Joan Didion

Who Was Joan Didion?

Joan Didion was one of the finest prose stylists of the twentieth century and the most diagnostically precise chronicler of the dissolution of the American narrative — a writer whose essays and memoirs tracked, with a precision and a personal honesty that no other writer of her generation matched, the unraveling of the stories by which American culture had organized its self-understanding. Born in Sacramento in 1934 into a family with deep California roots, she moved to New York after winning Vogue’s Prix de Paris writing contest and built her career at the intersection of journalism and literary essay.

Her essay collections — Slouching Towards Bethlehem (1968) and The White Album (1979) — established her as the supreme diagnostician of the cultural disintegration of the 1960s and 1970s. Her opening sentence of The White Album — “We tell ourselves stories in order to live” — is one of the most quoted and most significant sentences in contemporary American prose.

Her late memoir The Year of Magical Thinking (2005), written after the sudden death of her husband John Gregory Dunne, is one of the finest accounts of grief in American literature and one of the most theologically resonant works she produced, precisely because its secular framework is so visibly insufficient to the experience it describes.

In Their Own Words

Selected Bibliography

• Slouching Towards Bethlehem — 1968 — essays
• Play It As It Lays — 1970 — novel
• The White Album — 1979 — essays
• Salvador — 1983 — political journalism
• The Year of Magical Thinking — 2005 — memoir
• Blue Nights — 2011 — memoir