37 Facts About Joan Didion

Joan Didion was an American writer and journalist.

Joan Didion is considered one of the pioneers of New Journalism, along with Gay Talese, Truman Capote, Norman Mailer, Hunter S Thompson, and Tom Wolfe.

Joan Didion went on to publish essays in The Saturday Evening Post, National Review, Life, Esquire, The New York Review of Books, and The New Yorker.

Joan Didion's writing during the 1960s through the late 1970s engaged audiences in the realities of the counterculture of the 1960s, the Hollywood lifestyle, and the history and culture of California.

Joan Didion's political writing in the 1980s and 1990s concentrated on political rhetoric and the United States's foreign policy in Latin America.

Joan Didion later adapted the book into a play that premiered on Broadway in 2007.

Joan Didion was profiled in the 2017 Netflix documentary The Center Will Not Hold, directed by her nephew Griffin Dunne.

Joan Didion was born on December 5,1934, in Sacramento, California, to Eduene and Frank Reese Joan Didion.

Joan Didion had one brother, five years her junior, James Jerrett Didion, who became a real estate executive.

Joan Didion recalled writing things down as early as age five, although she said she never saw herself as a writer until after her work had been published.

Joan Didion identified as a "shy, bookish child", an avid reader, who pushed herself to overcome social anxiety through acting and public speaking.

Joan Didion attended kindergarten and first grade, but, because her father was a finance officer in the Army Air Corps and the family constantly relocated, she did not attend school regularly.

Joan Didion wrote in her 2003 memoir Where I Was From that moving so often made her feel as if she were a perpetual outsider.

In 1968, Joan Didion published her first nonfiction book, Slouching Towards Bethlehem, a collection of magazine pieces about her experiences in California.

Joan Didion wrote from a personal perspective, adding her own feelings and memories to situations, inventing details and quotes to make the stories more vivid, and using metaphors to give the reader a better understanding of the disordered subjects of her essays: politicians, artists, or just people living an American life.

Dunne and Joan Didion worked closely for most of their careers.

Joan Didion suggested the defendants were found guilty because of a sociopolitical narrative with racial overtones that clouded the judgment of the court.

In 1992, Joan Didion published After Henry, a collection of twelve geographical essays and a personal memorial for Henry Robbins, who was Joan Didion's friend and editor until his death in 1979.

Joan Didion published The Last Thing He Wanted, a romantic thriller, in 1996.

Joan Didion delayed his funeral arrangements for approximately three months until Quintana was well enough to attend.

On October 4,2004, at the age of 70, Joan Didion began writing The Year of Magical Thinking, documenting her response to the death of her husband and the severe illness of their daughter.

Joan Didion finished the manuscript on the following New Year's Eve.

Joan Didion wrote about Quintana's death in her 2011 book, Blue Nights.

Joan Didion was living in an apartment on East 71st Street in Manhattan in 2005.

Everyman's Library published We Tell Ourselves Stories in Order to Live, a 2006 compendium of much of Joan Didion's writing, including the full content of her first seven published nonfiction books, with an introduction by her contemporary, the critic John Leonard.

Joan Didion began working with English playwright and director David Hare on a one-woman stage adaptation of The Year of Magical Thinking in 2007.

Joan Didion wrote early drafts of the screenplay for an untitled HBO biopic directed by Robert Benton on Katharine Graham.

Joan Didion paid tribute to her in a scene for his movie Tar wherein the title character returns to her childhood bedroom and peers at "little boxes" labeled precisely the way Didion describes Quintana's in Blue Nights.

In 2021, Joan Didion published Let Me Tell You What I Mean, a collection of 12 essays she wrote between 1968 and 2000.

Joan Didion died from complications of Parkinson's disease at her home in Manhattan on December 23,2021, at the age of 87.

Joan Didion viewed the structure of the sentence as essential to her work.

Joan Didion was heavily influenced by Ernest Hemingway, whose writing taught her the importance of how sentences work in a text.

Joan Didion was an observer of journalists, believing the difference between the process of fiction and nonfiction is the element of discovery that takes place in nonfiction, which happens not during the writing, but during the research.

From 1957 to 1962, Didion was in a relationship with Noel E Parmentel Jr.

Joan Didion wished to have a baby, but Parmentel felt he had already failed at marriage and ruled out a conventional domestic arrangement.

Parmentel, who had championed and found publishers for Joan Didion's work, was angered by what he felt was a thinly veiled portrait of him in her 1977 novel, A Book of Common Prayer.

In 1996, breaking a long-held silence on Joan Didion, Parmentel was interviewed for an article about her in New York magazine.