Joan Didion

As a teenager, Joan Didion typed out Hemingway’s books to see how his sentences worked. Born in Sacramento in 1934, she won an essay contest run by Vogue in her final year at Berkeley and went on to work there for seven years.

She was a journalist and essayist first. Slouching Towards Bethlehem (1968) collected her magazine pieces about California, including writing on the hippie counterculture of San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury. It is often cited as a New Journalism book: real events told with a novelist’s tools, by a reporter who puts herself in the story. She also wrote novels, such as Play It as It Lays (1970), set in Hollywood, and screenplays with her husband, the writer John Gregory Dunne.

At the end of 2003, their daughter Quintana was in a coma when Dunne died suddenly of a heart attack. Didion wrote about the following year in The Year of Magical Thinking, which won the National Book Award for Nonfiction in 2005 and which she later turned into a Broadway play. Quintana died in 2005, while her mother was on tour promoting the book. Didion wrote about her in Blue Nights (2011).

Start with an essay. In The White Album (1979), the title piece goes back to the summer of 1968, when Didion herself was not well. Then read The Year of Magical Thinking. Joan Didion died in New York in 2021.