Literary icon Joan Didion dies at 87

“We tell ourselves stories in order to live.” The White Album (1979). 

California-born writer, journalist and cultural critic, Joan Didion, died of complications from Parkinson’s disease on December 23 in Manhattan at the age of 87. Born and largely raised in Sacramento, she graduated from UC Berkeley and began her writing career while working at Vogue magazine. In both her fiction and non-fiction, Didion was often lauded as a keen observer of American life and politics.  

Didion was one of the rare female voices of the New Journalism, a movement of the 1960s that merged literary writing and reporting and which also counted writers Hunter S. Thompson, Tom Wolfe and Truman Capote among its practitioners. Her essays were published in Life, the  Saturday Evening Post and the New York Times. 

Many of these were included in the celebrated collections Slouching Towards Bethlehem (1968), The White Album (1979), Salvador (1983), and Miami (1987). Didion’s meditation on grief and loss,The Year of Magical Thinking (2005), followed the death of her husband, John Gregory Dunne, and the illness and subsequent death of daughter, Quintana Roo. It won a National Book Award and introduced a new generation of readers to her works.

California was a frequent subject in Didion’s writings. She and Dunne moved to her home state in 1964 and lived in various locations in Los Angeles for more than 2 decades before returning to New York. The themes of both hope and impending disaster that Didion saw in the California landscape inspired her richest works. In Where I Was From, her 2003 book of essays, Didion writes of California, “We believed in fresh starts. We believed in good luck. We believed in the miner who scratched together one last stake and struck the Comstock Lode.” 

Check out one of Joan Didion’s books by reserving a copy with your library card from the Library’s online catalog.