Joan Didion,the legendary author ofSlouching Towards Bethlehem,The White Album, andThe Year of Magical Thinkinghas passed away due to complications from Parkinson’s disease, confirms her publisher Alfred A. Knopf. She was 87 years old.
Didion was a prominent writer in the New Journalism movement, a style which grew to prominence in the 1960s and was characterized by an unusual, subjective perspective. However, her writing has remained incisive and clear, cutting to the heart of issues both political, social, and personal. Over the decades it seems that her work has become even more essential and elucidating, and within recent years, her work has become essential to the canon of American literature. Didion received the National Medal of Arts and Humanities in 2013, awarded to her by former PresidentBarack Obama.
Among her many topics of interest, Didion wrote intensely about her two homes: California and New York City. Didion was born in Sacramento, California in 1934, and she lived and worked in California for many years, writing a memoir regarding her view of the golden state in the 2003 bookWhere I Was From.
Didion was preceded in death by her husband,John Gregory Dunne, who died in December of 2003, and her daughter,Quintana Roo Dunne, who passed in 2005. Dunne and Didion often partnered with each other for writing projects, particularly in film work. Perhaps their best-known collaboration, the pair co-wrote the 1971 filmThe Panic in Needle ParkwithJames Mills, starringAl Pacinoin an early film role. After Didion lost Dunne in 2003, she wrote the memoirThe Year of Magical Thinking, followed by her 2011 bookBlue Nights, which reflected on the loss of her daughter. Her nephew,Griffin Dunne, also produced and directed a film on her life and work,Joan Didion: The Center Will Not Hold, released in 2017.
RELATED:Sally Ann Howes, Star of ‘Chitty Chitty Bang Bang’, Dies at 91In a statement to the press, her publicist,Paul Bogaards, said, “We are deeply saddened to report that Joan Didion died earlier this morning at her home in New York due to complications from Parkinson’s disease.”
Even though Didion has passed away, her work will continue to inspire storytellers for years to come. In recent years, films such asIngrid Goes WestandGreta Gerwig’s own love letter to Sacramento,Lady Bird, have used her work as inspiration or, at the very least, shorthand for characterizing a very specific kind of Californian.
One of Didion’s most quoted lines is as follows: “We tell ourselves stories to live.” But the quote continues, past this most reprinted bit, into a less settled territory: “[w]e interpret what we see, select the most workable of the multiple choices. 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.”
Stories are, then, not just a means of getting by. They are the only way to get by, to make sense out of nothing, to take the pain of experience and turn it into something liveable, which is exactly the purpose of stories in the first place. If nothing else, we can take this from Didion’s work, offering us a cut beneath the veneer of narrative and an essential addition to it.
Our deepest sympathies go out to Ms. Didion’s family and friends.
