Joan Didion was born in 1934 in
Sacramento, California, to an Air Force officer and a homemaker
whose families had lived in central California for five generations.
Descended from the rugged settlers who crossed the continent to
find a better life in the West, Didion’s direct, plainspoken writing
style reflects her ancestry, and her home state features prominently
in her acclaimed essays about the failures of liberalism and the
rise of counterculture movements in the 1960s.
Didion attended the University of California at Berkeley,
where she studied English. In 1956, she won Vogue’s
Prix de Paris essay prize for young writers, which allowed her to
gain experience at the magazine, where she eventually became an
associate features editor. While at Vogue, Didion
learned how to describe products in detail without cluttering her
work with superfluous descriptions, a practice that had a formative
effect on her trademark spare prose style. In 1963,
she published her first novel, Run River. Thematically,
the book tackles nostalgia, death, and irreversible change, all
major elements examined in The Year of Magical Thinking.
That same year, Didion met and fell in love with John Gregory Dunne,
a reporter for Time magazine and a budding novelist.
They married at the Catholic Mission San Juan Bautista in January 1964 and
shortly thereafter moved to Los Angeles, where they lived for the
next twenty-five years.
Soon after moving to California, Didion and Dunne adopted their
only child, Quintana Roo, named for a peninsula in the Yucatan.
Both writers produced novels, essays, reviews, and screenplays,
some of which they wrote together. In 1968,
Didion published a collection of essays titled Slouching
Toward Bethlehem, compiled from features she had written
for the Saturday Evening Post. With a detached,
analytical voice, Didion described a breakdown of social order in
California, mixing personal reflections with her shrewd social commentary.
Two years later, Didion published her second novel, Play
It As It Lays, another sharp satire that skewered Hollywood
culture. In 1971, the couple’s first collaboration, Panic
in Needle Park, hit the big screen. A six-figure salary,
a successful film adaptation, and a National Book Award nomination
for The White Album in 1981 cemented
Didion’s status as one of America’s preeminent literary figures.
Joan Didion is often identified with the New Journalists,
a loose grouping of writers that emerged during the 1960s
and 1970s that takes its name from a 1973 essay
compilation by Tom Wolfe. Norman Mailer and Truman Capote (particularly
in his true crime exposé In Cold Blood) are considered
the forerunners of the movement, and its other notable practitioners
include Wolfe, Didion, Hunter S. Thompson, and Gay Talese. New Journalism
sought to break the pattern of the traditional, objective writing
style that dominated the New York literary scene in the wake of
World War II. New Journalists added scenes, dialogue, and everyday
details to enliven their pieces, making them read more like fiction
than journalism. They also strove to give the reader insight into
their subjects’ thoughts and emotions, in contrast to the strict
reportage of surface facts and details by journalists of an earlier
generation. The Year of Magical Thinking, while
not a strict example of New Journalism, utilizes many of the literary
conventions that Didion herself contributed to the movement, such
as the book’s nonlinear structure and abundance of subjective detail
that Didion offers her readers.
Throughout the 1970s and early 1980s,
Didion continued to write, publish, and collaborate with Dunne on
several film projects. A Book of Common Prayer, a
novel, and The White Album, another collection
of essays about California, appeared in 1977 and 1979, respectively.
Didion and Dunne’s screenplay for the 1976 remake
of A Star is Born—and their decision to accept
a portion of the film’s profits—secured their financial future.
During the 1980s, Didion began to move away
from the New Journalism that had made her famous and turned to traditional
political reporting, writing about El Salvador’s civil war in Salvador (1983)
and the Cold War Cuban-American intrigue in southern Florida in Miami (1987).
Her writing output decreased as she focused her attention on shorter
essays and articles that allowed her to spend more time with her
daughter.
In 1988, the couple relocated to
New York, where Didion spent the late 1980s
covering American politics. She and Dunne continued to write teleplays,
though they always saw their film and television work as primarily
a moneymaking venture. The couple spent several years writing and
rewriting an adaptation of the biography of ill-fated reporter Jessica
Savitch, which turned into the 1996 film Up
Close & Personal, a star vehicle for actress Michelle
Pfeiffer. Over the course of the 1990s Didion
regularly contributed to the New York Review of Books and
the New Yorker and published several more novels
and essay collections, mostly about politics.
In December 2003, Quintana, then
a photo editor at ELLE magazine, was hospitalized
with a severe case of flu that developed into pneumonia and septic
shock. A few weeks later, John died suddenly of a major heart attack
while the couple was sitting down to dinner. Over the next year,
Didion tended to her daughter, who was rehospitalized with a subdural
hematoma, while also coming to grips with the death of her husband.
Her mourning process resulted in The Year of Magical Thinking, a
spare, thoughtful meditation on her personal experience of grief.
The book was released to massive critical and commercial acclaim
in October 2005, earning Didion the National
Book Award for nonfiction and a Pulitzer Prize nomination. The story
also introduced her work to a broad new readership. Though the book
ends by relating the initial stages of her daughter’s recovery,
Quintana died of acute pancreatitis shortly before the book’s release.
In 2006, Didion announced her collaboration
with the actress Vanessa Redgrave, set to star in a one-woman Broadway
play adapted by Didion from The Year of Magical Thinking.
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