37 Facts About Joan Didion

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

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 often concentrated on the subtext of political and social rhetoric.

In 2005, Joan Didion won the National Book Award for Nonfiction and was a finalist for both the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Pulitzer Prize for The Year of Magical Thinking, a memoir of the year following the death of her husband, writer John Gregory Dunne.

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

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

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 was a real estate executive.

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

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

Joan Didion spent her adolescence typing out Ernest Hemingway's works to learn more about how sentence structures worked.

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.

Joan Didion received a bachelor of arts degree in English from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1956.

Joan Didion lived in Los Feliz from 1963 to 1971; after living in Malibu for eight years, she and Dunne lived in Brentwood Park, a quiet, affluent, residential neighborhood of Los Angeles.

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 her personal perspective; adding her own feelings and memories to situations, inventing details and quotes to make the stories more vivid, and using many metaphors in order for the reader to get a better understanding of the disorder present in the subjects of her essays, whether they be politicians, artists, or the American society.

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

In 1988, Joan Didion moved from California to New York City.

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, Joan Didion began writing The Year of Magical Thinking, a narrative of her response to the death of her husband and the severe illness of their daughter.

Joan Didion finished the manuscript 88 days later on New Year's Eve.

Joan Didion wrote about Quintana's death in the 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 Sir 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, The Washington Post publisher.

Joan Didion discusses her writing and personal life, including the deaths of her husband and daughter, adding context to her books The Year of Magical Thinking and 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 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.

For several years in her 20s, Didion was in a relationship with Noel E Parmentel Jr.

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