Joan Didion, writer, 1934-2021

Joan Didion, a razor-sharp observer of American life whose essays eschewed its sentimentality and reshaped its journalism, has died, aged 87.

During a writing career that spanned more than 50 years, Didion penned magazine features, newspaper columns, novels and — sometimes in collaboration with her husband, John Gregory Dunne — Hollywood screenplays, including the 1976 version of A Star is Born.

But she is best known for collections of essays that used their own fractured style to capture the fraying of society in the 1960s and 1970s and the darkness underlying the counterculture.

As her essay “Slouching Towards Bethlehem”, a piece of reportage from San Francisco’s Haight Ashbury district in 1967, arrestingly announced: “The centre was not holding. It was a country of bankruptcy notes and public-auction announcements and commonplace reports of casual killings and misplaced children and abandoned houses and vandals who misspelled even the four-letter words they scrawled.”

The title was derived from a WB Yeats poem that, Didion later recalled, had been ringing in her ears during those years and became a sort of epitaph for her career: “Turning and turning in the widening gyre/ The falcon cannot hear the falconer;/ Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold.”

Although her writing ranged widely — from Cuban émigrés and crooked CIA spies in south Florida to the artist Georgia O’Keeffe and the ravages of ageing — California was an enduring obsession. Didion was a fifth-generation native whose great-great-great-grandmother set off with the Donner party, a group of 19th-century American pioneers, but veered off on a separate route and so avoided its gruesome fate. For Didion, who viewed sentimentality as dangerous, California was not a paradise of dreams fulfilled but a harsh terrain that harboured Charles Manson and alienation.

The novelist Martin Amis called her “the poet of the great Californian Emptiness”, writing in 1980 that she possessed “an almost embarrassingly sharp ear and unblinking eye” for its inanity.

Her nephew, Griffin Dunne, described a kind of frontier sturdiness in his aunt that prevailed even when all around her was chaotic. “No matter what happens to her or is happening in the world, even if she can’t make sense of it, she still tries to make sense of it,” he said in a 2017 interview.

Didion was born in Sacramento but endured an itinerant childhood and schooling due to her father’s military service. She considered acting in high school but was told she was too small and so pursued writing instead. While studying at the University of California at Berkeley she won an essay contest and a coveted job at Vogue magazine in New York, where she worked for seven years.

In person, Didion was slight and often hidden behind large sunglasses. But she was unflinching with her observations, and could be critical to the point of cruelty. She famously described American first lady Nancy Reagan’s smile as “a study in frozen insincerity” and derided journalist Bob Woodward’s books as “political pornography” in which “measurable cerebral activity is virtually absent”.

As Didion herself observed: “My only advantage as a reporter is that I am so physically small, so temperamentally unobtrusive, and so neurotically inarticulate that people tend to forget that my presence runs counter to their interests. And it always does. That is one last thing to remember: ‘writers are always selling somebody out.’” 

The collection Slouching Towards Bethlehem, published in 1968, confirmed her place alongside Tom Wolfe, Truman Capote, Gay Talese and other leading practitioners of the “New Journalism” — in which writers employed literary techniques and narrative tricks to refashion often staid non-fiction. She was peerless as a crafter of crystalline sentences, having retyped Ernest Hemingway works in high school to try to decode their workings.

The White Album, another acclaimed collection, was published in 1979, and toggled between the madness of the era — The Doors, the Black Panther party, the Manson murders — and Didion’s own psychological torment. “We tell ourselves stories in order to live,” she wrote.

In the 1980s she turned her gaze to the degradation of US politics and the creation of a new journalistic class removed from the public. Her observations seem more apt over time. As she wrote in her 1988 essay “Insider Baseball”: “American reporters ‘like’ covering a presidential campaign (it gets them out on the road, it has balloons, it has music, it is viewed as a big story, one that leads to the respect of one’s peers, to the Sunday shows, to the lecture fees and often to Washington), which is why there has developed among those who do it so arresting an enthusiasm for overlooking the contradictions inherent in reporting that which occurs only in order to be reported.”

Even though Didion never quite went out of fashion, she received another gust of acclaim late in her career with the 2005 publication of The Year of Magical Thinking, a National Book Award-winning memoir that documented the year following the death of her husband.

“Grief has no distance,” she wrote. “Grief comes in waves, paroxysms, sudden apprehensions that weaken the knees and blind the eyes and obliterate the dailiness of life.”