Joan Didion

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Joan Didion (born December 5, 1934) is an American writer. Famous for her journalism, essays, and novels. 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, she collaborated on several screenplays. She lives in New York City.

Contents

[edit] Biography

Didion was born in Sacramento, California and 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. She has developed a very distinct style in which commas, and imposters (not to mention her frequent employment of parentheses) litter her sentences. They are usually filled with different concepts as well, and written in narrative form. She employs 'narrative' almost as a literary tool such as citing another's essay in order to reach the reader. Often failing to structure her essays around one point as is conventional, Didion touches on numerous issues that can be tied into (however remotely) her original topic.[citation needed]

She adopted a culturally conservative stance; her early career was spent as a Goldwater conservative and writing incisive articles in William Buckley's National Review. Perhaps as a reaction to Reagan, whom she termed a faux conservative, or as a result of being closely aligned with progressive writers in the New York literary world in which she moved in the seventies, she abandoned her earlier leanings and moved toward the liberal tenets of the Democrats. Didion retains a conservative bent, though, sharply chronicling America after World War II with its endless search for privacy and fulfillment of individual dreams.

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 described in one review as helping to define California as "the paranoia capital of the world" -- made her famous as an observer of American politics and culture with a distinctive style of reporting that mixed personal reflection and social analysis. This led her to be associated with members of the New Journalism such as Tom Wolfe and Hunter S. Thompson, though Didion's ties to that movement have never been considered particularly strong.

Didion is not without her critics. Barbara Grizzuti Harrison skewered Didion's style (and to some extent Didion herself) in her essay: Joan Didion: Only Disconnect from Off Center: Essays by Barbara Grizzuti Harrison. ("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 latest 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 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.

[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."[2] 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

  • The Year of Magical Thinking (2006)

[edit] Screenplays

[edit] References

  1. ^ New York Times: "Joan Didion: Staking Out California," June 10, 1979 [1]
  2. ^ New York Times: "A Medal for Joan Didion," Sept. 11, 2007 [2]

[edit] External links

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