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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.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Joan Did­ion Reads From New Mem­oir, Blue Nights, in Short Film Direct­ed by Grif­fin Dunne

30 Free Essays & Sto­ries by David Fos­ter Wal­lace on the Web

10 Free Sto­ries by George Saun­ders, Author of Tenth of Decem­ber , “The Best Book You’ll Read This Year”

Read 18 Short Sto­ries From Nobel Prize-Win­ning Writer Alice Munro Free Online

Josh Jones  is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at  @jdmagness

by Josh Jones | Permalink | Comments (3) |

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Comments (3), 3 comments so far.

“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,..”

Dead link to the essay

It should be “Slouch­ing Towards Beth­le­hem,” with the “s” on Towards.

Most of the Joan Did­ion Essay links have pay­walls.

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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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‘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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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.

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."

By Tatiana Dias

By Kate Lloyd

By Christian Allaire

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.

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“To Be A Writer, You Must Write”: How Joan Didion Became Joan Didion

Evelyn mcdonnell on the writing process of one of america's leading literary ladies.

Joan Didion looks straight at the camera, with her fist curled in front of her mouth—as if to indicate it is through her hands that the taciturn thinker speaks. Appropriately, a manual typewriter takes up half the frame in this iconic black-and-white photo taken by Nancy Ellison in 1976.

When she was a teenager, Didion taught herself to type and to write by pecking out stories by Ernest Hemingway and Joseph Conrad on an Olivetti Lettera 22. Her goal: “To learn how the sentences worked,” she told the Paris Review . Thus began her immersion in the physical act as well as the craft of writing. Call it a form of machine learning. “I’m only myself in front of my typewriter,” Didion once told an editor at Ms. magazine.

At some point her father, in one of his random financial schemes, bought a load of Royal 200 typewriters, one of which became Didion’s accomplice. She took it with her everywhere. A typewriter is included in the carry-on items in the packing list she published in The White Album . Her idea was not to write on the plane, but while she waited in the airport, she would sit “and start typing the day’s notes.” This is one of many instructive lessons offered by Joan Didion. She must have hauled a typewriter with her in 1955, when, at age twenty, she took a train alone from Boston back to Sacramento, after a month spent in Mademoiselle ’s guest editor program. She typed multiple letters to her Mademoiselle colleague and college friend Peggy LaViolette on hotel stationery along the way. “Never being one to throw myself wholeheartedly into Adventure, I carefully got a seat alone, barricaded myself in with wicker basket, typewriter, mangled copies of old magazines and thought I could sleep all night,” she typed in one missive.

Many writers become so attached to a physical process that changing tools with the times is not easy; some never manage it. Neil Gaiman, the futurist, has said he prefers to write his novels in longhand. I still print out my writing and edit it on paper, a routine I was chuffed to hear Didion recommend to Hilton Als in an interview late in her life. Over the decades Didion graduated from notebook to manual typewriter to electric typewriter to computer, again demonstrating her openness to progress. Still, she did complain to author Maxine Hong Kingston about the transition to electric in a 1978 letter, saying that combined with moving and quitting smoking, the “reprogramming…had caused an inordinate amount of stress.” She switched to a computer in 1987 and eventually came to love the editing capabilities of word processing programs. “It did for me what geometry was supposed to have done,” she said.

Writers are prone to obsessive interest in other writers’ processes. We write because we are readers, and we read, in part, to see how others write. Didion was a bookworm. When she wasn’t sitting on the fender of her car, she was far from the snakes at the Sacramento library on a Friday night with her friend Maurice, or maybe her gal pal Nancy Kennedy (whose brother Anthony later became a Supreme Court justice and spoke at Joan’s memorial). Photos and videos document her various homes stacked floor to ceiling with books. Among the items sold at auction by her estate in 2022 were Didion’s collections of works by George Orwell, Elizabeth Hardwick, Joyce Carol Oates, and Norman Mailer.

Joan was an avid consumer of culture in general, with broad interests that did not divide art into high and low: She named one anthology after a Yeats poem, another after a Beatles album. Writer and friend Calvin Trillin called her Brentwood home “the West Coast literary consulate,” but she and Dunne largely financed it with Hollywood hack work. She loved biker films, interviewed Jim Morrison for the Saturday Evening Post and Joan Baez for the New York Times , wrote an important essay about Georgia O’Keeffe, and was close friends with writer and artist Eve Babitz ( Slow Days, Fast Company ) and writer and screenwriter Nora Ephron ( When Harry Met Sally ).

There’s a 1971 interview with Joan on YouTube, posted by the Center for Sacramento History. Some of the audio is missing, but the footage of Didion in her office in her Franklin Avenue house is, well, pure gold. She’s wearing a brown flared miniskirt and a black V-neck shirt that fastens in the back. She has tucked her shoulder-length strawberry blond hair behind her ears, as she did, and freckles dot her cheeks. She’s talking about growing up in rural environments; her Valley accent is strong. I’m not talking San Fernando Valley here; I’m talking the almost southern twang of the Central Valley, that Didion said she picked up from the many refugees from the Oklahoma dust bowl with whom she went to school. This is how Didion spoke: not with the English accent of Vanessa Redgrave, who portrayed her in the stage version of The Year of Magical Thinking , or the crisp patrician consonants of Barbara Caruso, who reads the audiobook of that text, but like a freckle-faced country girl. The camera pans across shelves full of books and books piled on the desk, lingering on volumes written by Didion and Dunne. Joan snips an article out of a newspaper in front of a cabinet of haphazardly placed manila folders, presumably full of other clippings. She’s talking about worrying herself sick about a comma being out of place while admitting she doesn’t have the same fastidious approach to her housekeeping. (This is the secret life of women writers: We can’t be good mothers, wives, daughters, writers, cooks, and housekeepers.) She sits on a black leather couch with leopard-print pillows, smoking a cigarette and reading a paperback that’s open on her lap.

“I like words and I’m very excited by seeing what can be done with words,” she says. “ Play It a s It Lays is a very short novel. I worked on it for five years but when I finished it, I thought every word was exactly right. Now I can’t even read it because words pop out at me, or sentences that I think ought to be changed.”

Didion once told a participant in a writing seminar that to get through writer’s block, you had to write one sentence, and then another, and then another.

To be a writer, you must write.

__________________________________

Excerpted from The World According to Joan Didion by Evelyn McDonnell. Copyright © 2023. Reprinted with permission from HarperOne, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers.

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There's a reason Joan Didion's work endures: she changed the way we wrote

The master of the personal essay taught us it’s not enough to ask ‘what happened?’ if you neglect ‘how did it feel?’

W hen Griffin Dunne announced he had the go-ahead to film a documentary about Joan Didion , the great writer (and, as it happens, his aunt), he crowdfunded the money needed in a day. Netflix kicked in with the rest and the result is The Center Will Not Hold, streaming now.

Didion has been the master of holding readers back while appearing – in her prose at least – to let you in. So fans, of which there are many, have been hoping for an unguarded moment – something that unwraps the enigma.

Those moments in the documentary are few and far between. But that a film as slight as this is still a must-watch is testament to Didion’s extraordinary and enduring appeal. New generations discover her as they discover The Catcher in the Rye. She becomes their author. Falling-apart copies of Slouching Towards Bethlehem get passed down the generations. And the thrill of discovery is not just in seeing the 1960s represented through a dark mirror, but in the prose style: long, breathless sentences that chart an inner turmoil combined with an astute eye for the times and what those times might mean.

Didion is a favourite writer of young women. Her instructions for packing (leotards and bourbon and cashmere shawls and … a typewriter) are republished in fashion magazines, and her look (ironic, sunglasses at all times, a scarf tied under her chin) has never really gone out of style. Old photographs of her look achingly chic, and in her later years, she even modelled for Céline .

Caitlin Flanagan in the Atlantic writes: “ Women who encountered Joan Didion when they were young received from her a way of being female and being writers that no one else could give them. She was our Hunter Thompson, and Slouching Towards Bethlehem was our Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.”

Part of Didion’s appeal has always been her “coolness”. That famous picture of her leaning against a Corvette was an Instagram moment decades before Instagram. But beneath this cool exterior, there is the suspicion that she was always a lot frailer than she let on. In The Center Will Not Hold, we see her as physically very frail, but still presenting as the “cool customer” who, as she recounts in The Year of Magical Thinking, didn’t cry at the hospital after her husband died. As film-maker, Dunne is protective of her: we don’t see her crack.

In writing about “serious” matters, Didion never sought to excise fashion or fabric from her prose. She started her writing career at Vogue and her descriptions of political or the personal often break to include descriptions of furnishings or curtains or clothes.

She writes in her essay, Goodbye to All That, about how “all that summer the long panels of transparent golden silk would blow out the windows and get tangled and drenched in the afternoon thunderstorms”.

The curtains are never just curtains, however – the details always mean something more. Those curtains mark the turning point where the exterior world and inner tumult meet and something must change. Similarly, the dress worn in the trial of Linda Kasabian in The White Album essay is a vehicle to describe Didion’s horror at both the banality and evil at the heart of the Charles Manson murders.

Martin Amis, when reviewing The White Album in the London Review of Books , noted “the volatile, occasionally brilliant, distinctly female contribution to the new New Journalism, diffident and imperious by turns, intimate yet categorical, self-effacingly listless and at the same time often subtly self-serving ... Miss Didion’s writing does not ‘reflect’ her moods so much as dramatise them. ‘How she feels’ has become, for the time being, how it is.”

Amis’s review reflected a long line of disdain from “serious writers” for the personal essay, the practitioners of which are mainly women.

“How she feels” did become “how it is”. The work has lasted, and although there are many imitators – and even more, like the novelist Bret Easton Ellis, are heavily influenced – Didion’s voice remains singular.

It’s her voice that is part of the appeal of her writing – at least for me. Her fragmentary style, particularly in the early collections The White Album and Slouching Towards Bethlehem, renders an event closer to a form of poetry than the blunt instrument that is the inverted pyramid of news or even more conversational-style features.

Didion’s style works because of, not in spite of, its fragments. It is closer to how we actually see the world – like the moment you heard big news, and how that moment is compromised of many things: how you felt, where you where, the people you were with, how cold it was outside. In Didion’s world, how we experience news is how we experience the world and that is why the temperature of the air and background music in the bar can seem inseparable from our experience of the event. To shear one off from the other is to only convey a part.

After Didion, it seems incomplete to ask only “what happened” and neglect “how did it feel?” (Ta-Nehisi Coates’s brilliant We Were Eight Years in Power does both to great effect.) Her strongest essay Slouching Towards Bethlehem – an exploration of the dark side of the 1960 – expresses dismay at the disorder of the times, and uses Yeats’ poem, The Second Coming, to describe a collapse of common values.

But as disorder burrowed more into Didion’s own life, with the deaths of her husband and daughter, her work and her sentences became even more fragmentary.

Her 2011 book, Blue Nights, is a book of shards – shorn-off sentences, fragments, words, repetitions, images held tight – like talismans that litter the text. Those of us who had fallen in love with the fragmentary, collage-y nature of Didion’s work were left without anything to hold those fragments together or give them shape.

This film picks up the pieces, a bit, and gives a softer, less alarming view of Didion than the one the writer chose to represent herself in her later works. There are things the film doesn’t address – darker topics, such as the deaths of her daughter and husband, and charges that she failed as a parent are left well alone.

Instead, we see Didion dwarfed by her giant refrigerator. We hear her talking about what she used to have for breakfast (always sunglasses-on in the house in the morning, always a cold Coca-Cola from the fridge), we hear about her morning routines with her daughter and husband, and see her now in cashmere and a gold chain – very thin, but very in control, telling us just enough about her life to keep us interested, yet also, perceptibly, holding back.

The Center Cannot Hold is showing now on Netflix

Brigid Delaney is a Guardian columnist

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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)

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 and the Art of Motherhood

Joan Didion was a genius. She was also a mother. The larger culture may see that as a contradiction, Carribean Fragoza writes, but Didion herself was always searching.

Joan Didion was known for her confident, self-assured statements and the surgical precision with which she observed the world. The one adjective continually invoked of her writerly persona and her work was cool . When she passed recently, one of the conversations that bubbled up about her life and her legacy was her identity as a writer and a mother. Online, some male writers asked if she was proof it was possible to be a great artist and a great parent—to be met with parent writers who quickly pointed out the nonsensicalness of that question. But if we look at Didion’s work itself, we see her contradictions. She is often admired for the clarity and conviction of her writing, but in her work, and how she thought of it, there is the uncertainty and tension between the demands of being a writer and the demands of being a mother. And certainly, in how Didion approached it, an understanding that to ask her to conceptualize the two was something that was never demanded of her male peers.

.css-1mkv557{font-family:NewParisTextBook,NewParisTextBook-roboto,NewParisTextBook-local,Georgia,Times,Serif;font-size:1.75rem;line-height:1.2;margin:0rem;padding-left:5rem;padding-right:5rem;}@media(max-width: 48rem){.css-1mkv557{padding-left:2.5rem;padding-right:2.5rem;}}@media(min-width: 64rem){.css-1mkv557{font-size:2.5rem;line-height:1.2;}}.css-1mkv557 b,.css-1mkv557 strong{font-family:inherit;font-weight:bold;}.css-1mkv557 em,.css-1mkv557 i{font-style:italic;font-family:inherit;} When Didion adopted her daughter she worried that she “would not be up to the task".

Where her nonfiction is all certainties and declarations, her fiction is a receptacle of ambiguities, vacillations, and deep anxieties. The topic of motherhood and her relationship to children straddles both genres. Though in her essays, such as her iconic collection Slouching Towards Bethlehem , these anxieties surface as acrid, sometimes derisive observations, particularly of women, they also linger and lurk in the undercurrents. In her novels, including A Book of Common Prayer and Play It as It Lays, the anxieties often fuel the erratic behavior of the female protagonists who suffer the torment of repressed mania, among their many other conditions and plights. Her memoirs, each prompted by grief— Where I Was From, Blue Nights, and The Year of Magical Thinking —take rigorous inventory of life with her family while attempting to make sense of the sudden death of her husband, John Gregory Dunne, and soon after, their daughter, Quintana Roo Dunne.

If we look at Didion’s work itself, we see her contradictions.

Didion published Play It as It Lays in 1970, four years after she adopted her daughter. When Didion and Dunne welcomed their baby, Quintana, in 1966, Didion worried that she “would not be up to the task.” Though not an uncommon concern for many new parents, it likely presented a particularly daunting risk for Didion, as it does for most mothers with professional pursuits. Didion must have known that if becoming a mother had required her to compromise her career, and had her writerly prowess and creative genius dampened and eventually dwindled away into the dark endless universe of motherhood, there would have been no one but herself to mourn the loss. Think of all the geniuses who never came to fruition because they did not have Didion’s privileges and freedoms to write as they pleased. Time to write is essential for developing genius. It is also very expensive—Didion and Dunne were famous as screenwriters for hire and had the good fortune of making a living during the golden age of magazine publishing, when superstar writers could demand a premium price for their services. There are many reasons for the genius of artists to shrivel away: poverty, racial discrimination, legal status, and, yes, sexism. Didion, a unique case, grew into her talents unhindered. She made sure of it.

Her anxieties were already present in 1967 when she wrote about the hippy movement’s spin into chaos in her landmark piece, “Slouching Towards Bethlehem.” In the title essay, upon arriving to San Francisco, she is struck by the prevalence of runaway teenagers, some with “baby fat” still on their bodies. She traces the decay of what was supposed to be a transformative movement from the streets to the domestic space of a commune. Didion progressively zeroes in on the lives and complications of the residents of a commune called the Warehouse. She takes particular interest in the most domestic aspects of all: the children and a woman named Barbara who has curiously embraced what she calls “the woman’s thing” or “the woman’s trip.” She is the apparent caretaker of this complicated, constantly shifting household. While the other members toil in the confusing intricacies of good and bad acid trips, Barbara bakes macrobiotic pastries, tends a loom, and takes occasional jobs to earn money to support everyone else.

Didion, a unique case, grew into her talents unhindered. She made sure of it.

Didion quotes Barbara as saying, “Doing something that shows your love that way is just about the most beautiful thing I know.” And being the astringent critical observer that she has set out to be, Didion adds her own commentary, “Whenever I hear about the woman’s trip, which is often, I think a lot about nothin’-says-loving’-like-something-from-the-oven and the Feminine Mystique and how it is possible for people to be the unconscious instruments of values they would strenuously reject on a conscious level, but I do not mention this to Barbara.”

All this is buildup to the most famous scene in her essay, an image that continues to serve as a point of discontent for so many of Didion’s close readers: In the commune, Didion comes across a five-year old child reading comic books while tripping on acid. In Joan Didion: The Center Will Not Hold , the 2017 documentary on Didion’s life and literary career, she is asked about what she thought upon witnessing this scene. With subtle but visible pleasure, she answers, “It was gold. You live for moments like that, if you’re doing a piece. Good or bad.”

That revelation is dumbfounding in its uninterrogated and unsympathetic bluntness—after Didion says this, the scene cuts without further questions from the film’s director (and Didion’s nephew), Griffin Dunne. It leaves people like me, who wrestle with Didion’s legacies while tracing her influence in our thinking, to wonder, How does one describe a person, let alone a mother, who would witness such a scene and respond not just with inaction, but most crucially, consider it “gold”?

With Didion...one can never be certain

The stark simplicity of her answer rang like a void, one that beckoned a downpour of assumptions and a flood of condemnation of Didion’s lack of empathy, especially as a mother. Yet, I read this moment as Didion responding to the question as a journalist who had doggedly chased a story. Such detachment, of course, is why many of those who build canons consider her a “genius.” In the politics of writing—who gets to publish, who gets to be considered good—dispassion, of detachment, “objectivity” are a cult and the writers who perform these qualities in the most legible ways get the accolades. But even as I write this, I think, Had Didion been asked to situate her answer in her own motherhood, not as a writer, her answer would have been different. Though with Didion, whose mind is at work beyond what can be deduced from the page, one can never be certain. There is always more. I think of her poignant accounting of her daughter’s sickness and death, where she wrote, “How could I have missed what was so clearly there to be seen?”

With Didion, the more she says the less certain she sounds. Her declarative sentences, crafted with unmistakable style, sound better when they stand on their own, unbothered by inquiries or objections. Her clauses reverberate, with the dominance of cathedrals, certain marble-floored banks. They are structures meant to inspire awe and, for some, veneration. For others, they inspire a certain amount of not-unfounded terror or rage. Didion described writing as an act of coercion, almost abuse of the reader. What she was referring to is power—something that people of older generations and even some newer ones cannot compute with the idea of motherhood.

Carribean Fragoza is the author of the short story collection, Eat the Mouth that Feeds You .

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Joan Didion’s Magic Trick

What was it that gave her such power?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Perhaps because they came after this beautiful line:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In Berkeley, things would begin to look familiar.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It had begun.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Read: The things I would never do

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

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

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

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

Franklin Avenue

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Read: We sell ourselves stories in order to live

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Kicked-down doors?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What would set him off? Griffin asks.

“Everything would set him off.”

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

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

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

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

Gone, gone, gone.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Read: Joan Didion was our bard of disenchantment

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

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

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

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

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Out of Bethlehem

By Louis Menand

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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By John Lahr

By Ian Frazier

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Joan Didion From the Couch

Think of Willa Cather, who for so many years was denied her rightful place among the great American novelists because her novels were thought insufficiently modernist. Or consider the high reputations enjoyed during their lifetimes by Norman Mailer, John Updike, and Philip Roth in part for their supposed courage in writing in a vividly detailed way about sex. Would a homely Susan Sontag have attracted the same literary attention as did the strikingly attractive Susan Sontag? Or what about Theodore Dreiser, one of the most powerful of American novelists, who is still often excluded from the American canon because of deficiencies in his style? Then there is James Gould Cozzens, who was knocked out of the box of literary respectability by a single attacking essay by Dwight Macdonald in, of all places, COMMENTARY (“ By Cozzens Possessed ,” January 1958), from which Cozzens’s literary reputation has never recovered.

Some writers enjoy high literary reputation because their politics, or even mere identity, accord with the Zeitgeist , or time-spirit, of the current day: black, feminist, gay-lesbian writers, too numerous to mention. (The New York Times Book Review, someone casually remarked to me the other day, is no longer interested in reviewing books by white heterosexual men.) Some literary reputations, then, seem bloated; some unfairly depressed; and others unfathomable.

High on the list of the unfathomable for me has long been that of Joan Didion (1934–2021). In her day, she won all the usual prizes—the National Book Award, the PEN Center Lifetime Achievement Award, the MacDowell Medal, the George Polk Award for investigative journalism, honorary doctorates from Harvard and Yale, and the publication of two stout volumes of her works in the canon-setting Library of America. The Last Love Song, by Tracy Daugherty , a 700-page biography of Didion, was published during her lifetime. Now we have The World According to Joan Didion , by Evelyn McDonnell, a fawning study of her life and work with thick gobs of feminism thrown in at no extra charge.

What is it about Joan Didion’s writing that seems so greatly to impress other people, I ask myself, when it leaves me so unimpressed?

Didion wrote five novels, all slender volumes marked, not to say marred, by their author’s depression. But Didion’s own preference came to be for the extended essay. “Writing a novel, which is what I thought I’d like to do,” she said in one of her many interviews, “turns out to be not very gratifying in the end because nobody reads them any more.” Today she is best known, even revered, for those essays and her two books of public grieving— The Year of Magical Thinking , about the sudden passing of her husband, John Gregory Dunne, and Blue Nights, about the death at 39 of pancreatitis of her adopted daughter, Quintana Roo Dunne.

Didion was at her best when she insinuated herself into her subject, at her worst when the subject was herself. Her lengthy essay “Slouching Toward Bethlehem” (1967), a close-up view of the drug culture of the mid-1960s in California, provides an example of Didion at her best. In this essay she is able to capture the full horror of lives at whose center is drugs. Near its end the essay closes on the corker detail of a comic-book-reading,   five-year-old girl whose “mother has for a year now . . . given her both peyote and acid.” Didion writes of these people: “This was not a traditional generational rebellion. At some point between 1945 and 1967 we had somehow neglected to tell these children the rules of the game we happened to be playing. Maybe we had stopped believing in the rules ourselves, maybe we were having a failure of nerve about the game. Maybe there were just too few people around to do the telling.”

Then there’s the Joan Didion writing about herself and her psychological condition, as in the essay called “The White Album.” It begins with the striking sentence, “We tell ourselves stories in order to live” and goes on from there to report how all her own personal stories, or narratives, have been undermined by experience. “At that time,” she writes, in a characteristic passage, “I believed that my basic affective controls were no longer intact, but now I present this to you as a more cogent question than it might at first appear, a kind of koan of the period.”

Didion claimed to have no politics. “I’m not sure I have a social conscience,” she told the Guardian in an interview. “It’s more an insistence that people tell the truth.” But then, in 1975, she became a regular contributor to the New York Review of Books and credited Robert Silvers, its editor, with shaping her thought. “I had no opinion I didn’t run by him first. … An editorial note from Bob would open up new possibilities both in a piece and in life itself. What could have been an empty place suddenly flooded with light and understanding.” Among those pieces was a fairly standard attack on Dick Cheney, and another on Woody Allen. In The World According to Joan Didion, Evelyn McDonnell writes that for the New York Review of Books, “ Didion wrote investigative journalism, book reviews, philosophical essays, and war reportage that transformed her from a celebrity chronicler of pop culture, counterculture, and subcultures into one of the leading social and political commentators of her time.” Under the tutelage of Robert Silvers, Didion joined left-wing politics to her generally gloomy views.

Toward the end of her life, Joan Didion achieved something close to celebrity status. A documentary film, The Center Will Not Hold , directed by her nephew Griffin Dunne, was released in 2017. In it Didion holds forth about … herself chiefly. After her death, an auction of her furniture, household goods, and photographs of herself fetched prices resembling those attained by the goods sold at auction of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis: 23 monogrammed linen napkins for $14,000, 13 blank notebooks for $11,000, etc. Photographs of Didion appear on the covers of nearly all her books, photographs that show a woman of the slightly boyish type the French call gamine. She is usually holding a cigarette, often in or in front of her yellow Corvette Stingray. Didion was barely five feet and weighed less than a hundred pounds. Time, as we know, can be a cruel sculptor, and it was hard on her, leaving her in her later years afflicted with Parkinson’s . In one of the few attacks on her, Barbara Grizzuti Harrison described Didion as resembling “a neurasthenic Cher.”

If attacks were few, praise for Didion during and after her lifetime was more than plentiful. At a memorial for her attended by various Hollywood figures, Shelley Wanger, her editor at Knopf, called her “one of the great writers of the past century.” David Rieff, Caitlin Flanagan, Hilton Als, John Leonard, Calvin Trillin, and Zadie Smith are among those who have celebrated her lavishly. Much of the praise is for Didion’s style, some for her authority, some for her unique place as a woman of great style and authority. The novelist Zadie Smith’s encomium strikes all three chords:

With notable exceptions, Didion was a woman who did not so much express opinions, or emotions, as interrogate both. If this still strikes us as unusual, it seemed unprecedented to me, when reading her for the first time in the late eighties. That she was a woman mattered, very much. When women writers of my generation speak in awed tones of Didion’s “style,” I don’t think it’s the shift dresses or the sunglasses, the cigarettes or commas or even the em dashes that we revere, even though all those things were fabulous. It was the authority. The authority of tone.…. I remain grateful for the day I picked up Slouching Toward Bethlehem and realized that a woman could speak without hedging her bets, without hemming and hawing, without making nice, without poeticisms, without sounding pleasant or sweet, without deference, and even without doubt. . . . She gave you confidence. Shored you up.

Yet Didion disclaimed any serious connection to feminism. In “ The Women’s Movement ” (1972), she wrote: “To those of us who remain committed mainly to the exploration of moral distinctions and ambiguities, the feminist analysis may have seemed a particularly narrow and cracked determinism.” She allowed that “many women are victims of condescension and exploitation and sex-role stereotyping was scarcely news, but neither was it news that other women are not: nobody forces women to buy the package.” She found the thinking behind the women’s movement coarse, those who espoused it ignorant of its ideological base, its adherents women “too ‘sensitive’ for the difficulties of adult life, women unequipped for reality and grasping at the movement as a rationale for denying that reality.”

Even so, Evelyn McDonnell derides the notion these words convey. “Not a feminist, my ass,” she writes, though she allows that, as a feminist, Didion stood in need of some consciousness-raising. “Those who critique Didion’s gender politics should take a look at these early articles,” McDonnell writes, “in which Didion is not merely her own woman but encouraging other women to be their own women, well at ease, not hindered by jealousy, driven by self-respect.”

Overlooked by all the praise are the neuroses that sit at the center of the Didion persona and pervade much of her writing. She suffered migraines; she was anorexic; she had breakdowns; she had neuropathy and later shingles; she had a drinking problem (at the close of Slouching Toward Bethlehem , she allows that when researching her work on the book’s lead essay, she was herself “out of her head on gin and speed”); she was terrified of snakes; and over all lay a thick veil of depression. Hilton Als, who admired Didion above all for her writing on gender and race, refers to her “romance with despair.” McDonnell says that “in Didion’s world, every silver lining has a cloud.” Zadie Smith writes that “the overarching theme of her work was decline—of our politics, the environment, truth, intellectualism.”

Far from hiding or working around this depression, Joan Didion wallows in it. In the preface to Slouching Toward Bethlehem , she reports: “I am so physically small, so temperamentally unobtrusive, and so neurotically inarticulate.” In the lead essay of The White Album , she reprints a portion of the psychological report on herself rendered when she went in to be checked for feelings she had experienced of vertigo, nausea, and fear of passing out: “Patient’s thematic productions on the Thematic Apperception Test emphasize her fundamentally pessimistic, fatalistic, and depressive view of the world around her. It is as though she feels deeply that all human effort is foredoomed to failure, a conviction which seems to push her further into a dependent, passive withdrawal. In her view she lives in a world of people moved by strange, conflicted, poorly comprehended, and, above all, devious motivations which commit them irretrievably to conflict and failure.”

This may stand as the most incisive literary criticism of Joan Didion yet written.

_____________

Today Didion is best known for The Year of Magical Thinking , her book about her reaction to the sudden death of her husband, the novelist John Gregory Dunne, on December 30, 2003, a month before their 40th wedding anniversary, and of her daughter’s illness. The book sold more than a million copies, was 24 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list, won the National Book Award, and was later made into a one-character play in which Vanessa Redgrave played Didion. To this day, one hears of people giving grieving friends the book in aid of their consolation.

Magical thinking is the belief that the force of will or induced conviction can translate into action. In Didion’s case, it meant denying her husband’s death in the hope of bringing him back to life. She did not remove his clothes from their Manhattan apartment, nor did she alter anything else that was in place before his death by heart attack while awaiting dinner at the age of 71. It also meant her insisting on an autopsy at which she wanted to be present. Not that Dunne’s death was altogether a surprise. He had been diagnosed with a weakened heart and had had a pacemaker installed. “Yet I had always at some level apprehended, because I was born fearful, that some events in my life would be beyond my ability to control or manage them,” Didion writes. “Some events would just happen. This was one of those events. You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends.”

One used to think of mourning as public, grieving in the realm of the private. Mourning had a public dignity, grieving was personal. No longer. Now, in the age of the therapeutic, one may grieve in public. On local television news one regularly encounters weeping relatives of people murdered on the streets of our cities. One wonders how much The Year of Magical Thinking, a 247-page package of public grieving, has had to do with bringing about this fundamental change in the national mores.

Missing from The Year of Magical Thinking is any closely detailed account of the Didion-Dunne marriage of the kind one would think a novelist might provide. We learn that they worked together, and at the end of the day they would often edit each other’s writing. They co-wrote movie scripts, none of them all that notable, but screenwriting was the major source of their income and allowed them to live in Malibu, Brentwood, and the Upper East Side of Manhattan. We learn from Didion that Dunne had “a horrible temper…. Everything would set him off.” We don’t learn how he dealt with her fame being greater than his. We don’t know which of them could not have a child, and thus their need to adopt. At one point, Didion reports that they contemplated a divorce. She also informs us that the night before his death, her husband told her that “everything he had done … was worthless.” (I have read three of Dunne’s novels, and all I can remember is the one that opens with a producer having two piles of screenplays on his desk, one denoted “shit,” the other “not shit.”)

The Year of Magical Thinking and with it Blue Evenings read as if they were written from the couch—the psychoanalyst’s couch. Both books have the feel of a chattering analysand, admitting to her own sadness, weakness, fragility. In Blue Evenings , she reports, “I feel unsteady, unbalanced, as if my nerves are misfiring, which may or may not be an exact description of what my nerves are actually doing.” Later: “I tell you this true story just to prove that I can. That my frailty has not yet reached a point at which I can no longer tell a true story.” And again: “Surprisingly, there were no abnormalities to explain why I felt as frail as I did.” At several points in The Year of Magical Thinking and in Blue Evenings, one wants to put the book down, announce “your 50 minutes are up,” and then ask the author to pay the desk on her way out.

In an essay titled “Why I Write,” Didion reports: “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.” The first sentence echoes the famous line “How do I know what I think until I write about it.” The second, though, writing to discover one’s desires and fears, is a stranger, even a peculiar, matter.

Tracy Daugherty, Didion’s biographer, claims that “she was a powerful voice for my generation.… She told us who we are, who we were…. She helped us admit things we intuited but rarely aired; the fragility of our national myths and the constant nearness of death.” Interesting that Daugherty, who is 68, refers to Joan Didion’s effect on his generation, when Didion, 20 years older than he, was of a different generation, mine actually.

What this suggests is that Didion was one of the first writers to rise to prominence under the reign of the triumphant therapeutic age. One can admire her writing only if one lives by the main tenets of that age. Among these are the confessional as the main mode of truth, vulnerability and fragility and despair as central to the human condition, self-esteem and personal happiness ranking higher in value than honor, courage, or generosity of spirit. All this is at the heart of Joan Didion’s writing and explains why she is admired by so many and is of so little interest to me.

Photo: AP Photo/Kathy Willens

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Joan Didion, ‘New Journalist’ Who Explored Culture and Chaos, Dies at 87

She established a distinctive voice in American fiction before turning to political reporting and screenplay writing. But it was California, her native state, that provided her with her richest material.

By William Grimes

Joan Didion, whose mordant dispatches on California culture and the chaos of the 1960s established her as a leading exponent of the New Journalism, and whose novels “Play It as It Lays” and “A Book of Common Prayer” proclaimed the arrival of a tough, terse, distinctive voice in American fiction, died on Thursday at her home in Manhattan. She was 87.

The cause was complications of Parkinson’s disease, according to an email sent by Paul Bogaards, an executive at Knopf, Ms. Didion’s publisher.

Ms. Didion came to prominence with a series of incisive, searching feature articles in Life magazine and The Saturday Evening Post that explored the fraying edges of postwar American life. California, her native state, provided her with her richest material. In sharp, knowing vignettes, she captured its harshness and beauty, its role as a magnet for restless settlers, its golden promise and rapidly vanishing past, and its power as a cultural laboratory.

“We believed in fresh starts,” she wrote in “Where I Was From” (2003), a psychic portrait of the state. “We believed in good luck. We believed in the miner who scratched together one last stake and struck the Comstock Lode.”

In two early groundbreaking essay collections, “Slouching Towards Bethlehem” (1968) and “The White Album” (1979) she turned her cool, apprehensive gaze on the hippies of Haight-Ashbury, on eccentrics and searchers like Bishop James Pike and Howard Hughes, on the film industry in the post-studio era, and on the death-tinged music of the Doors.

Ms. Didion’s reporting reflected Norman Mailer’s prescription for “enormously personalized journalism in which the character of the narrator was one of the elements in the way the reader would finally assess the experience.”

Her attraction to trouble spots, disintegrating personalities and incipient chaos came naturally. In the title essay from “The White Album,” she included her own psychiatric evaluation after arriving at the outpatient clinic of St. John’s Hospital in Santa Monica complaining of vertigo and nausea.

It read, in part: “In her view she lives in a world of people moved by strange, conflicted, poorly comprehended, and, above all, devious motivations which commit them inevitably to conflict and failure.” This description, which Ms. Didion did not contest, could describe the archetypal heroine of her novels.

“Her talent was for writing about the mood of the culture,” the writer Katie Roiphe said in an interview. “She managed to channel the spirit of the 1960s and ’70s through her own highly idiosyncratic and personal — that is, seemingly personal — writing. She was perfectly matched to the times, with her slightly paranoid, slightly hysterical, high-strung sensibility. It was a perfect conjunction of the writer with the moment.”

Ms. Didion later turned to political reporting, filing long essays for The New York Review of Books on the civil war in El Salvador and Cuban émigré culture in Miami; they were published in book form as “Salvador” and “Miami.”

“She was fearless, original and a marvelous observer,” Robert B. Silvers , who was the editor of The New York Review of Books, which began publishing Ms. Didion’s work in the early 1970s, said in an interview for this obituary in 2009. “She was very skeptical of the conventional view and brilliant at finding the person or situation that was telling about the broader picture. She was a great reporter.”

Joan Didion was born on Dec. 5, 1934, in Sacramento to Frank and Eduene (Jerrett) Didion. She was a fifth-generation Californian descended from settlers who left the ill-fated Donner party in 1846 and took the safer route. Her father was a finance officer with the Army, her mother a homemaker, and during World War II the family moved from one posting to the next before returning to Sacramento after the war.

As a teenager, Ms. Didion typed out chapters from Hemingway novels to see how they worked. She was deeply influenced by Hemingway’s handling of dialogue and silence. Joseph Conrad was another formative influence.

In her junior year at the University of California, Berkeley, where she earned a bachelor’s degree in English in 1956, Ms. Didion submitted an early draft of a short story to Mademoiselle and won a spot as guest fiction editor for the magazine. The following year she won an essay contest sponsored by Vogue. Turning down a trip to Paris, the top prize, she went straight to work at the magazine, where her prose underwent a rigorous if idiosyncratic schooling as she advanced from writing promotional copy to becoming an associate features editor. “In an eight-line caption everything had to work, every word, every comma,” she later said .

By the early 1960s Ms. Didion was writing for Vogue, Mademoiselle and National Review, often on topics like “Jealousy: Is It a Curable Illness?” At the same time, she published a well-received first novel, “Run, River” (1963), about the unraveling of a Sacramento family. Although not as lean as her subsequent fiction, it introduced the preoccupations that governed her later novels — violence, dread, the sickening sense that the world was spinning out of control — and acquainted readers with “the Didion woman,” described by Michiko Kakutani in The New York Times Magazine as the forlorn resident of “a clearly personal wasteland, wandering along highways or through countries in an effort to blot out the pain of consciousness.”

In 1964, she married John Gregory Dunne, a writer at Time with whom she had been friends for several years. They moved to California and started writing screenplays. They also adopted a daughter, Quintana Roo, taking her name from the Mexican state, which they had chanced upon while looking at a map.

In time they became a bicoastal glamour couple, with one foot in Hollywood and the other in Manhattan’s literary salons. Mr. Dunne died of a heart attack at 71 in 2003 . Two years later, Quintana Roo Dunne died of pancreatitis and septic shock at 39. Ms. Didion wrote about her husband’s death and her daughter’s illness in “The Year of Magical Thinking” (2005), which won the 2005 National Book Award for nonfiction and was adapted for the Broadway stage in 2007 in a one-woman production starring Vanessa Redgrave. Ms. Didion took up the subject of her daughter’s death in her 2011 memoir, “Blue Nights.”

Ms. Didion constructed a tripartite career devoted to reporting, screenwriting and fiction. Reporting, she once said, forced her into other people’s lives and allowed her to collect the information and impressions that fed her fiction. “Something about a situation will bother me, so I will write a piece to find out what it is that bothers me,” she told The Paris Review in 2006. Screenwriting, by contrast, offered a diversion, like working a crossword puzzle. She was unusually successful at all three.

In 1970, she and her husband, after optioning a story about drug addicts on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, wrote the screenplay for “Panic in Needle Park,” a film that gave Al Pacino his first starring role. Their second screenplay was an adaptation of Ms. Didion’s second novel, “Play It as It Lays” (1970), the elliptical tale of a young actress who compulsively drives the California freeways to forget her failed marriage, an abortion and her daughter’s mental illness. The film version, released in 1972, starred Tuesday Weld and Anthony Perkins.

With their third screenplay, Ms. Didion and her husband struck gold. With James Taylor and Carly Simon in mind for the lead roles, they rewrote “A Star Is Born” to bring it into the rock ’n’ roll era. With Barbra Streisand and Kris Kristofferson starring, the film became a big box-office success and paid its screenwriters handsomely.

The couple later collaborated on “True Confessions,” the film version of Mr. Dunne’s 1977 novel, starring Robert De Niro and Robert Duvall, and “Up Close and Personal” (1996), a television-news drama with Robert Redford and Michelle Pfeiffer.

In her third novel, “A Book of Common Prayer” (1977), Ms. Didion placed her heroine, the dreamy, damaged Charlotte Douglas, in a fictional Central American country torn by revolutionary politics. This broader canvas prefigured a series of long, probing articles on political subjects, often written for The New York Review of Books. A trip to El Salvador, then in the throes of a civil war, yielded the material for the highly impressionistic “Salvador” (1983), a V.S. Naipaul-esque journey into the heart of darkness.

The intricacies of Cuban-American politics were the subject of “Miami” (1987), another extended foray into personal journalism, which some critics began to find wearying. Everywhere Ms. Didion went, it seemed, she found the identical set of circumstances: looming chaos, an atmosphere saturated with dread and absurdities described by unwitting participants in clichéd language indicated by quotation marks.

“She always seems to be writing on the brink of a catastrophe so awful that her only available response is to withdraw into a kind of autism,” Adam Kirsch wrote in The New York Sun in 2006. (“I have a theatrical temperament,” Ms. Didion once told an interviewer.)

In 2015, St. Martin’s Press published “The Last Love Song: A Biography of Joan Didion,” by Tracy Daugherty. Two years later, “Joan Didion: The Center Will Not Hold,” a documentary film produced and directed by Griffin Dunne, the son of her brother-in-law, the journalist Dominick Dunne , was shown on Netflix.

She left no immediate survivors.

In her later years, Ms. Didion abandoned traditional reporting and wrote a form of cultural criticism that focused on how the press and television interpreted certain events, including presidential elections and the beating and rape of a jogger in Central Park in 1989.

Several of these essays were included in the collections “After Henry” (1992) and “Political Fictions” (2001), which focused on the administrations of George Bush and Bill Clinton. In 2006, Everyman editions published “We Tell Ourselves Stories in Order to Live: Collected Nonfiction.” In “South and West: From a Notebook,” published in 2017, Ms. Didion reached back to the 1970s and retrieved her impressions of the Deep South, where she and her husband had traveled on assignment for Life magazine, and further reflections on California.

The voice remained the same: tough, knowing, at times cynical. Despite her deceptively frail appearance, she maintained the stance of a frontierswoman shaped by the extreme circumstances of her native state. She put it succinctly in “Where I Was From”:

“You were meant, if you were a Californian, to know how to lash together a corral with bark, you were meant to show spirit, kill the rattlesnake, keep moving.”

Alex Traub contributed reporting.

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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.