Joan Didion

Joan Didion
Didion at the 2008 Brooklyn Book Festival
Born	December 5, 1934 (1934-12-05) (age 76) Sacramento, California, U.S.
Occupation	Novelist, Memoirist, Essayist
Nationality	American
Period	1963–present
Subjects	Memoir, Drama
Notable work(s)	Slouching Towards Bethlehem (1968) The Year of Magical Thinking (2005)
Spouse(s)	John Gregory Dunne (1932-2003; his death at 71)

Joan Didion (born December 5, 1934) is an American author best known for her novels and her literary journalism. Her novels and essays explore the disintegration of American morals and cultural chaos, where the overriding theme is individual and social fragmentation. A sense of anxiety or dread permeates much of her work.^[1]

Childhood and education

Joan Didion was born in Sacramento, California, to parents Frank Reese and Eduene (née Jerrett) Didion. Didion recalls writing things down as early as age five, though she claims that she never saw herself as a writer until after being published. She read everything she could get her hands on after learning how to read and even needed written permission from her mother to borrow adult books, biographies especially, from the library at a young age. With this, she identified herself as being a "shy, bookish child", who pushed herself to overcome these personal obstacles through acting and public speaking.^[2]

As a child, Didion attended kindergarten and first grade. Because her father was in the Army Air Corps during World War II, her family was constantly relocated and she did not attend school on a regular basis. Then, at the age of nine or ten,^{[Which one?]} in 1943 or early 1944, her family settled back in Sacramento, and her father went to Detroit to settle defense contracts for World War I and II. Didion wrote, in her 2003 memoir Where I Was From,^[2] that moving as often as her family did made her feel like a perpetual outsider.

In 1956, Didion graduated from the University of California, Berkeley with a Bachelor of Arts in English. During her senior year, she won first place in an essay contest sponsored by Vogue, with the prize of a job at the magazine.

Adult life

Professional life

For two years at Vogue, Didion worked her way up from promotional copywriter to associate feature editor. While there, she wrote her first novel, Run, River, which was published in 1963. She returned to California with her new husband, writer John Gregory Dunne, and in 1968, published Slouching Towards Bethlehem, her first work of non-fiction, a collection of magazine pieces about her experiences in California.^[3]

In 1979, she published The White Album, another collection of magazine pieces from Life, Esquire, The Saturday Evening Post, The New York Times, and The New York Review of Books.

Play It As It Lays, set in Hollywood, was published in 1970 and A Book of Common Prayer was published in 1977. Her 1983 essay, Salvador, was written after a two-week long trip to El Salvador with her husband. She also wrote Democracy in 1984 which deals with her concern for the loss of society's traditional values. Her 1987 nonfiction book, Miami, looked at the Cuban expatriate community in Miami. In 1992, she published After Henry, a collection of twelve geographical essays. In 1996, she published The Last Thing He Wanted, a romantic thriller.

Dunne and Didion worked closely together for most of their careers, and indeed much of their writing is intertwined. With Dunne, Didion co-wrote a number of screenplays, including an adaptation of her novel Play It As It Lays. She and Dunne also spent eight years adapting the biography of journalist Jessica Savitch into the film Up Close & Personal.

Didion began writing The Year of Magical Thinking, a narrative of her response to the death of her husband and severe illness of their daughter, Quintana, on October 4, 2004, and finished 88 days later on New Year's Eve.^[4] She went on a book tour following the release of this memoir, doing many readings and interviews to promote it. She has said that she found the process very "therapeutic" during her period of mourning.^[5]

In 2006, Everyman's Library published We Tell Ourselves Stories in Order to Live, a compendium of much of Didion's writing, including the full content of her first seven published nonfiction books Slouching Towards Bethlehem, The White Album, Salvador, Miami, After Henry, Political Fictions, and Where I Was From, with an introduction by her contemporary, the noted critic John Leonard.

In 2007, she began working on a one-woman adaptation of The Year of Magical Thinking. Produced by Scott Rudin, this Broadway play featured Vanessa Redgrave. Although at first she was hesitant about the idea of writing a play, she has since found this new genre to be quite exciting.^[5]

Didion wrote early drafts of the screen play for an HBO biopic directed by Robert Benton on the famous newspaper dame Katharine Graham. It currently remains untitled. Sources say it may trace Graham's paper, The Washington Post, in its dogged reportage on the Watergate scandal which led to President Richard Nixon's resignation.^[6] However, Didion is no longer working on that project.^[7]

In 2011, Knopf published Blue Nights, a memoir about aging.^[8] The book focuses on Didion's daughter, Quintana Roo Dunne, who died just before her previous memoir, The Year of Magical Thinking, was published. It addresses their relationship with “stunning frankness.” More generally, the book will speak to the anxieties Didion experienced about having and raising a child, and also about the aging process.^[9][10]

Personal life

While in New York and working at Vogue, Didion met her future husband of almost forty years, John Gregory Dunne, who at the time was writing for Time Magazine. The couple married in 1964 and moved to Los Angeles, California, soon after, with intentions of staying only temporarily. California ultimately became their home for the next twenty years.

In the title essay of The White Album, Didion documents a nervous breakdown she experienced in the summer of 1968. After undergoing a psychiatric evaluation, she is diagnosed as having had an attack of vertigo and nausea.

Two terrible tragedies struck Didion in just over two years' time. On December 30, 2003, while their daughter Quintana Roo Dunne lay comatose in the ICU with septic shock resulting from pneumonia, Dunne suffered a fatal heart attack while at the dinner table. Didion put off Dunne's funeral arrangements for approximately a month until Quintana was well enough to attend the service. Returning to Los Angeles after her father's funeral, Quintana was struck by a massive hematoma. She required six hours of brain surgery at UCLA Medical Center.^[4] Quintana died of acute pancreatitis on August 26, 2005, during Didion's New York promotion for The Year of Magical Thinking. She was thirty-nine.^[5]

Physically, Didion is most commonly described as being a thin, frail woman.^[4] Even at the younger age of 44, Didion was said to weigh just 95 pounds at 5 feet 2 inches in height. She claims to have an Okie accent, which she attributes to attending Sacramento high schools.

In 1979, Didion was living in Brentwood Park, California, a quiet, residential suburb of Los Angeles. Before her move to Brentwood she lived in the Hollywood/Los Feliz area on Franklin Ave, one block north of Hollywood Blvd. ^[11] As of 2005, Didion has resided in an apartment on East 71st Street in New York City.^[4]

Didion as a writer

New Journalism

New Journalism seeks to communicate facts through narrative storytelling and literary techniques. This style is also described as creative nonfiction, intimate journalism, or literary nonfiction. Tom Wolfe, author of The New Journalism (1974), popularized this style and pointed to the fact that "it is possible to write journalism that would ... read like a novel."^[12] New Journalist writers tend to turn away from “just the facts” and focus more upon the dialogue of the situation and the scenarios that the author may have experienced. The style gives the author more creative freedom and blends elements of fiction, opinion, and fact. This can help to represent the truth and reality through the author's eyes. Exhibiting subjectivity is a major theme in New Journalism. Here, the author’s voice is critical to a reader forming opinions and thoughts concerning the work.^[13]

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

Writing style and themes

Didion views the structure of the sentence as essential to what she is conveying in her work. In the New York Times article, Why I Write (1976)^[14] Didion remarks, "To shift the structure of a sentence alters the meaning of that sentence, as definitely and inflexibly as the position of a camera alters the meaning of the object photographed...The arrangement of the words matters, and the arrangement you want can be found in the picture in your mind...The picture tells you how to arrange the words and the arrangement of the words tells you, or tells me, what's going on in the picture."^[14]

Didion is heavily influenced by Ernest Hemingway, whose writing taught Didion the importance of the way sentences worked within a text. Other influences include writer Henry James, who wrote "perfect, indirect, complicated sentences" and George Eliot.^[15]

Because of her belief that it is the media that tells us how to live, Joan Didion has become an observer of journalists themselves.^[13] She believes that the difference between the process of fiction and nonfiction is the element of discovery that takes place in nonfiction. This happens not during the writing, but rather during the research.^[15]

There are rituals that are a part of Didion's creative thought process. At the end of the day, Didion must take a break from writing to remove herself from the "pages."^[15] She feels closeness to her work; without a necessary break, she cannot make proper adjustments. Didion spends a great deal of time cutting out and editing her prose before concluding her evening. The next day, Didion begins by looking over her work from the previous evening, making further adjustments as she sees fit. As this process culminates, Didion feels that it is necessary to sleep in the same room as her book. In Didion's own words, "That's one reason I go home to Sacramento to finish things. Somehow the book doesn't leave you when you're right next to it."^[15]

Awards and recognitions

Didion has received a great deal of recognition for one of her more recent books, The Year of Magical Thinking, which was awarded the National Book Award in 2005. Documenting the grief she experienced following the sudden death of her husband, the book has been said to be a "masterpiece of two genres: memoir and investigative journalism."^[5]

In 2007, Didion received the National Book Foundation's annual Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters for "her distinctive blend of spare, elegant prose and fierce intelligence." This same year, Didion also won the Evelyn F. Burkey Award from the Writers Guild of America.^[16]

In 2009, Didion was awarded an honorary Doctor of Letters degree by Harvard University.^[17] Yale University conferred another honorary Doctor of Letters degree on the writer in 2011.^[18]

Published works

Fiction

• Run, River (1963)
• Play It as It Lays (1970)
• A Book of Common Prayer (1977)
• Democracy (1984)
• The Last Thing He Wanted (1996)

Nonfiction

• Slouching Towards Bethlehem (1968)
• The White Album (1979)
• Salvador (1983)
• Miami (1987)
• After Henry (1992)
• Political Fictions (2001)
• Where I Was From (2003)
• Fixed Ideas: America Since 9.11 (2003; preface by Frank Rich)
• Vintage Didion (2004)
• The Year of Magical Thinking (2005)
• We Tell Ourselves Stories in Order to Live: Collected Nonfiction (2006; includes her first seven volumes of nonfiction)
• The Year of Magical Thinking (2006)
• Blue Nights (2011) ISBN 978-0307267672

Letter From Paradise, 21 19' N., 157 52' W.

Screenplays

• The Panic in Needle Park (1971)
• Play It as It Lays (1972) (based on her novel)
• A Star Is Born (1976)
• True Confessions (1981)
• Up Close & Personal (1996)

References

1. ^ "Joan Didion (1934-)." Contemporary Literary Criticism. Ed. Jean C. Stine and Daniel G. Marowski. Vol. 32. Detroit: Gale Research, 1985. 142-150. Literature Criticism Online. Gale. St. John's University Library. 10 April 2009 http://galenet.galegroup.com/servlet/LitCrit/jama62549/FJ3511650016
2. ^ ^{a b} Joan Didion Biography - Academy of Achievement - http://www.achievement.org/autodoc/page/did0bio-1
3. ^ Joan Didion (1934-)." Contemporary Literary Criticism. Ed. Jeffrey W. Hunter. Vol. 129. Detroit: Gale Group, 2000. 58-108. Literature Criticism Online. Gale. St. John's University Library. 10 April 2009 http://galenet.galegroup.com/servlet/LitCrit/jama62549/FJ3533350004
4. ^ ^{a b c d} Feature: When Everything Changes - http://nymag.com/nymetro/arts/books/14633/
5. ^ ^{a b c d} Guernica/a magazine of art & politics- http://www.guernicamag.com/interviews/146/seeing_things_straight/
6. ^ Michael Fleming (November 14, 2008). "HBO sets Katharine Graham biopic"
7. ^ Joan-Didion.info "Biopic Abandoned"
8. ^ Joan-Didion.info "New Didion Memoir About Aging Coming Next Year"
9. ^ Joan-Didion.info "Details Emerge About Blue Nights"
10. ^ Joan Didion Mourns Her Daughter, By JOHN BANVILLE New York Times, November 3, 2011
11. ^ Joan Didion: Staking Out California - http://www.nytimes.com/1979/06/10/books/didion-calif.html?pagewanted=1
12. ^ A Masterpiece of Literary Journalism: Joan Didion's Slouching towards Bethlem - Feb. 2006, Volume 3, No.2 (Serial No. 26), Sino-US English Teaching, ISSN1539-8072,USA
13. ^ ^{a b} Joan Didion: Sandra Braman - http://www.english.upenn.edu/~despey/didion.htm
14. ^ ^{a b} Why I Write by Joan Didion, New York Times (1857-Current file); Dec 5,1976; ProQest Historical Newspapers The New York Times (1851-2005) pg. 270
15. ^ ^{a b c d} The Paris Review: The Art of Fiction No. 71: Joan Didion
16. ^ New York Times: "A Medal for Joan Didion," Sept. 11, 2007
17. ^ http://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2009/06/ten-honorary-degrees-awarded-at-commencement/
18. ^ Joan-Didion.info "Didion Receives Honorary Degree from Yale"

External links

• Joan-Didion.info: Joan Didion Fan Site
• Joan Didion on The California Museum's California Legacy Trails
• 2005 audio interview of Joan Didion by Susan Stamberg of National Public Radio - RealAudio
• Didion and Vanessa Redgrave on NPR's Morning Edition
• Didion on NPR's Fresh Air discusses The Year of Magical Thinking
• Author interview in Guernica Magazine (Guernicamag.com)
• CBC: Didion wins U.S. National Book Award
• The New York Review of Books: Joan Didion
• Linda Kuehl (Fall-Winter 1978). "Joan Didion, The Art of Fiction No. 71". The Paris Review. http://www.parisreview.org/viewinterview.php/prmMID/3439. 
• Hilton Als (Spring 2006). "Joan Didion, The Art of Nonfiction No. 1". The Paris Review. http://www.parisreview.org/viewinterview.php/prmMID/5601. 
• "The Zen of Joan Didion" in Shambhala Sun Magazine
• Joan Didion at the Internet Movie Database
• Joan Didion is writing the screenplay for HBO's upcoming Katharine Graham biopic.

Persondata
Name	Didion, Joan
Alternative names
Short description	American author
Date of birth	December 5, 1934
Place of birth	Sacramento, California
Date of death
Place of death