Author Joan Didion sits in front of a photo of herself holding her daughter, Quintana Roo Dunne, and another photo of her daughter’s wedding. Didion writes about the death of his daughter at the age of 39 in Blue night.
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Author Joan Didion sits in front of a photo of herself holding her daughter, Quintana Roo Dunne, and another of her daughter’s wedding. Didion writes about the death of his daughter at the age of 39 in Blue night.
Kathy Willens / AP
American novelist, journalist and essayist Joan Didion died Thursday at her New York home at the age of 87 from Parkinson’s disease, according to Knopf journalist Paul Bogaards. The best-selling writer began depicting her home state, California, for magazines in the 1960s and expanded her audience over the decades through nonfiction, novels, and films.
Didion talks about the act of sharp writing more than anyone else. “I write purely to find out what I’m thinking; what I’m thinking,” she says.
The article itself has been a path to understanding and clarification. Her definition of a writer is “someone who spends most passionately and passionately about arranging words on pieces of paper.” She said it during a 1976 speech at her alma mater, the University of California, Berkeley. By then, Didion had published Slide towards Bethlehem, a collection of reports on life in turbulent America in the 1960s. She has also published two novels: Play it as it lies, possibly with the subtitles “Lost in Las Vegas and Most Elsewhere,” and River Run, her first novel. Here is an excerpt from the following:
“It feels like closing one’s eyes on a Valley town and risking opening them soon after in arid fields, the sun bleaching the last traces of life, a straw hat with flowers, a neon ad that flashed just before from a wall that is no longer visible: More yield per acre with seed from Northrup-King.
“It’s a wonderful comfort, watching towns come and go through the tinted windows of Greyhound buses. The heat has dissipated the difference between everything – marriage and divorce, new curtains. and overdraft at the bank, it’s all the same – and Lily can’t. At this point, imagine any preoccupation strong enough to withstand the summer.”
That excerpt, from 1963, is the essence of Didion’s writing style: concise, polished, elegant, and transparent. Critic John Leonard speak her sentences are like “icepick laser.”
Fiction and non-fiction writer Francine Prose says it’s a style – and a voice – that Didion pioneered in the ’60s. Prose says: “It’s hard to remember how important it is to see by evidence of real female intelligence on that site. “She put a certain kind of accent – Western, female, nervous – on the page that wasn’t there before.”
Writing with ‘Electricity Worries’
Prose has a list of all the places and themes that Didion dealt with during his writing life. It includes California, New York, Hawaii, El Salvador, Las Vegas, Miami, John Wayne, Patty Hearst, Vietnam, Central Park runners, Black Panthers, presidential election, Newt Gingrich, Doris Lessing, feminism , hippies, movies, books and newspapers.
Didion, pictured here in 1979, defined a writer as “one whose many hours and passions are spent arranging words on pieces of paper.”
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Didion, pictured here in 1979, defined a writer as “one whose many hours and passions are spent arranging words on pieces of paper.”
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But there is also death. She wrote about her husband’s 2003 death in Year of Magical Thinking, and when their daughter, Quintana, died two years later, Didion struggled with that subject in Blue night. Behind all those subjects and locations is a steady, sharp, dreary, anxious voice.
“It was just anxiety,” says Prose. “Every sentence has some kind of anxiety and that’s part of it that gets your attention like that. I mean, you’re just waiting for something to explode and then it just doesn’t happen and you move on. read.”
Meanwhile, Didion continued to write with his nervous pen. It was an act of courage in itself.
“Everything worries her,” says Prose. “And she went to [El] Salvadoran; she goes to Miami; she goes to Las Vegas; she travels all over California; she visits the cheetahs; She visits the hippies. It’s anxiety and at the same time overcoming anxiety, which pretty much describes what any of us go through during the day. “
Didion realized that the physical and psychological scene she described was desolation. “I’m more attracted to the underside of the rug,” she says. “I tend to always look for the dark side, the dark side. I mean, I’ve been doing that since I was a kid.”
She once said, “We tell our own stories to live on,” and the stories she tells are the dark truth. “I’m pretty slow to research and I’m late for fear that there’s a void at the heart of the experience.”
Didion and her husband, John Gregory Dunne, photographed here in California in 1977, wrote the screenplay together before moving to New York in the 80s.
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Didion and her husband, John Gregory Dunne, photographed here in California in 1977, wrote the screenplay together before moving to New York in the 80s.
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A member who is not capable of establishing Hollywood
Before moving to New York City in the 1980s, Didion and her husband, John Gregory Dunne, lived for many years in Los Angeles. There, they wrote the screenplay together: The Panic in Needle Park, a remake of Barbra Streisand A star was born, Close-up & Personal with Robert Redford and Michelle Pfeiffer.
As screenwriters, as well as novelists and journalists, Didion and Dunne were part of the founding of Hollywood. But Prose says you never feel Southern California movie stardom in Didion’s writing — especially not in her personal essays.
“Friend do feel the nerve’s presence,” she said. The person is struggling to meet the deadline; migraine sufferers; who can barely get out of bed in the morning; for whom writing is a kind of torment; who the California light is almost too much to bear. “
It all sounded “disappointing,” but until her final years, Didion denied any personal fragility her readers assumed. In real life, she was short, thin, pale, and didn’t look like California. But in 1977, she said her body size was a lie: “I’m very healthy. I eat a lot. I don’t cry a lot.”
And her Written great number of. In her novels, she relies on images that she says pop into her mind. Then, Didion, the writer has to figure out what’s going on in them. “If you lie low enough and quiet enough,” she says, “and if you don’t talk to a lot of people and you keep your central nervous system down, these pictures will come to you.” . And then you try to figure out what they mean.”
A generation of journalists has been influenced by those discoveries, and a generation of novelists and memoirs has been captivated and enlightened. Didion, a chronicler of cultural truth and fiction, observed her world intensely. She provides clarity.
