What to say about Joan Didion? She was born on December 5th, 1934 in Sacramento, California. She famously began her career at Vogue, where she was awarded a job after winning an essay contest sponsored by the magazine; while still at the magazine, she wrote and published her first novel, Run, River (1963).
Run, River “marked Didion as a significant new literary presence, one rooted squarely in California,” wrote Jim Newton.
No author since Frank Norris had more forcefully channeled the currents of the American West, and none had done so with such a deliberate voice. Joan Didion gave California a position: serious, sober, and curious at a time when much of the country thought of it as anything but those. She wrote about California, but more important, she wrote as one who knew California. She and her neighbors killed rattlesnakes as a favor to one another. She puzzled over gangs and uncertainty, waded skeptically through the currents that swept up others. She thought with care and intelligence and would come, much later, to examine her own life and family with the same heartbreakingly clear eyes that defined her body of work.
Didion, of course, would become—was already becoming—one of our most distinctive and influential contemporary writers. She would change the landscape of the American essay—and the landscape of American thought—with collections like Slouching Towards Bethlehem (1968) and The White Album (1979), as well as novels like Play It as It Lays (1970) and A Book of Common Prayer (1977), and memoirs The Year of Magical Thinking (2005) and Blue Nights (2011).
As Sara Davidson put it, “She’s probably the most imitated writer since Hemingway, and her voice, like his, is catchy but can’t be imitated without the attempt being obvious.”
Didion died just under a year ago at the age of 87, but our collective obsession with her (and her stuff) will never fade away.
