Joan Didion

Born on December 5, 1934, in Sacramento, California, Joan Didion came from a family that had been in the Sacramento Valley for five generations, and her sense of place, the landscape, the water, the light, the moral implications of geography, permeated everything she wrote. She won Vogue's Prix de Paris essay contest in her senior year at Berkeley and went to work at the magazine in New York, where she learned the discipline of the sentence and the paragraph. Her first novel, Run, River (1963), was about a Sacramento family coming apart; John Gregory Dunne, a writer and friend, helped her edit it, and they married in 1964. They moved to Los Angeles, adopted a daughter they named Quintana Roo, and together wrote screenplays, including The Panic in Needle Park (1971) and A Star Is Born (1976). Her essay collections, Slouching Towards Bethlehem (1968) and The White Album (1979), defined the style and moral sensibility of New Journalism, rendering the dislocations of 1960s and 1970s California with a precision that felt almost clinical. The novels Play It as It Lays (1970) and A Book of Common Prayer (1977) extended her investigation of American fracture. On December 30, 2003, her husband died of a heart attack at their dinner table while their daughter lay comatose in a hospital. Quintana died twenty months later. The Year of Magical Thinking (2005), her memoir of grief, won the National Book Award. Didion died on December 23, 2021, at her home in Manhattan, at the age of eighty-seven.

As a teenager in Sacramento, Didion sat at a typewriter and copied out Hemingway's stories word by word, teaching herself to type and, at the same time, learning how a sentence was built. Direct sentences, she would later call them: smooth rivers, clear water over granite, no sinkholes. She spent a lifetime building her own on that model.