Joan Didion, writer, journalist, and social anthropologist of American culture brought a singularly sharp, scrupulous voice to all sorts of subjects for more than 60 years. She is gone at 87 years old, taken by Parkinson’s disease on Thursday, December 23.
Noted for her detached writing, Didion focused on feelings of alienation and isolation throughout her career, no more so than expressing her own grief after the death of her husband John Gregory Dunne in the Pulitzer-winning The Year Of Magical Thinking (2005), the emptiness of Los Angeles and the film industry in the novel Play It As It Lays (1970), or American expats caught up in Central American politics in her novel A Book Of Common Prayer (1977).
She started her career working at Vogue, where she met Dunne, who was writing for Time magazine. He was the younger brother of writer Dominick Dunne. The couple married in 1964 and moved to Los Angeles, intending to stay only temporarily, but California ultimately became their home for the next 20 years. Their daughter, Quintana Roo Dunne, was adopted in 1966.
Two tragedies struck Didion in less than two years: in December 2003, while her daughter lay comatose in the ICU with septic shock resulting from pneumonia, her husband suffered a fatal heart attack at the dinner table. Didion delayed his funeral arrangements for approximately three months until her daughter was well enough to attend. Visiting Los Angeles after her father’s funeral, Quintana fell at the airport, hit her head on the pavement and suffered a massive hematoma, requiring six hours of brain surgery. After progressing toward recovery in 2004, Quintana died of acute pancreatitis in August 2005, during Didion’s release promotion for The Year Of Magical Thinking. Didion was in New York City and her daughter in Los Angeles.
I read The Year Of Magical Thinking in early 2014, when it looked likely that I was not going to beat cancer. Somehow, the best book about grieving that I had ever read gave me solace. That is what good writing can do. It received the National Book Award for Nonfiction in 2005 and the Prix Medicis Essais in 2007. It is a true masterpiece of two genres: the memoir and investigative journalism.
In her collection of essays, The White Album (1979), Didion writes about a nervous breakdown she experienced in the summer of 1968. After undergoing psychiatric evaluation, she was with multiple sclerosis.
She also wrote screenplays with her husband:
The Panic In Needle Park (1971), about life among a group of heroin addicts who hang out in “Needle Park” (then the nickname for Sherman Square on Manhattan’s Upper West Side near 72nd Street and Broadway), starring Al Pacino and Kitty Winn.
Play It As It Lays (1972), based on her novel about Hollywood, he film stars Tuesday Weld and Anthony Perkins.
A Star Is Born (1976), not the one with Judy Garland or Lady Gaga, this version has Barbra Streisand in an afro and Kris Kristofferson with his shirt off.
True Confessions (1981), based on a novel by Dunne, it stars Robert De Niro and Robert Duvall playing brothers, a priest and police detective. It’s good.
Up Close & Personal (1996), starring Robert Redford as a news director and Michelle Pfeiffer as his protégée, with Stockard Channing in a supporting role. The screenplay began as an adaptation of Golden Girl: The Story Of Jessica Savitch (1988), a book about the troubled life of news anchor Jessica Savitch. Dunne, having spent eight years working on the script with Didion, later wrote a book describing his difficult experience, titled Monster: Living Off the Big Screen (1997), which details the meetings, writing, rewriting and all the other struggles in the way of creating a sellable screenplay. It also describes how a film that started being about Jessica Savitch ends up being a Star Is Born-type film, where one character is a “rising star,” and the person she is in love with becomes a “falling star”.
Didion’s nephew Griffin Dunne directed a documentary about her: The Center Will Not Hold (2017), where, with the assistance of her and family, she discusses her writing and personal life.
The Year Of Magical Thinking was adapted to a one-person play by Didion. It was directed by David Hare, with Vanessa Redgrave. It ran for 24 weeks on Broadway in 2007, and the following year Redgrave reprised her role at London’s National Theatre.
From The Year Of Magical Thinking:
“Time passes but not so aggressively that anyone notices? Or even: Time passes, but not for me? Could it be that I did not figure in either the general nature or the permanence of the slowing, the irreversible changes in mind and body, the way in which you wake one summer morning less resilient than you were and by Christmas find your ability to mobilize gone, atrophied, no longer extant? The way in which you live most of your life in California, and then don’t? The way in which your awareness of this passing time — this permanent slowing, this vanishing resilience — multiplies, metastasizes, becomes your very life?”
Joan Dideon
Could it be that I never believed that?
