By Celia Papavasileiou,
“We tell ourselves stories in order to live” (The White Album/ Joan Didion). Joan Didion’s stories date back to the 1950’s but they are as relevant and vibrant today as they were then. Even though Didion passed in 2021, she has left behind a legacy of novels, essays and memoirs that have marked literary history and are now reasons why people continue to live.
Didion was born on December 5th of 1934 in Sacramento, California. After graduating from University of California, Berkley in 1956 she moved to New York. She soon started working at Vogue Magazine which opened her path to establishing a writing career, starting with her first novel “Run, River” which got published in 1963. Her years at Vogue ended in 1964, when she married Gregory Dunne and moved to California. Two years later the couple adopted a daughter and named her Quintana Roo Dunne.
One of the most important milestones of Didion’s career was the publication of her essay collection “Slouching Towards Bethlehem” (1968), which compiles her previous magazine articles. Her first non-fiction book captures 1960’s California, an overview of its political and cultural happenings and proved to be crucial for her establishment as a writer in the 1960’s and 1970’s. At the same time a new American literary movement started emerging, one that pushed the boundaries of journalism by melding it with techniques of fiction writing. Didion is considered as one of “New Journalism’s” pioneers, as the movement is known as today.
Throughout her lifetime, Didion published a variety of novels, the most famous one being “Play It As It Lays” (1970), which was the book that completely immersed me into her works. Some of her most known non-fiction writings include “The White Album” (1979), “The Year of Magical Thinking” (2005) and “Blue Nights” (2011). Although different, all Didion’s works share the same characteristic: they compose a perfect symphony of a sharp writing style through a personal lens.
Didion’s life and writing changed dramatically after 2003, after her daughter, Quintana, developed pneumonia that progressed to septic shock which led to her staying in an intensive-care unit. During her stay, on December 30th of the same year Didion suffered another heartbreak, her husband’s sudden death caused by a heart attack. At the age of 70, Didion started working on “My Year of Magical Thinking”, as a coping mechanism to her troubles, which won the National Book Award for Nonfiction for the year 2005. It was her first non-fiction book that wasn’t an assortment of her previous essays and articles.
During the promotion of “My Year of Magical Thinking” in August of 2005 Quintana passed at the age of 39 of pancreatitis. Thankfully, Didion found the process therapeutic to her mourning, loss and grief. In 2011, she published “Blue Nights” which was her way of trying to make sense of life and death, her family’s tragedy, past and future. She focuses on her relationship with motherhood, parenting and aging. Didion died in 2021, at the age of 87 from complications of Parkinson’s disease.
Didion’s works aren’t always the easiest to swallow. At times they can be difficult to get into or seem distant to the reader, since they don’t overanalyze or oversimplify complex topics and themes. However, in my opinion, that is exactly what makes reading her works so worth it at the end. She doesn’t tackle the easy and that makes her writing all the more special.
Undoubtably, I believe Joan Didion is an author everyone should read. Her work can be described as a carefully assorted craft, an admirable use of diction, syntax and narration. Especially her memoirs, which deal with her contact with grief and mourning are ones that countless of people have honored and loved, and will definitely continue to do so in the future.
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