Joan Didion

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Joan Didion at the 2008 Brooklyn Book Festival.

Joan Didion (born December 5, 1934) is an American journalist, essayist, and novelist. Didion contributes regularly to The New York Review of Books. In a 1979 New York Times review of Didion's collection The White Album, critic Michiko Kakutani noted, "Novelist and poet James Dickey has called Didion 'the finest woman prose stylist writing in English today.'"[1]

With her late husband, the writer John Gregory Dunne, Didion collaborated on several screenplays. She lives in New York City.

Contents

[edit] Biography

Born in Sacramento, California, Didion graduated from the University of California, Berkeley in 1956 with a BA in English. Much of Didion's writing draws upon her life in California, particularly during the 1960s as the world in which she grew up "began to seem remote." Her non-fiction portraits of conspiracy theorists, paranoiacs, and sociopaths are now considered part of the canon of American literature. Sibylline, elegant, and oracular, she has a distinctive writing style of layered, interrupted, or parenthetical thoughts, integrated into smooth, flowing sentences. Her essays are often written in a narrative form, yet range wide among differing themes or points in time.[citation needed]

Initially adopting a culturally conservative stance, she demarcated her early career as a Barry Goldwater conservative and wrote incisive articles in William Buckley's National Review, to which she was introduced by the political writer Noel Parmentel. Perhaps as a reaction to Ronald Reagan, whom she termed "a faux conservative," or as a result of her reluctant affinity with progressive writers in the New York literary world in which she moved in the seventies, she moved toward the liberal tenets of the Democrats, while retaining a conservative bent. Whatever her perceived "stances" or "bents," Didion has always remained iconoclastic, chronicling the endless American dream, and its fulfillment or mutation in the United States among some of its most unique individuals -- Joan Baez, Howard Hughes, Nancy Reagan, -- or groups -- the Haight-Ashbury hippies, Miami's Cuban community, Californians living in New York.

As recounted in her essay collection The White Album, in 1969, Didion was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, although the disease went into remission in 1972. [2]

Didion is the author of five novels and eight books of nonfiction. Her early collections of essays, Slouching Towards Bethlehem (1968) and The White Album (1979) -- a book defining California, in the words of one review, as "the paranoia capital of the world" -- made her famous as an observer of American politics and culture with a distinctive reporting style combining personal reflection and social analysis, and associating her, however remotely, with practioners of the New Journalism like Tom Wolfe and Hunter S. Thompson.

Didion is not without her critics. Seeming to deploy Didion's icy, biting style against Didion herself, essayist Barbara Grizzuti Harrison, in a less than kind passage from her essay Joan Didion: Only Disconnect from Off Center: Essays by Barbara Grizzuti Harrison, writes: "When I am asked why I do not find Joan Didion appealing, I am tempted to answer -- not entirely facetiously -- that my charity does not naturally extend itself to someone whose lavender love seats match exactly the potted orchids on her mantel, someone who has porcelain elephant end tables, someone who has chosen to burden her daughter with the name Quintana Roo...."

In 2001, Didion published Political Fictions, a collection of essays which had first appeared in the New York Review of Books. Issues and personalities covered in the essays included The Religious Right, Newt Gingrich, and the Reagan administration.

Where I Was From (2003), a memoir, explores the mythologies of California, and the author's relationship to her birthplace and to her mother. Indirectly, it also serves as a rumination on the American frontier myth and the culture that we see today in California as a direct consequence of a population of survivalists who made it "through the Sierra," finally posing the question "at what cost progress?"

Didion's book, The Year of Magical Thinking, was published October 4, 2005. The book-length essay chronicles the year following her husband's death, during which their daughter, Quintana Roo Dunne, was also gravely ill. The book is both a vivid personal account of losing a partner after 40 years of professional collaboration and marriage, and a broader attempt to describe the mechanism that governs grief and mourning. Although Quintana seemed to be getting better during the period the book covers, she died of complications from acute pancreatitis on August 26, 2005, in New York City at age 39 after an extended period of illness. The New York Times reported that Didion would not change the book to reflect her daughter's death. "It's finished," she said.

Didion later adapted the memoir into a one-woman play, which premiered on Broadway in 2007 to mixed reviews and starred her friend Vanessa Redgrave. The play includes the event of Quintana's death, technically spanning its timeline to over a year and a half.

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.

Joan Didion is attached to write an HBO biopic on the famous newspaper dame, Katharine Graham. It is as yet untitled and will be directed by Robert Benton (The Human Stain). 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.[3]

[edit] Awards

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."[4] Also in 2007, Didion won the Evelyn F. Burkey Award from the Writers Guild of America. In November 2005, The Year of Magical Thinking won the National Book Award for nonfiction.

[edit] Published works

[edit] Fiction

[edit] Nonfiction

[edit] Drama

[edit] Screenplays

[edit] References

  1. ^ New York Times: "Joan Didion: Staking Out California," June 10, 1979 [1]
  2. ^ New York Times Book Review, June 10, 1979 [2]
  3. ^ Michael Fleming (November 14, 2008). "HBO sets Katharine Graham biopic". Variety. http://www.variety.com/article/VR1117995873.html?categoryid=13&cs=1. 
  4. ^ New York Times: "A Medal for Joan Didion," Sept. 11, 2007 [3]

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