Profile of Joan Didion on Famous Like Me

Joan Didion (born December 5, 1934) is an American writer, renowned as a journalist and prose stylist. Didion contributes regularly to The New York Review of Books and The New Yorker. With her late husband, writer John Gregory Dunne, she collaborated on several screenplays. She lives in New York City.

Didion was born in Sacramento, California and graduated from the University of California at Berkeley in 1956. Much of Didion's writing draws from her life in California, particularly during the 1960s as the world in which she grew up "began to seem remote." Her portrayals of conspiracy theorists, paranoiacs, and sociopaths (including Charles Manson) are now considered part of American Literature.

Didion is the author of five novels and eight books of non-fiction. Her collections of essays, Slouching Toward Bethlehem (1968) and The White Album (1979) -- a book described in one review as helping to define California as "the paranoia capital of the world" -- made her famous as an observer of American politics and culture with a distinctive style of reportage that mixed personal reflection and social analysis. This led her to be associated with members of the New Journalism such as Tom Wolfe and Hunter S. Thompson, though Didion's ties to that movement have never been considered particularly strong.

In 2001 Didion published Political Fictions, a collection of essays which had first appeared in the New York Review of Books. Whereas earlier books such as Slouching Toward Bethlehem and The White Album had ridiculed various aspects of liberalism (the counterculture, bureaucratic social planners, etc.), the criticism in Political Fictions was targeted at political conservatives, with pieces skewering Newt Gingrich and the Religious Right. Didion attributed her shift in sympathies to the Republican Party's own shift away from what she considered to be the values of Barry Goldwater, whom she had supported in 1964.

Where I Was From (2003) contains both new and collected essays, all of them exegeses on California mythologies, and on the author's relationship to her birthplace and to her mother. Indirectly, it also serves as a rumination on the American frontier myth and the culture that we see today in California as a direct consequence of a population of survivalists who made it "through the Sierra," finally posing the question "at what cost progress?"

Didion's latest book, The Year of Magical Thinking, was published October 4, 2005. The book-length essay chronicles the year following her husband's death, during which their only daughter was also gravely ill, with an attempt to capture the mechanism that governs grief and mourning, through the lens of personal history and domestic detail. It is a painful account of losing a mate after 40 years of professional collaboration and marriage.

Didion and her late husband John Gregory Dunne had one child, a daughter, Quintana Roo Dunne Michael, who was adopted at birth. Although during the period of the book their daughter seemed to recover, she died of complications from acute pancreatitis on August 26, 2005, in New York City at age 39 after an extended period of illness. The New York Times reported that Didion would not change the book to reflect her daughter's death. "It's finished," she said.

External Links

• 1987 audio interview of Joan Didion by Don Swaim of CBS Radio, RealAudio
• 2005 audio interview of Joan Didion by Susan Stamberg of National Public Radio, RealAudio

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