Shelley Wanger, Didion’s editor at Knopf since the early 90s, told the Guardian the author was masterful and fearless. “Didion was one of the country’s most trenchant writers and astute observers,” Penguin Random House and its imprint Knopf said in a statement. Her ability to put the tapestry of California and the times into words made her a treasure for her generation and generations to come.”Īuthor Susan Orlean called Didion “my idol and inspiration”. California governor Gavin Newsom said Didion was “peerless in her capacity to write about life, loss, love and society – easily the best writer in California. She is usually present in her essays as a voice rather than a character, observer rather than participant – though the boundaries regularly blur.”Īfter her death was announced, tributes poured in from across the spectrum of politics and literature. On her most recent collection of selected essays, Let Me Tell You What I Mean, the Guardian’s reviewer wrote: “Didion has established a way of narration that focuses not so much on events as on subtexts, atmospheres and perceptions. “Try to rearrange one of her sentences, and you’ve realised that the sentence was inevitable, a hologram.” “Nobody writes better English prose than Joan Didion,” literary critic John Leonard wrote. She was highly protective of her work, never telling even close friends the subject of her writing until it was ready to publish. ![]() ![]() “A place,” she once wrote, “belongs for ever to whoever claims it hardest, remembers it most obsessively, wrenches it from itself, shapes it, renders it, loves it so radically that he remakes it in his own image.”įamous for her detached, sometimes elegiac tone, Didion returned to the themes of alienation and isolation throughout her career, whether she was exploring her own grief after the death of Dunne in the Pulitzer-finalist The Year of Magical Thinking, the emptiness of Hollywood life in the novel Play It As It Lays, or expats caught up in Central American politics in her novel A Book of Common Prayer. ![]() It takes place not at all,” she told the Associated Press in 2005 after publishing The Year of Magical Thinking, an account of losing her husband John Gregory Dunne.ĭidion spent her later years in New York, but she was shaped by her native state of California, which she called “a hologram that dematerialises as I drive through it”. “We have kind of evolved into a society where grieving is totally hidden. Known for her pioneering blend of the personal and the political in her journalism and essays, Didion became a household name with her writing on US society.Īs a standout female figure in the male-dominated “new journalism” movement alongside Tom Wolfe, Truman Capote and Gay Talese, Didion cast her precise, coolly detached eye over both American society and her own life in writing that was collected in books including Slouching Towards Bethlehem, her journey through the promise and dissolution of California’s 60s counterculture, and The White Album, which began in typically economic style, with: “We tell ourselves stories in order to live.”
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