded as an “instrument of aggression”, and “the most thrilling medicine cabinet” – beside her own mother’s – that the film producer Julia Phillips had ever seen. A paradox defined her marriage to the writer John Gregory Dunne. He was always by her side, and always “a hothead”. What would set him off, she was asked? “Everything.” Just as the “order” symbolised by Los Angeles swimming pools affirmed her fear of water as “uncontrollable”, so Dunne insulated Didion from that sense of pervasive precariousness of which he was also a courier. She needed reassurance that things would be OK – and also that she was justified in feeling under siege.

But what really kept her going – gave her the keenest sense of the relationship between engulfment and mastery – was the quest for perfect prose. A belief in that idea will have its downside, or side effects. “There certainly is what doctors call a ‘migraine personality’,” she wrote in her essay “In Bed”, “and that personality tends to be ambitious, inward, intolerant of error, rather rigidly organised, perfectionist.” But the kind of person who testifies to a more-or-less equal terror of having an article killed (“soul-searing”), of witnessing “one’s own words in print” (“mortal humiliation”) and of committing to paper any sentence that would “expose me as not good enough” is likely to produce something worthwhile.

[See also: 4 new books reviewed in short ]

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Since the appearance of Slouching Towards Bethlehem (1968), the first and best of her non-fiction books, the sound of Didion’s sublimated whine has been among the most distinctive in Anglophone letters. (Who rivals her, among living writers of American prose, for potency and intensity and influence? If the question isn’t rhetorical, the only conceivable reply is Don DeLillo.)

The critic Hilton Als, in his superb foreword to Let Me Tell You What I Mean – the longest piece in this rather random gathering of previously uncollected essays written over a 40-year period – declares that Didion’s non-fiction reads like fiction. But he’s far too quick to narrow the parameters. “Or, more specifically,” he clarifies, “has the metaphorical power of great fiction.”

Less specifically, Didion’s essays can be treated as companions to novels including Run River (1961) and A Book of Common Prayer (1977), or as a series of dazzling linked short stories, with a narrator who waxes and wanes, sometimes violently, in her awareness of the role played by her own perspective in mediating experiences and generating reactions. When, towards the end of a feature on Gamblers Anonymous, reprinted in the new book, she decides there was “something not quite right, something troubling”, only the second formulation rings true. Didion tells us that she associates the often-used noun “serenity” with death; she prefers to be in places where “no one counted days”. She may feel troubled by all this, but how much can it really be said to dent the legitimacy – the “rightness” – of the fellowship or its approach to recovery?

It’s a problem that’s liable to occur when, for largely financial reasons, a world-class neurasthenic with a novel on the go assumes a rationalist position –“Didion the Opiner”, in Als’s term. At points, though never reliably, Didion recognised this conundrum. In the preface to Slouching Towards Bethlehem , she acknowledges that her writing “reflects, sometimes gratuitously, how I feel”. At the end of “Notes from a Native Daughter”, an elegy to Sacramento written in 1965, she wonders if she has been “playing out unawares” the role of the girl in Gerard Manley Hopkins’s poem, “Spring and Fall”, who thinks she is grieving the arrival of autumn, but is really mourning for herself.

In “On Keeping a Notebook”, another essay collected in Slouching Towards Bethlehem , she says she sometimes imagines that her “notebook is about other people”, but of course “it is not”; the common denominator is “the implacable ‘I’”. In a 1968 column about the underground press, the opening item in Let Me Tell You What I Mean , Didion complains about the “factitious” objectivity of most journalism.

During the same period, Didion also published what is probably these days her most beloved essay, “Goodbye to All That”, originally printed as “Farewell to the Enchanted City”, a sublime piece of evocation – basically a string of unforgettable details – that is also a masterpiece of myopia. It concerns Didion’s experience of falling out of love with New York. When things got “very bad” in the early months of 1962, she recalled: “There were certain parts of the city which I had to avoid… I hurt the people I cared about, and insulted those I did not… I cried until I was not even aware when I was crying and when I was not, cried in elevators and in taxis and in Chinese laundries.” Didion visited a doctor. He told her that she was depressed, and recommended a “specialist”, but, she recalls: “I did not go.” Didion’s own diagnosis, looking back, was that New York is a city “for only the very young” – surely she hadn’t been expecting the doctor to say that? – and so Didion and Dunne moved to California.

But, as things turned out, that didn’t mark the end of tears and terror. In June, 1968, Didion suffered an attack of vertigo and nausea, and this time she did “go”– to the outpatient psychiatric clinic at St John’s Hospital, in Santa Monica. Basic “reality contact”, the resulting report concluded, was “obviously and seriously impaired”.

Writing at the end of 1969, in her often-quoted first column for Life – which explains that she and Dunne have travelled to Hawaii “in lieu of filing for divorce” – Didion displayed a degree of clarity about her “emotional shock” that had been entirely absent from “Goodbye to All That”. She could easily turn her gaze outwards, she explains, blaming the larger “cultural breakdown”, but that would be “just one more stylish shell game”. She was not, she conceded, “the society in microcosm”, just a 34-year-old woman with “bad nerves sitting on an island in the middle of the Pacific waiting for a tidal wave that will not come”.

And yet in “The White Album”, the title essay of Didion’s second collection, which appeared in 1979, Didion appears all too happy to engage in shell games. “We tell ourselves stories in order to live,” the first section begins. She expands: “We interpret what we see, select the most workable of the multiple choices. We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images.”

If, at a certain point in 1962, she struggled to “live”, that was because stories stopped making sense. As she had written in “Slouching Towards Bethlehem”, her electrifying portrait of hippies in the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco: “The centre was not holding.” It is obvious to most Didion readers, as it had been to Didion, that the centre was really inside herself, but in that essay and elsewhere, she encountered strong corroboration. Who wouldn’t feel that things were falling apart if they were confronted, as Didion was, by a five-year-old girl wearing white lipstick and tripping on acid?

L et Me Tell You What I Mean reprints half a dozen essays that first appeared in 1968 and deal with subjects like Nancy Reagan’s frantic self-promotion and William Randolph Hearst’s “phantasmagoric” castle. Too often, though, Didion’s choice of subject is correlative to her mood or mindset, and plainly ill-suited to the purpose. In “The White Album”, Didion quotes a chunk of her psychiatric report; it’s terrifying. The “only” comment that Didion offers, a whole decade on, is that the state described does not seem “an inappropriate response” to Los Angeles during that summer – though many of the events she depicts in fact occurred later – just as crying in a Chinese laundry was not an inappropriate response to being a resident of Manhattan at the age of 28.

“The White Album” describes her encounter with the Doors and the Black Panthers, the night Janis Joplin came by and asked for “brandy-and-Benedictine” (“Music people never wanted ordinary drinks”), but doesn’t consider such potentially pertinent factors as her neglectful upbringing, Dunne’s rages, the imminent publication of Slouching Towards Bethlehem , or the fact she had recently adopted a daughter.

In another essay, “On the Morning After the Sixties”, written in 1970 just months after Didion said she wasn’t a microcosm of society, she declares that she is “a child of my time”, then proceeds to argue that her contemporaries at Berkeley had been obedient or quietist because collective action was just “one more way of escaping the personal, of masking for a while that dread of the meaningless which was man’s fate”. Another way of escaping the personal is to claim kinship with a generation and membership of a species, then ascribe to both your own penchant for nihilism. (In the Hopkins poem, the “blight man was born for” was something broader: know-ledge of death.)

This tendency towards “intellectualisation” and “projection”, to borrow the terms of the report, also governs the thinking of Maria Wyeth in Didion’s most enduring novel, Play It As It Lays (1970). Maria has lost all faith in “‘reasons’” and causality, and is convinced she is right to do so, despite being institutionalised. (At one point she compares herself to the heroine of Gaslight .) But then Wyeth is not the author – or even the sole narrator – of Play It As It Lays . Didion’s fiction exhibits a degree of unconscious self-insight lacking from the personal journalism – unless, that is, we choose to read the journalism as something else.

[See also: In search of a language of loss ]

An essay, “On Being Unchosen by the College of One’s Choice”, reprinted in the new book explains that, on being rejected by Stanford, Didion “thought about swallowing the contents of an old bottle of codeine-and-Empirin” while picturing herself in an oxygen tent with the director of admissions “hovering outside”. It’s possible to believe that Didion is relaying these details with a degree of detachment, or bafflement, or amusement. Such a pretence is harder to sustain in the case of the 1978 reminiscence “Telling Stories”, which descends into a blow-by-blow account of a minor professional setback Didion had a decade before; the extreme reaction here is the essay.

In “The White Album”, Didion recalls that her loss of faith in stories or a narrative line lasted until 1971. But her 1972 essay “The Women’s Movement” exhibits the closely related belief that, in the words of the report, “all human effort is foredoomed to failure”. In 1974, she described the history of Bogotá as “a mirage” and remembered, of her time there, “mainly images” that were “difficult to connect”. “The White Album” itself – which was completed in 1978 – is a several-thousand-word justification of her despair, which concludes with the none-too-triumphant realisation that writing about her experience of late-1960s Los Angeles “has not yet helped to see what it means”.

At the start of her next book, Salvador (1983), Didion claims that “no ground is solid, no depth of field reliable”. Paul Theroux, writing as an expert on the region, couldn’t understand what she meant. El Salvador, he said, is “a miserably poor, overpopulated, badly governed, and politically and religiously divided police state”. Didion’s snapshots of an atomised West Coast, like her memories of a meaning-deprived East Coast metropolis, provide a matchless, if covert, record of depression, and her piece of extended reportage was, in Theroux’s reading, an “excellent account of being nervous”.

The way forward required a perspectival shift. Didion couldn’t reverse or deny her exhaustion. But she needed to embrace it, once and for all, as her own. The first sign of a turning point came – not very surprisingly – in a work of fiction. “Cards on the table,” the narrator “Joan Didion” announces near the start of Democracy (1984). Then she alludes to “a point in my life when I lacked certainty… lacked conviction, lacked patience in the past and interest in memory; lacked faith even in my own technique.” No mention is made of the times, or a summer, or ephemerally elating New York. The implacable “I” had returned.

In her non-fiction, too, Didion managed to repurpose her ingrained sense of futility – so long the licence for a shrug and head shake, and the basis for dubious claims – as a genuine tool of critical analysis. As she had shown in “Slouching Towards Bethlehem” and other early essays – on a murder in the San Bernardino Valley and marriage in Las Vegas and Joan Baez’s Institute for the Study of Nonviolence – she needed a certain kind of subject matter. Robert Silvers, the editor of the New York Review of Books , found it for her: American politics. And now her work had an added dimension.

In the essays collected in Sentimental Journeys (1993) and Political Fictions (2001), she covered the coverage, scrutinising memoirs of Reagan and the writing of Newt Gingrich, poring over the Starr Report that investigated Bill Clinton, laying waste to the “political pornography” of the reporter Bob Woodward, exploring “fables” and “fixed ideas”. Like Janet Malcolm, probably her greatest contemporary, Didion developed a critical method in which the old-fashioned close reading she had learned as a student at Berkeley was underpinned by a type of post-modernism, the body of ideas associated with despair, emptiness and scepticism about the “grand narrative”.

[see also: How we misunderstand depression ]

In 1988, just before she covered the national conventions, Didion moved back to New York (despite not being young at all) and later wrote long essays on the public myths encoded in the handling of the Central Park jogger case – when five black and Latino youths were wrongfully convicted of the rape and assault of a white woman – and the World Trade Center attacks of 11 September 2001. Then, in The Year of Magical Thinking (2005), she wrote a meta-memoir – an account of widowhood that is also an essay on the literature of illness and grief – as well as a reflection on her own ability to seem “rational” while being secretly “delusionary”, including her tendency to talk about herself in the guise of looking outwards. (For the first time in 40 years, she quoted Hopkins’s poem.)

Let Me Tell You What I Mean ends with two examples of Didion in this refreshed, possessed, newly conscious mode. “Last Words” explores the decision on the part of Hemingway’s heirs – the appointed protectors of his literary legacy – to ignore the instructions for unfinished work. In “Everywoman.com”, she considers the phenomenon of Martha Stewart with the help of an unofficial website and an authorised biography. “This is a story about love and death in the golden land,” she wrote in 1966, at the start of the essay that opens Slouching Towards Bethlehem . Later, once her natural gift for sense-making was gone, she needed something obviously false or sentimental to resist. A circuitous route, perhaps, but as the closing passage of the new book shows, it got her there:

This is not a story about a woman who made the best of traditional skills. This is a story about a woman who did her own IPO. This is the “woman’s pluck” story, the dust-bowl story… The dreams and the fears into which Martha Stewart taps are not of “feminine” domesticity but of female power, of the woman who sits down at the table with the men and, still in her apron, walks away with the chips.

Let Me Tell You What I Mean Joan Didion 4th Estate, 192pp, £12.99

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'Let Me Tell You What I Mean': New essay collection affirms Joan Didion’s mastery

The tide of “New Journalism” that flooded the late 1960s and ’70s may have been dominated by the exclamation marks, manic italics and machismo of Tom Wolfe, Norman Mailer, or Hunter S. Thompson, but the lower-key voice of Joan Didion has outlasted, and outperformed, those swaggering peers. Didion’s latest volume, “Let Me Tell You What I Mean” (Knopf, 192 pp., ★★★★ out of four), makes that case easily with a dozen previously uncollected pieces from 1968 to 2000.

Slim and elegant as Didion’s public persona remains at age 86, the book traces her journey and development as a writer of magisterial (a word she would never use) command and finely measured style. She brought new eyes to the American scene, whether charting the disconnect between traditional and hippie media – in the book’s opener, “Alicia and the Underground Press” – or with piercing observations of boldfaced names including Ernest Hemingway, Nancy Reagan and Martha Stewart . She intuited the fragmentation that would breed an internet world, and she sensed danger in the shallow myth-making of celebrity journalism.

'The Doctors Blackwell' review: Two remarkable sisters transformed American medicine

Didion came to literature as an army brat Californian, bred from Sacramento’s cultural aridity, whose greatest adolescent trauma was not getting into Stanford. Settling for University of California, Berkeley, she felt lost in her first writing workshop – without ideas, stories, worldliness. “I remember each other member of the class as older and wiser than I had hope of ever being,” she writes, “more possessed of an exotic past: marriages and the breakup of marriages, money and the lack of it, sex and politics and the Adriatic seen at dawn.”

But the American icon who would declare, in her most famous sentence, “We tell ourselves stories in order to live” (from the classic essay, and subsequent book, “The White Album”) wasted no time telling the world what she saw. After an apprenticeship at Vogue magazine, where writing photo captions influenced her less-is-more style, Didion found her voice quickly at the Saturday Evening Post, via the “Points West” column she shared with her husband and screenwriting partner, John Gregory Dunne.

Check out: USA TODAY's weekly Best-selling Booklist

Six of those early essays, all from 1968, are the short-form gems of the new collection, pioneering a coolly detached, analytic tone that shimmered – ironically – with subjectivity. Didion dissected the West Coast anomie and rootless questing that would mark such breakthrough novels as “Play It as It Lays” and “A Book of Common Prayer.” But the incomparable journalism and self-reflection that accompanied every stage of her success would build her legacy. With such late, bestselling memoirs as 2005’s “The Year of Magical Thinking” – in which she described dealing with the sudden death of Dunne (mainly by not dealing with it) – and 2011’s “Blue Nights,” about the passing of their daughter Quintana Roo Dunne, Didion proved she could sustain a cold gaze amid so much pain.

The new book captures the essence of Didion in countless lapidary sentences, especially in the 1998 essay “Last Words,” which deconstructs the lean, “deceptively simple” opening paragraph of Hemingway’s “A Farewell to Arms.” Didion “imagined that if I studied them closely enough and practiced hard enough I might one day arrange 126 words myself. Only one of the words has three syllables. Twenty-two have two. The other 103 have one.”

She would come to match that economy with unwavering vision, setting a standard for those who have inhaled Didion not just as a writer’s writer, but also as a soul – still-centered, self-haunted – of modern experience.

'Kamala's Way': What we learned about the future madam vice president from new biography

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Joan Didion: Why I Write

"i write entirely to find out what i’m thinking, what i’m looking at, what i see and what it means.".

Of course I stole the title for this talk from George Orwell. One reason I stole it was that I like the sound of the words: Why I Write. There you have three short unambiguous words that share a sound, and the sound they share is this:

In many ways, writing is the act of saying I, of imposing oneself upon other people, of saying listen to me, see it my way, change your mind . It’s an aggressive, even a hostile act. You can disguise its aggressiveness all you want with veils of subordinate clauses and qualifiers and tentative subjunctives, with ellipses and evasions—with the whole manner of intimating rather than claiming, of alluding rather than stating—but there’s no getting around the fact that setting words on paper is the tactic of a secret bully, an invasion, an imposition of the writer’s sensibility on the reader’s most private space.

I stole the title not only because the words sounded right but because they seemed to sum up, in a no-nonsense way, all I have to tell you. Like many writers I have only this one “subject,” this one “area”: the act of writing. I can bring you no reports from any other front. I may have other interests: I am “interested,” for example, in marine biology, but I don’t flatter myself that you would come out to hear me talk about it. I am not a scholar. I am not in the least an intellectual, which is not to say that when I hear the word “intellectual” I reach for my gun, but only to say that I do not think in abstracts. During the years when I was an undergraduate at Berkeley I tried, with a kind of hopeless late-adolescent energy, to buy some temporary visa into the world of ideas, to forge for myself a mind that could deal with the abstract.

In short I tried to think. I failed. My attention veered inexorably back to the specific, to the tangible, to what was generally considered, by everyone I knew then and for that matter have known since, the peripheral. I would try to contemplate the Hegelian dialectic and would find myself concentrating instead on a flowering pear tree outside my window and the particular way the petals fell on my floor. I would try to read linguistic theory and would find myself wondering instead if the lights were on in the Bevatron up the hill. When I say that I was wondering if the lights were on in the Bevatron you might immediately suspect, if you deal in ideas at all, that I was registering the Bevatron as a political symbol, thinking in shorthand about the military-industrial complex and its role in the university community, but you would be wrong. I was only wondering if the lights were on in the Bevatron, and how they looked. A physical fact.

I had trouble graduating from Berkeley, not because of this inability to deal with ideas—I was majoring in English, and I could locate the house-and-garden imagery in The Portrait of a Lady as well as the next person, “imagery” being by definition the kind of specific that got my attention—but simply because I had neglected to take a course in Milton. For reasons which now sound baroque I needed a degree by the end of that summer, and the English department finally agreed, if I would come down from Sacramento every Friday and talk about the cosmology of Paradise Lost , to certify me proficient in Milton. I did this. Some Fridays I took the Greyhound bus, other Fridays I caught the Southern Pacific’s City of San Francisco on the last leg of its transcontinental trip. I can no longer tell you whether Milton put the sun or the earth at the center of his universe in Paradise Lost , the central question of at least one century and a topic about which I wrote ten thousand words that summer, but I can still recall the exact rancidity of the butter in the City of San Francisco’s dining car, and the way the tinted windows on the Greyhound bus cast the oil refineries around Carquinez Strait into a grayed and obscurely sinister light. In short my attention was always on the periphery, on what I could see and taste and touch, on the butter, and the Greyhound bus. During those years I was traveling on what I knew to be a very shaky passport, forged papers: I knew that I was no legitimate resident in any world of ideas. I knew I couldn’t think. All I knew then was what I couldn’t do. All I knew then was what I wasn’t, and it took me some years to discover what I was.

Which was a writer.

By which I mean not a “good” writer or a “bad” writer but simply a writer, a person whose most absorbed and passionate hours are spent arranging words on pieces of paper. Had my credentials been in order I would never have become a writer. Had I been blessed with even limited access to my own mind there would have been no reason to write. I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear. Why did the oil refineries around Carquinez Strait seem sinister to me in the summer of 1956? Why have the night lights in the Bevatron burned in my mind for twenty years? What is going on in these pictures in my mind?

When I talk about pictures in my mind I am talking, quite specifically, about images that shimmer around the edges. There used to be an illustration in every elementary psychology book showing a cat drawn by a patient in varying stages of schizophrenia. This cat had a shimmer around it. You could see the molecular structure breaking down at the very edges of the cat: the cat became the background and the background the cat, everything interacting, exchanging ions. People on hallucinogens describe the same perception of objects. I’m not a schizophrenic, nor do I take hallucinogens, but certain images do shimmer for me. Look hard enough, and you can’t miss the shimmer. It’s there. You can’t think too much about these pictures that shimmer. You just lie low and let them develop. You stay quiet. You don’t talk to many people and you keep your nervous system from shorting out and you try to locate the cat in the shimmer, the grammar in the picture.

Just as I meant “shimmer” literally I mean “grammar” literally. Grammar is a piano I play by ear, since I seem to have been out of school the year the rules were mentioned. All I know about grammar is its infinite power. To shift the structure of a sentence alters the meaning of that sentence, as definitely and inflexibly as the position of a camera alters the meaning of the object photographed. Many people know about camera angles now, but not so many know about sentences. The arrangement of the words matters, and the arrangement you want can be found in the picture in your mind. The picture dictates the arrangement. The picture dictates whether this will be a sentence with or without clauses, a sentence that ends hard or a dying-fall sentence, long or short, active or passive. 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. Nota bene:

It tells you.

You don’t tell it.

Let me show you what I mean by pictures in the mind. I began Play It as It Lays just as I have begun each of my novels, with no notion of “character” or “plot” or even “incident.” I had only two pictures in my mind, more about which later, and a technical intention, which was to write a novel so elliptical and fast that it would be over before you noticed it, a novel so fast that it would scarcely exist on the page at all. About the pictures: the first was of white space. Empty space. This was clearly the picture that dictated the narrative intention of the book—a book in which anything that happened would happen off the page, a “white” book to which the reader would have to bring his or her own bad dreams—and yet this picture told me no “story,” suggested no situation. The second picture did. This second picture was of something actually witnessed. A young woman with long hair and a short white halter dress walks through the casino at the Riviera in Las Vegas at one in the morning. She crosses the casino alone and picks up a house telephone. I watch her because I have heard her paged, and recognize her name: she is a minor actress I see around Los Angeles from time to time, in places like Jax and once in a gynecologist’s office in the Beverly Hills Clinic, but have never met. I know nothing about her. Who is paging her? Why is she here to be paged? How exactly did she come to this? It was precisely this moment in Las Vegas that made Play It as It Lays begin to tell itself to me, but the moment appears in the novel only obliquely, in a chapter which begins:

Maria made a list of things she would never do. She would never: walk through the Sands or Caesar’s alone after midnight. She would never: ball at a party, do S-M unless she wanted to, borrow furs from Abe Lipsey, deal. She would never: carry a Yorkshire in Beverly Hills.

That is the beginning of the chapter and that is also the end of the chapter, which may suggest what I meant by “white space.”

I recall having a number of pictures in my mind when I began the novel I just finished, A Book of Common Prayer . As a matter of fact one of these pictures was of that Bevatron I mentioned, although I would be hard put to tell you a story in which nuclear energy figures. Another was a newspaper photograph of a hijacked 707 burning on the desert in the Middle East. Another was the night view from a room in which I once spent a week with paratyphoid, a hotel room on the Colombian coast. My husband and I seemed to be on the Colombian coast representing the United States of America at a film festival (I recall invoking the name Jack Valenti a lot, as if its reiteration could make me well), and it was a bad place to have fever, not only because my indisposition offended our hosts but because every night in this hotel the generator failed. The lights went out. The elevator stopped. My husband would go to the event of the evening and make excuses for me and I would stay alone in this hotel room, in the dark. I remember standing at the window trying to call Bogotá (the telephone seemed to work on the same principle as the generator) and watching the night wind come up and wondering what I was doing eleven degrees off the equator with a fever of 103. The view from that window definitely figures in A Book of Common Prayer , as does the burning 707, and yet none of these pictures told me the story I needed.

The picture that did, the picture that shimmered and made these other images coalesce, was of the Panama airport at 6 am. I was in this airport only once, on a plane to Bogotá that stopped for an hour to refuel, but the way it looked that morning remained superimposed on everything I saw until the day I finished A Book of Common Prayer . I lived in that airport for several years. I can still feel the hot air when I step off the plane, can see the heat already rising off the tarmac at 6:00 a.m. I can feel the skirt damp and wrinkled on my legs. I can feel the asphalt stick to my sandals. I remember the big tail of a Pan American plane floating motionless down at the end of the tarmac. I remember the sound of a slot machine in the waiting room. I could tell you that I remember a particular woman in the airport, an American woman, a norteamericana , a thin norteamericana about forty who wore a big square emerald in lieu of a wedding ring, but there was no such woman there.

I put this woman in the airport later. I made this woman up, just as I later made up a country to put the airport in, and a family to run the country. This woman in the airport is neither catching a plane nor meeting one. She is ordering tea in the airport coffee shop. In fact she is not simply “ordering” tea but insisting that the water be boiled, in front of her, for twenty minutes. Why is this woman in this airport? Why is she going nowhere, where has she been? Where did she get that big emerald? What derangement, or disassociation, makes her believe that her will to see the water boiled can possibly prevail?

She had been going to one airport or another for four months, one could see it, looking at the visas on her passport. All those airports where Charlotte Douglas’s passport had been stamped would have looked alike. Sometimes the sign on the tower would say “BIENVENIDOS” and sometimes the sign on the tower would say “BIENVENUE,” some places were wet and hot and others were dry and hot, but at each of these airports the pastel concrete walls would rust and stain and the swamp off the runway would be littered with the fuselages of cannibalized Fairchild F-227s and the water would need boiling.

I knew why Charlotte went to the airport even if Victor did not. I knew about airports.

These lines appear about halfway through A Book of Common Prayer , but I wrote them during the second week I worked on the book, long before I had any idea where Charlotte Douglas had been or why she went to airports. Until I wrote these lines I had no character called Victor in mind: the necessity for mentioning a name, and the name Victor, occurred to me as I wrote the sentence. I knew why Charlotte went to the airport sounded incomplete. I knew why Charlotte went to the airport even if Victor did not carried a little more narrative drive. Most important of all, until I wrote these lines I did not know who “I” was, who was telling the story. I had intended until that moment that the “I” be no more than the voice of the author, a nineteenth-century omniscient narrator. But there it was:

“I knew why Charlotte went to the airport even if Victor did not.”

“I knew about airports.”

This “I” was the voice of no author in my house. This “I” was someone who not only knew why Charlotte went to the airport but also knew someone called Victor. Who was Victor? Who was this narrator? Why was this narrator telling me this story? Let me tell you one thing about why writers write: had I known the answer to any of these questions I would never have needed to write a novel.

__________________________________

Excerpted from Let Me Tell You What I Mean by Joan Didion. Copyright © 2021 by Joan Didion. Excerpted by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

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Joan Didion’s best books, from essays to fiction

On Thursday, it was announced that prolific writer Joan Didion had died at the age of 87.

An executive at her publisher, Knopf, confirmed the author's death to TODAY in an email and said that Didion passed away at her home in Manhattan from Parkinson's disease.

Here, we round up seven necessary reads by the late author, who was best known for work on mourning and essays and magazine contributions that captured the American experience.

Here are the best books by Joan Didion:

'the year of magical thinking' (2005).

Probably her best known work, this gutting work of non-fiction profiles Didion's experience grieving her husband John Gregory Dunne while caring for comatose daughter Quintana Roo Dunne.

"The Year of Magical Thinking" quickly became an iconic representation of mourning, capturing the sorrow and ennui of that period. It won numerous awards, including the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Awards, and was later adapted into a play starring Vanessa Redgrave.

'Blue Nights' (2011)

A continuation of what is started in "The Year of Magical Thinking," this poignant 2011 work of non-fiction features personal and heartbreaking memories of Quintana, who passed away at the age of 39, not long after Didion's husband died.

"It is a searing inquiry into loss and a melancholy meditation on mortality and time,” wrote book critic Michiko Kakutani of the New York Times.

'Slouching Towards Bethlehem' (1968)

Didion's first collection of nonfiction writing is revered as an essential portrait of America — particularly California — in the 1960s.

It focuses on her experience growing up in the Sunshine state, icons of that time John Wayne and Howard Hughes, and the essence of Haight-Ashbury, a neighborhood in San Francisco that became the heart of the counterculture movement.

'The White Album' (1979)

A reflective collection of essays, "The White Album" explores several of the same topics Didion touched on in "Slouching Towards Bethlehem," this time focusing on the history and politics of California in the late 1960s and early '70s. Its matter-of-fact and intimate stories give the reader a feeling of what California and the atmosphere was like during that time period.

'Play it as it Lays' (1970)

Set during a time before Roe vs. Wade, this terrifying and at times disturbing novel profiles a struggling actress living in Los Angeles whose life begins to unravel after she has a back-alley abortion.

"(Didion) writes with a razor, carving her characters out of her perceptions with strokes so swift and economical that each scene ends almost before the reader is aware of it, and yet the characters go on bleeding afterward," wrote book critic John Leonard for the New York times.

'Miami' (1987)

Joan Didion Speaks At The College Of Marin

A great example of Didion's journalistic work, "Miami" paints a portrait of life for Cuban exiles in the south Florida city.

Didion writes a stunning and passionate page-turner set against the backdrop of Miami’s decline caused by economic and political changes with the refugee immigration from Cuba after Fidel Castro’s rise to power.

Alexander Kacala is a reporter and editor at TODAY Digital and NBC OUT. He loves writing about pop culture, trending topics, LGBTQ issues, style and all things drag. His favorite celebrity profiles include Cher — who said their interview was one of the most interesting of her career — as well as Kylie Minogue, Candice Bergen, Patti Smith and RuPaul. He is based in New York City and his favorite film is “Pretty Woman.”

Joan Didion vs. the Political Insiders

Her precise, thrilling essays on public life do battle with conventional wisdom..

Joan Didion has had a startlingly active afterlife. A star-studded memorial , a pricey estate sale , an underselling Upper East Side co-op : In the almost two years since her death at age 87, much has been said about the queen of New Journalism—good, bad, and unctuous. The lifestyle coverage can be both a distraction and a deflection from the serious substance of Didion’s reporting on topics from the Central Park Five to wartime atrocities in El Salvador. More than the sunglasses or art collection , this journalism—for publications from The New Yorker to the Los Angeles Times , but mostly in The New York Review of Books —is a major part of her legacy. Her thoroughly researched and meticulously written analyses of the politics, personalities, and issues of her day should be studied as antidotes to the punditry of the 24-7, 280-character news cycle, in this age when truths are even stranger than “political fictions.”

Beginning in the 1980s, Didion did at the The New York Review something that very few women reporters had been allowed to do when she began her career decades earlier, when they were confined to fashion magazines or research departments: She covered campaigns and conventions, presidents and vice presidents. In 1968, she had written about Ronald Reagan’s wife, Nancy, back when he was governor of California, and in 1977, her topic was the empty mansion he built on the outskirts of Sacramento. In 1989, she took on the president himself.

The Reagan article, “ Life at Court ,” is a think piece reflecting on the legacy of his two terms based on recent books. The year prior, Didion did weeks of legwork, not just brain work, covering the presidential primary in California and the Democratic and Republican conventions in Atlanta and New Orleans. Her resulting article, “ Insider Baseball ,” analyzed the deep disconnect she experienced between both parties and the people they are supposed to represent. The candidates, she wrote—she barely deigned to speak George Bush’s or Michael Dukakis’s name—“tend to speak a language common in Washington but not specifically shared by the rest of us.”

Robert Scheer traveled with Didion as part of the press crew on these campaigns. At the time, he was a reporter for the Los Angeles Times and an outspoken, contrarian journalist himself. He found his colleague to be a fierce and fearless road warrior. “The times that I was alone with Joan traveling, I didn’t think of her as frail,” he says. “I thought of her as quite feisty and capable of surviving quite well and having a sharp eye and also keeping up the schedule that was even more exhausting at times than I wanted to do. What I loved about Joan was she had none of the pain in the ass qualities—the know-it-all, I can figure this out in 15 minutes arrogance—that a lot of journalists have. She always felt there was a lot to learn.”

Didion critiqued not just the two political parties but the entire system of political discourse, including policy advisers, pollsters, media consultants, and columnists: “that handful of insiders who invent, year in and year out, the narrative of public life.” Didion had a name for these invented narratives, which became the title of her 2001 collection: Political Fictions . “Insider Baseball” and its companion pieces don’t offer the sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll stimulation of Joan’s 1960s and 1970s writing, but they are equally insightful and arguably more important.

Political Fictions won the prestigious George Polk Book Award for “investigative work that is original, requires digging and resourcefulness, and brings results.” In her book Joan Didion: Substance and Style, the scholar Kathleen M. Vandenberg examines Didion’s later writings, beginning with Salvador, and argues that far from reifying and representing the ruling class, as other critics have charged, Didion sounded some of the earliest warnings of the Trumpocalypse to come. “She has, in both subject matter and approach, been amazingly prescient about the future of political and cultural discourse and the ways in which patterns of thinking and narratives of ‘fact’ are rhetorically constructed, and grounded both in the past and in the adherence to regional traditions and values,” Vandenberg writes. Joan warned us.

Didion’s writing style changed with the increasing complexity of her subjects. Her articles for The New York Review were much denser, less full of the “white space” she extolled in “Why I Write,” more linear rather than fragmented, and deeply, even maniacally, researched. Rather than giving in to the widening gyre, she was now determined to make sense of the world. She had a profound understanding of the importance of narrative, of finding order in disorder. “I mean total control has always been the reason I wrote anything at all,” she said in a 1972 letter to New American Review editor Ted Solotaroff.

Some of the change in Didion’s writing was mechanistic. Her switch to word processing programs allowed Didion to cut and paste passages in more complex and seamless ways than her old habit of arranging note cards on the floor. She wrote longer, in bigger paragraphs. She also turned less often to first-person narrative. She was now the well-informed expert offering her take on current events—an authority figure. These articles—“In the Realm of the Fisher King,” “Times Mirror Square,” “The West Wing of Oz”—don’t offer the same lyrical, conversational prose of the pieces gathered in Slouching Towards Bethlehem and The White Album. They provide a different kind of pleasure: the thrill of a thorough, precise, relentless, and often unexpected interrogation. (“We are in an interrogation room, and I am interrogating Officer Gerrans,” Didion wrote in “Slouching Towards Bethlehem.”) And every now and then, she still gets in a jab so clever and/or ironic, it makes you laugh out loud, such as this one at Reagan in “The West Wing of Oz”: “Two hours before his 1981 inauguration, according to Michael Deaver, he was still sleeping. Deaver did not actually find this extraordinary, nor would anyone else who had witnessed Reagan’s performance as governor of California.”

Poet Michelle Bitting draws frequently on Didion’s prose for its weaving of incisiveness and insight. “There’s so much in it, and yet it never feels laborious to read, you never zone out on all of the information that she’s giving you,” she says. “I think she knows how to press into the facts and then pull back to the personal. And all the tangents, but it never feels like, ‘Oh I’m lost.’ There’s a music to it. But it’s so clear too.”

Didion wrote with the kind of authority historically allowed mostly to men. But she brought additional insights that the men could not, shaped by gender and her upbringing in Sacramento. “Clinton Agonistes,” an article about President Bill Clinton’s sex scandals and impeachment hearing, opens thus: “No one who ever passed through an American public high school could have watched William Jefferson Clinton running for office in 1992 and failed to recognize the familiar predatory sexuality of the provincial adolescent.” As someone who attended a provincial American public high school and watched Clinton shake hands at a New York rally in 1992, I can only respond, “Exactly.”

The bravery of Didion’s genre innovations throughout her career created whole new ways of writing; without them, untold numbers of readers might not have become writers. David L. Ulin is an author, professor at the University of Southern California, former book editor at the Los Angeles Times, and editor of the Library of America editions of Joan Didion’s work. “There’s a real present tense quality to that writing, in the sense that I always have the notion, even when I reread it now, of her in the moment trying to figure it out,” Ulin says. “It’s polished, but I almost feel like I’m watching the movement of her thinking … I’m always aware of her uncertainty, of what she doesn’t know as much as what she does know.”

Postmortems tend to praise Didion as a stylist. If by “style” they are referring to her intrepid interrogations and rigorous, luminous prose, then yes, she was one of the greatest of them all.

Evelyn McDonnell has written books about Bjork and The Runaways, and is a journalism professor at Loyola Marymount University.

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Joan Didion: an Analysis of Her Writings on Morality

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Self-examination and morality, influence of environment and society, language and morality, power and morality, ethical inquiry and morality.

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Kate Coleman, Who Documented the Bay Area Counterculture, Dies at 81

She wrote about politics and the patriarchy as a left-wing writer, then alienated her compatriots with exposés critical of the Black Panthers and the environmental movement.

A black and white photo of Ms. Coleman standing in front of a statue of a female figure and, behind it, a pine tree. She wears her collar-length dark hair parted in the middle. She wears a light-colored knit sweater and a scarf while, with her arms crossed, holding a lit cigarette in her right hand.

By Clay Risen

Kate Coleman, an iconoclastic Bay Area journalist who began her career as a left-wing radical, writing about the patriarchy, politics and polyamory, then made enemies among her erstwhile comrades when her reporting cast a harsh light on the Black Panthers and the environmental movement, died on Tuesday in Oakland, Calif. She was 81.

Carol Pogash, a close friend, said her death, in a memory-care facility, was caused by complications of dementia.

For decades Ms. Coleman operated at the center of a fervid community of journalists and activists in and around Berkeley. Like her, most of them had attended the University of California in the 1960s, helping to define the campus as a hotbed of political and social activism.

Her subsequent writing career, most of it as a freelancer for anti-establishment publications like Ramparts and The Berkeley Barb as well as national outlets like Newsweek and The Los Angeles Times, tracked the transit of the American left through its many phases, from early idealism through violent extremism to late-stage disenchantment.

Like Eve Babitz and Joan Didion , she positioned herself as a young female writer who was both immersed in the moment and able to stand outside it, casting a gimlet eye on the ironies and excesses of America’s “left coast.”

As an undergraduate at Berkeley, Ms. Coleman was an early participant in the university’s Free Speech Movement and was among the hundreds of students arrested in December 1964 for occupying Sproul Hall, a campus administration building.

After graduating in 1965, she spent three years at Newsweek, in its New York headquarters, where she was among the few young women allowed to write occasionally for the magazine. (A few years after she left, in 1968, a group of female employees successfully challenged Newsweek’s discriminatory policies.)

Ms. Coleman succeeded at Newsweek by offering something different: Where most of the staff came from buttoned-up East Coast colleges, she arrived bearing news from the free-spirited West.

“She was the resident hippie, the resident Berkeley radical, and she was proud of it,” Harriet Huber, who worked with Ms. Coleman at Newsweek, said in a phone interview.

Returning to the Bay Area, Ms. Coleman established herself as a freelance writer and radio producer. Among other gigs, she wrote a column for The Berkeley Barb, a scrappy magazine that was required reading among the region’s counterculture.

She used the column to cover a gamut of topics that occupied the minds of the young and hip in the late 1960s and early ’70s: Watergate, second-wave feminism, free love, radical politics, venereal disease.

She wrote in a casual tone, tinged with but not drenched in the hippie vernacular of the time — profanity, but not too much; a single “ain’t” in a column of otherwise Strunkian grammatical precision.

She was also willing to go further than most reporters. In 1969, Ms. Coleman was at a racetrack east of San Francisco covering the Altamont Speedway Free Festival , where members of the Hells Angels biker gang were hired as security (and where one of the bikers stabbed a man to death). While backstage waiting for the Rolling Stones to come on, she saw a biker beating a concertgoer. When she intervened, he grabbed her and slammed her repeatedly into a Volkswagen van.

For a 1971 article on prostitution for Ramparts, she not only embedded herself in a brothel on Manhattan’s Upper East Side but also turned a trick herself.

“You couldn’t be in Kate’s presence without being impressed by her brashness,” Steve Wasserman, the publisher of Heyday Books in Berkeley, said by phone. “But it would also get her in trouble with her dogmatic comrades.”

In 1977, the Center for Investigative Reporting, a nonprofit newsroom, commissioned Ms. Coleman and another reporter, Paul Avery, to examine the unsolved murder of Betty Van Patter , a former bookkeeper for the Black Panthers.

After nine months of reporting, their 1978 article, “ The Party’s Over ,” published in New Times magazine, concluded that the Panther leadership, in particular Huey P. Newton , one of the party’s founders, had most likely ordered Ms. Van Patter’s killing because she was about to reveal corruption within the organization.

Ms. Coleman received death threats and went into hiding for several months. She bought a handgun and bars for her windows — then submitted them as expenses.

She made a new set of antagonists in 2005 with her book “The Secret Wars of Judi Bari: A Car Bomb, the Fight for the Redwoods, and the End of Earth First!”

Judi Bari, until her death from cancer in 1997, had been one of the most revered figures in the radical wing of the environmental movement. But in Ms. Coleman’s telling, she was a “tyrannical diva,” paranoid and obsessed with her own martyrdom.

The book drew protests from Ms. Bari’s defenders, some of whom would interrupt Ms. Coleman during stops on her book tour. At least one store canceled her appearance. “Is the Biographer of Activist Judi Bari a Tool of the Right — or Just a Skeptical Liberal?” asked a headline in The San Francisco Chronicle.

“Why not focus her energies on problems of the right?” the author of the article, Edward Guthmann, wrote.

Ms. Coleman responded: “The right has too many problems for me to even begin to start covering. I don’t want to research that. It’s not what I knew intimately. It’s what I know from afar.”

Kate Ann Coleman was born on Dec. 7, 1942, in Rutherford, N.J. Her father, Robert, was an engineer for a machine-tools company. Her mother, Lilian (Anson) Coleman, went blind after surgery when Kate was 3 and was largely confined to their home.

Ms. Coleman leaves no immediate survivors.

Kate’s parents divorced when she was 10. Soon after, she moved with her mother and her older sister, Susan, to Encino, Calif., to be near her mother’s wealthy brother.

Her political awakening came in early 1960, soon after she arrived at Berkeley. The House Committee on Un-American Activities had come to San Francisco for a field hearing into allegations of Communist subversion in the Bay Area. Hundreds showed up in protest, which ended with the police turning fire hoses on the crowd without warning.

Ms. Coleman joined Slate, a progressive campus political party, and eventually the Free Speech Movement, which was led in part by Mario Savio . She graduated in 1965 with a degree in English literature.

Her writing was not entirely political. Like most freelance journalists, she wrote whatever came her way: celebrity profiles, personal essays, restaurant reviews, even accounts of her rather active sex life, which she discussed in terms too explicit for a family newspaper.

For a time she also worked once a week as a host at Chez Panisse, the famed Berkeley restaurant founded by Alice Waters.

And she was a later-life convert to open-water swimming, mostly in the San Francisco Bay. She routinely won races in her age group, and once a year she swam from Alcatraz, in the middle of the bay, to San Francisco.

She would dive in wearing just a swimsuit. Wet suits, she said, were for wimps.

Clay Risen is a Times reporter on the Obituaries desk. More about Clay Risen

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That Viral Essay Wasn’t About Age Gaps. It Was About Marrying Rich.

But both tactics are flawed if you want to have any hope of becoming yourself..

Women are wisest, a viral essay in New York magazine’s the Cut argues , to maximize their most valuable cultural assets— youth and beauty—and marry older men when they’re still very young. Doing so, 27-year-old writer Grazie Sophia Christie writes, opens up a life of ease, and gets women off of a male-defined timeline that has our professional and reproductive lives crashing irreconcilably into each other. Sure, she says, there are concessions, like one’s freedom and entire independent identity. But those are small gives in comparison to a life in which a person has no adult responsibilities, including the responsibility to become oneself.

This is all framed as rational, perhaps even feminist advice, a way for women to quit playing by men’s rules and to reject exploitative capitalist demands—a choice the writer argues is the most obviously intelligent one. That other Harvard undergraduates did not busy themselves trying to attract wealthy or soon-to-be-wealthy men seems to flummox her (taking her “high breasts, most of my eggs, plausible deniability when it came to purity, a flush ponytail, a pep in my step that had yet to run out” to the Harvard Business School library, “I could not understand why my female classmates did not join me, given their intelligence”). But it’s nothing more than a recycling of some of the oldest advice around: For women to mold themselves around more-powerful men, to never grow into independent adults, and to find happiness in a state of perpetual pre-adolescence, submission, and dependence. These are odd choices for an aspiring writer (one wonders what, exactly, a girl who never wants to grow up and has no idea who she is beyond what a man has made her into could possibly have to write about). And it’s bad advice for most human beings, at least if what most human beings seek are meaningful and happy lives.

But this is not an essay about the benefits of younger women marrying older men. It is an essay about the benefits of younger women marrying rich men. Most of the purported upsides—a paid-for apartment, paid-for vacations, lives split between Miami and London—are less about her husband’s age than his wealth. Every 20-year-old in the country could decide to marry a thirtysomething and she wouldn’t suddenly be gifted an eternal vacation.

Which is part of what makes the framing of this as an age-gap essay both strange and revealing. The benefits the writer derives from her relationship come from her partner’s money. But the things she gives up are the result of both their profound financial inequality and her relative youth. Compared to her and her peers, she writes, her husband “struck me instead as so finished, formed.” By contrast, “At 20, I had felt daunted by the project of becoming my ideal self.” The idea of having to take responsibility for her own life was profoundly unappealing, as “adulthood seemed a series of exhausting obligations.” Tying herself to an older man gave her an out, a way to skip the work of becoming an adult by allowing a father-husband to mold her to his desires. “My husband isn’t my partner,” she writes. “He’s my mentor, my lover, and, only in certain contexts, my friend. I’ll never forget it, how he showed me around our first place like he was introducing me to myself: This is the wine you’ll drink, where you’ll keep your clothes, we vacation here, this is the other language we’ll speak, you’ll learn it, and I did.”

These, by the way, are the things she says are benefits of marrying older.

The downsides are many, including a basic inability to express a full range of human emotion (“I live in an apartment whose rent he pays and that constrains the freedom with which I can ever be angry with him”) and an understanding that she owes back, in some other form, what he materially provides (the most revealing line in the essay may be when she claims that “when someone says they feel unappreciated, what they really mean is you’re in debt to them”). It is clear that part of what she has paid in exchange for a paid-for life is a total lack of any sense of self, and a tacit agreement not to pursue one. “If he ever betrayed me and I had to move on, I would survive,” she writes, “but would find in my humor, preferences, the way I make coffee or the bed nothing that he did not teach, change, mold, recompose, stamp with his initials.”

Reading Christie’s essay, I thought of another one: Joan Didion’s on self-respect , in which Didion argues that “character—the willingness to accept responsibility for one’s own life—is the source from which self-respect springs.” If we lack self-respect, “we are peculiarly in thrall to everyone we see, curiously determined to live out—since our self-image is untenable—their false notions of us.” Self-respect may not make life effortless and easy. But it means that whenever “we eventually lie down alone in that notoriously un- comfortable bed, the one we make ourselves,” at least we can fall asleep.

It can feel catty to publicly criticize another woman’s romantic choices, and doing so inevitably opens one up to accusations of jealousy or pettiness. But the stories we tell about marriage, love, partnership, and gender matter, especially when they’re told in major culture-shaping magazines. And it’s equally as condescending to say that women’s choices are off-limits for critique, especially when those choices are shared as universal advice, and especially when they neatly dovetail with resurgent conservative efforts to make women’s lives smaller and less independent. “Marry rich” is, as labor economist Kathryn Anne Edwards put it in Bloomberg, essentially the Republican plan for mothers. The model of marriage as a hierarchy with a breadwinning man on top and a younger, dependent, submissive woman meeting his needs and those of their children is not exactly a fresh or groundbreaking ideal. It’s a model that kept women trapped and miserable for centuries.

It’s also one that profoundly stunted women’s intellectual and personal growth. In her essay for the Cut, Christie seems to believe that a life of ease will abet a life freed up for creative endeavors, and happiness. But there’s little evidence that having material abundance and little adversity actually makes people happy, let alone more creatively generativ e . Having one’s basic material needs met does seem to be a prerequisite for happiness. But a meaningful life requires some sense of self, an ability to look outward rather than inward, and the intellectual and experiential layers that come with facing hardship and surmounting it.

A good and happy life is not a life in which all is easy. A good and happy life (and here I am borrowing from centuries of philosophers and scholars) is one characterized by the pursuit of meaning and knowledge, by deep connections with and service to other people (and not just to your husband and children), and by the kind of rich self-knowledge and satisfaction that comes from owning one’s choices, taking responsibility for one’s life, and doing the difficult and endless work of growing into a fully-formed person—and then evolving again. Handing everything about one’s life over to an authority figure, from the big decisions to the minute details, may seem like a path to ease for those who cannot stomach the obligations and opportunities of their own freedom. It’s really an intellectual and emotional dead end.

And what kind of man seeks out a marriage like this, in which his only job is to provide, but very much is owed? What kind of man desires, as the writer cast herself, a raw lump of clay to be molded to simply fill in whatever cracks in his life needed filling? And if the transaction is money and guidance in exchange for youth, beauty, and pliability, what happens when the young, beautiful, and pliable party inevitably ages and perhaps feels her backbone begin to harden? What happens if she has children?

The thing about using youth and beauty as a currency is that those assets depreciate pretty rapidly. There is a nearly endless supply of young and beautiful women, with more added each year. There are smaller numbers of wealthy older men, and the pool winnows down even further if one presumes, as Christie does, that many of these men want to date and marry compliant twentysomethings. If youth and beauty are what you’re exchanging for a man’s resources, you’d better make sure there’s something else there—like the basic ability to provide for yourself, or at the very least a sense of self—to back that exchange up.

It is hard to be an adult woman; it’s hard to be an adult, period. And many women in our era of unfinished feminism no doubt find plenty to envy about a life in which they don’t have to work tirelessly to barely make ends meet, don’t have to manage the needs of both children and man-children, could simply be taken care of for once. This may also explain some of the social media fascination with Trad Wives and stay-at-home girlfriends (some of that fascination is also, I suspect, simply a sexual submission fetish , but that’s another column). Fantasies of leisure reflect a real need for it, and American women would be far better off—happier, freer—if time and resources were not so often so constrained, and doled out so inequitably.

But the way out is not actually found in submission, and certainly not in electing to be carried by a man who could choose to drop you at any time. That’s not a life of ease. It’s a life of perpetual insecurity, knowing your spouse believes your value is decreasing by the day while his—an actual dollar figure—rises. A life in which one simply allows another adult to do all the deciding for them is a stunted life, one of profound smallness—even if the vacations are nice.

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Born in Sacramento, California, on December 5, 1934, Joan Didion received a B.A. from the University of California, Berkeley in 1956. She wrote for Vogue from 1956 to 1963, and was visiting regent's lecturer in English at the University of California, Berkeley in 1976. Didion also published novels, short stories, social commentary, and essays.
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A Guide to Joan Didion's Books. Ms. Didion was a prolific writer of stylish essays, novels, screenplays and memoirs. Here is an overview of some of her works, as reviewed in The Times. Joan ...
Joan Didion's 7 Best Books, From Essays To Fiction
Joan Didion's best books, from essays to fiction Here, we round up the imperative reads by the late iconic author, who died Thursday at the age of 87. Dec. 23, 2021, 7:54 PM UTC
Joan Didion's "On Going Home": [Essay Example], 619 words
Joan Didion's essay "On Going Home" is a poignant exploration of the complexities of family, nostalgia, and the passage of time. In this reflective piece, Didion grapples with the conflicting emotions that arise when returning to her childhood home and the realization that the familiar landscapes and relationships of her past have evolved and changed.
Joan Didions Holy Water: [Essay Example], 666 words
In conclusion, Joan Didion's "Holy Water" is a masterful exploration of faith, loss, and the search for meaning. Through her poetic use of language, stream-of-consciousness writing style, and narrative flow, Didion invites us to join her in contemplating the nature of belief and its impact on our lives. Her use of analogies and metaphors makes ...
Joan Didion vs. the Political Insiders
Joan Didion has had a startlingly active afterlife. A star-studded memorial, a pricey estate sale, an underselling Upper East Side co-op: In the almost two years since her death at age 87, much ...
Joan Didion: an Analysis of Her Writings on Morality
Joan Didion's writings emphasize the importance of self-examination in establishing a sense of morality. In most of her works, Didion pushes her readers to reflect on their own values, belief system, and their actions. Didion's perspective on morality suggests that self-examination is crucial to understanding your moral compass.
My Grandfather-in-Law, My Roommate
In his 90s, in the E.R. after a heart attack scare, a doctor asked how anxious he was feeling, on a scale of 1 to 10, as part of a study. "One," he declared, half an hour removed from a near ...
Kate Coleman, Who Documented the Bay Area Counterculture, Dies at 81
Like Eve Babitz and Joan Didion, ... Ms. Coleman was an early participant in the university's Free Speech Movement and was among the hundreds of students arrested in December 1964 for occupying ...
The Cut's viral essay on having an age gap is really about marrying
Reading Christie's essay, I thought of another one: Joan Didion's on self-respect, in which Didion argues that "character—the willingness to accept responsibility for one's own life—is ...