Happy Birthday, Joan Didion
Born December 5, 1934, Sacramento, CA | Died December 23, 2021, New York, NY
Today, the Best American Essays newsletter celebrates the essayist, novelist, screen writer and journalist Joan Didion, on the ninetieth anniversary of her birth. With Gay Talese, Hunter S. Thompson, and Tom Wolfe, Didion is known as a pioneer of New Journalism. Didion’s career began in 1956 after she won a Vogue talent contest. In 2005, Didion won the National Book Award for Nonfiction for The Year of Magical Thinking. In 2013, she was honored with the Lifetime Achievement Award from the PEN Center USA. Her work has been reprinted three times in The Best American Essays series and listed as Notable seven.
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“What’s so hard about that first sentence is that you’re stuck with it. Everything else is going to flow out of that sentence. And by the time you’ve laid down the first two sentences, your options are all gone. Yes, and the last sentence in a piece is another adventure. It should open the piece up.”
“We tell ourselves stories in order to live. […]. We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images, by the ‘ideas’ with which we have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience.
Or at least we do for a while.”
First widely recognized essay:
“On Self-Respect.” Vogue, August 1961. In 1956, Didion moved from California to New York to work as a copy writer for Vogue, whose Prix de Paris she had won the same year for a profile of California architect William Wilson Wurster. According to Vogue, “Didion wrote [“On Self-Respect”] as the magazine was going to press, to fill the space left after another writer did not produce a piece on the same subject. She wrote it not to a word count or a line count, but to an exact character count.”
Select nonfiction bibliography:
The Joan Didion Collection (three-book boxed set), edited by David Ulin, Library of America, November 2024.
Joan Didion: Memoirs & Later Writings, edited by David Ulin, Library of America, November 2024.
Joan Didion: The 1980s & 90s, edited by David Ulin, Library of America, April 2021.
Joan Didion: The 1960s & 70s, edited by David Ulin, Library of America, November 2019.
Essays by Joan Didion reprinted (R) in The Best American Essays (BAE), or listed in Notables (N):
“In Sable and Dark Glasses,” Vogue, 2011 (BAE 2012, N).
“The Case of Theresa Schiavo,” The New York Review of Books, 2005 (BAE 2006, N).
“Fixed Opinions, or the Hinge of History,” The New York Review of Books, 2003 (BAE 2004, N).
“Last Words,” The New Yorker, 1998 (BAE 1999, R).
“Trouble in Lakewood,” The New Yorker, 1993 (BAE 1994, N).
“Sentimental Journeys,” The New York Review of Books, 1991 (BAE 1992, R).
“Letter from Los Angeles,” The New Yorker, 1990 (BAE 1991, N).
“Letter from Los Angeles,” The New Yorker, 1989 (BAE 1990, N).
“Insider Baseball,” The New York Review of Books, 1988 (BAE 1989, R).
“Letter from Los Angeles,” The New Yorker, 1988 (BAE 1989, N).
See also:
Visit: JoanDidion.org
Watch A Place None of Us Know: Writing, Loss, and Joan Didion’s Late Memoirs, with Honor Moore and David L. Ulin, Library of America Live, November 2024.
Watch An Evening with Joan Didion, in conversation with David Ulin, Library Foundation of LA, November 2011.
Watch Joan Didion’s first public reading, February 1977, San Francisco State University, César Chavez Student Union.
Read “The Essential Joan Didion,” by Alissa Wilkinson, The New York Times, April 2024.
Read “The Art of Reading Joan Didion: Who We Are, Who We Used to Be,” Drew Limsky, Poets and Writers, 2006 (Listed as Notable in BAE 2007).
Read “Joan Didion, The Art of Fiction, No. 71,” by Linda Kuehl, The Paris Review, 1978.