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Read 12 Masterful Essays by Joan Didion for Free Online, Spanning Her Career From 1965 to 2013

in Literature , Writing | January 14th, 2014 3 Comments

Image by David Shankbone, via Wikimedia Commons

In a classic essay of Joan Didion’s, “Goodbye to All That,” the novelist and writer breaks into her narrative—not for the first or last time—to prod her reader. She rhetorically asks and answers: “…was anyone ever so young? I am here to tell you that someone was.” The wry little moment is perfectly indicative of Didion’s unsparingly ironic critical voice. Didion is a consummate critic, from Greek kritēs , “a judge.” But she is always foremost a judge of herself. An account of Didion’s eight years in New York City, where she wrote her first novel while working for Vogue , “Goodbye to All That” frequently shifts point of view as Didion examines the truth of each statement, her prose moving seamlessly from deliberation to commentary, annotation, aside, and aphorism, like the below:

I want to explain to you, and in the process perhaps to myself, why I no longer live in New York. It is often said that New York is a city for only the very rich and the very poor. It is less often said that New York is also, at least for those of us who came there from somewhere else, a city only for the very young.

Anyone who has ever loved and left New York—or any life-altering city—will know the pangs of resignation Didion captures. These economic times and every other produce many such stories. But Didion made something entirely new of familiar sentiments. Although her essay has inspired a sub-genre , and a collection of breakup letters to New York with the same title, the unsentimental precision and compactness of Didion’s prose is all her own.

The essay appears in 1967’s Slouching Towards Bethlehem , a representative text of the literary nonfiction of the sixties alongside the work of John McPhee, Terry Southern, Tom Wolfe, and Hunter S. Thompson. In Didion’s case, the emphasis must be decidedly on the literary —her essays are as skillfully and imaginatively written as her fiction and in close conversation with their authorial forebears. “Goodbye to All That” takes its title from an earlier memoir, poet and critic Robert Graves’ 1929 account of leaving his hometown in England to fight in World War I. Didion’s appropriation of the title shows in part an ironic undercutting of the memoir as a serious piece of writing.

And yet she is perhaps best known for her work in the genre. Published almost fifty years after Slouching Towards Bethlehem , her 2005 memoir The Year of Magical Thinking is, in poet Robert Pinsky’s words , a “traveler’s faithful account” of the stunningly sudden and crushing personal calamities that claimed the lives of her husband and daughter separately. “Though the material is literally terrible,” Pinsky writes, “the writing is exhilarating and what unfolds resembles an adventure narrative: a forced expedition into those ‘cliffs of fall’ identified by Hopkins.” He refers to lines by the gifted Jesuit poet Gerard Manley Hopkins that Didion quotes in the book: “O the mind, mind has mountains; cliffs of fall / Frightful, sheer, no-man-fathomed. Hold them cheap / May who ne’er hung there.”

The nearly unimpeachably authoritative ethos of Didion’s voice convinces us that she can fearlessly traverse a wild inner landscape most of us trivialize, “hold cheap,” or cannot fathom. And yet, in a 1978 Paris Review interview , Didion—with that technical sleight of hand that is her casual mastery—called herself “a kind of apprentice plumber of fiction, a Cluny Brown at the writer’s trade.” Here she invokes a kind of archetype of literary modesty (John Locke, for example, called himself an “underlabourer” of knowledge) while also figuring herself as the winsome heroine of a 1946 Ernst Lubitsch comedy about a social climber plumber’s niece played by Jennifer Jones, a character who learns to thumb her nose at power and privilege.

A twist of fate—interviewer Linda Kuehl’s death—meant that Didion wrote her own introduction to the Paris Review interview, a very unusual occurrence that allows her to assume the role of her own interpreter, offering ironic prefatory remarks on her self-understanding. After the introduction, it’s difficult not to read the interview as a self-interrogation. Asked about her characterization of writing as a “hostile act” against readers, Didion says, “Obviously I listen to a reader, but the only reader I hear is me. I am always writing to myself. So very possibly I’m committing an aggressive and hostile act toward myself.”

It’s a curious statement. Didion’s cutting wit and fearless vulnerability take in seemingly all—the expanses of her inner world and political scandals and geopolitical intrigues of the outer, which she has dissected for the better part of half a century. Below, we have assembled a selection of Didion’s best essays online. We begin with one from Vogue :

“On Self Respect” (1961)

Didion’s 1979 essay collection The White Album brought together some of her most trenchant and searching essays about her immersion in the counterculture, and the ideological fault lines of the late sixties and seventies. The title essay begins with a gemlike sentence that became the title of a collection of her first seven volumes of nonfiction : “We tell ourselves stories in order to live.” Read two essays from that collection below:

“ The Women’s Movement ” (1972)

“ Holy Water ” (1977)

Didion has maintained a vigorous presence at the New York Review of Books since the late seventies, writing primarily on politics. Below are a few of her best known pieces for them:

“ Insider Baseball ” (1988)

“ Eye on the Prize ” (1992)

“ The Teachings of Speaker Gingrich ” (1995)

“ Fixed Opinions, or the Hinge of History ” (2003)

“ Politics in the New Normal America ” (2004)

“ The Case of Theresa Schiavo ” (2005)

“ The Deferential Spirit ” (2013)

“ California Notes ” (2016)

Didion continues to write with as much style and sensitivity as she did in her first collection, her voice refined by a lifetime of experience in self-examination and piercing critical appraisal. She got her start at Vogue in the late fifties, and in 2011, she published an autobiographical essay there that returns to the theme of “yearning for a glamorous, grown up life” that she explored in “Goodbye to All That.” In “ Sable and Dark Glasses ,” Didion’s gaze is steadier, her focus this time not on the naïve young woman tempered and hardened by New York, but on herself as a child “determined to bypass childhood” and emerge as a poised, self-confident 24-year old sophisticate—the perfect New Yorker she never became.

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Remembering essayist Joan Didion, a keen observer of American culture

Terry Gross

Didion, who died Dec. 23, was known her cool, unsentimental observations. Her books include Slouching Towards Bethlehem and The Year of Magical Thinking . Originally broadcast in 1987 and 2005.

NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by an NPR contractor. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.

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What Joan Didion Saw

By Nathan Heller

When Joan Didion died, on Thursday, at eighty-seven, she left behind sixteen books, seven films, one play, and an impulse to make sense of what remained. It was tempting to note that, like her husband, the writer John Gregory Dunne, whose passing shaped “ The Year of Magical Thinking ” (2005), she died during the Christmas holiday. It was easy to see, as she did in her daughter’s lethal illness that same season, larger gears at work. Didion was a pattern-seeker—a writer with an uncanny ability to scan a text, a folder of clippings, or an entire society and, like a genius eying figures, find the markers pointing out how the whole worked. Through her efforts, the craft of journalism changed. She helped expand the landscape of what matters on the page.

Though Didion spent half her life in New York (first as a junior editor at Vogue , then, in a later stint, as a short-statured lioness of letters), much of her best-known work was done in California, where she’d grown up in mid-century Sacramento. Her ominous, valley-flat style channelled the Pacific terrain, with its beauty and severity and restless turns. “This is the country in which a belief in the literal interpretation of Genesis has slipped imperceptibly into a belief in the literal interpretation of Double Indemnity , the country of the teased hair and the Capris and the girls for whom all life’s promise comes down to a waltz-length white wedding dress and the birth of a Kimberly or a Sherry or a Debbi and a Tijuana divorce and a return to hairdressers’ school,” she wrote in “Some Dreamers of the Golden Dream,” the essay that opened her first collection, “ Slouching Towards Bethlehem ” (1968). That book announced her subject—the long, crazed shadow of the frontier mentality—and her style, which carried across five novels and several screenplays, not least “A Star Is Born” (1976), which she co-wrote with Dunne. Today, readers know what’s meant by “Didionesque.”

Like most strong stylists, though, Didion worked up her craft as a sensitive reader of other masters. She had been an English student, at Berkeley, in the nineteen-fifties, a high point for the New Criticism and its close reading, and the approach became part of her lifelong methodology, applied equally to language she encountered as a reporter and to literary work. In a New Yorker essay about Hemingway , her early influence, she performed an unmatched reading of the beginning of “ A Farewell to Arms ,” noting how the sudden, pattern-breaking absence of a “the” before the third appearance of “leaves” casts “exactly what it was meant to cast, a chill, a premonition.” It was characteristic of Didion to work this way, in the danger zone between sensibility and objectivity: to be receptive to a passing feeling, a change in cast, and then to bear down, with unsparing rigor, in the work of understanding why.

What she came to understand was the vastest change that American society had seen in fifty years. Like many writers, Didion was on the spot in the late sixties, as the social fabric, the ideal of common institutions and of a shared society, came apart. Unlike many, she saw the long-term stakes of this rupture at a moment when most observers were fretting over whether to don love beads or to follow draft cards. Didion reported on the hippies—they’re the subject of the title essay of “Slouching Towards Bethlehem,” which created a technique, later germane to her fiction, of telling a story through jagged juxtapositions that she called “flash cuts”—but recognized that what she saw in the Haight-Ashbury was less about them than about an “atomization” of communication and connection across America. It was a curiously durable insight for the period; it remains vivid and pressing today.

Didion often gets identified, along with Norman Mailer , Gay Talese, Tom Wolfe , and other snappy dressers, as part of the New Journalism, by which people usually mean long narrative reporting imprinted with a writer’s style and point of view. But her goal, in the best work, was never sensibility or affect. Early on, and again at the end of her life, Didion was known for her first-person writing, and subjective perception was always at the heart of her impulses as a reporter and as an essayist. (“Something about a situation will bother me, so I will write a piece to find out what it is that bothers me,” she once explained, in an interview with Hilton Als.)

Subjectivity was paramount, yet her thinking, as it developed in the pages of The New York Review of Books , was basically systemic: in “ Miami ” (1987), about the Cold War dialogue between the U.S. and the atomized powers of Latin America; in “ Sentimental Journeys ” (1991), about the Central Park jogger case, and the mythologies that eroded New York’s civil and economic structure; in “ Where I Was From ” (2003), about the governmental policies supporting California’s frontier image of itself. Her target was what she called sentimentality: the prefabricated story lines, or fairy tales, that spread within a culture and that cause society to rip apart. Didion started out a Goldwater Republican and ended up one of her cohort’s keenest champions of the social pact. She came to see that the way stories were told—an individualized project—had deep stakes for the societal whole.

Famous styles often make fossils of their practitioners. Didion’s work will last because it was the product of a restless mind. “In retrospect, we know how to write when we begin,” she once said. “What we learn from doing it is what writing was for .” How to put together a paragraph, whether to add a “the” or not: by the time you’re thirty, the sound of your best writing is already in your mind’s ear, and the hardest part is listening. What to do with those sentences, how to turn the craft of storytelling away from shared delusion, is the effort of a life. Many—most—writers never make it the full distance. Didion did. Her work was her own answer to the question of what writing and living are for. It ought to be ours, too.

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By Deborah Treisman

North America
6 Essays By Joan Didion...

6 Essays By Joan Didion You Should Know

Joan Didion is lauded as one of the best literary journalists to emerge from the New Journalism school in the ’60s, among Tom Wolfe , Terry Southern and Hunter S. Thompson, and one of California’s wittiest contemporary writers . Best known for her sharply reported stories that service frequently dystopian and despondent cultural commentary, even Didion’s more journalistic works are in part personal essay. It’s precisely her authorial presence that lends credence, honesty and depth to her work. Her subjectivity makes her observations all the more resonant, and in a way, more accurate too. Here’s a look at some of the California writer’s greatest hits.

‘some dreamers of the golden dream’.

‘This is a story about love and death in the golden land, and begins with the country,’ the essay begins. Making good on her promise, this piece reports a lascivious tale of adultery and murder in San Bernardino County in 1966. In true Didion form, however, atmosphere and place play characters just as important as the perpetrators and, in that way, this piece is about much more than the details of a single crime.

‘John Wayne: A Love Song’

Though this essay presents itself as an ode the great American frontiersman of the silver screen, it charts a loss of innocence – personal, though perhaps also cultural – against Wayne’s larger than life persona . ‘In a world we understand early to be characterized by venality and doubt and paralyzing ambiguities, he suggested another world… a place where a man could move free, could make his own code and live by it.’

Having kept a notebook from the age of five, Didion considers the compulsion to capture our lives. She writes, ‘however dutifully we record what we see around us, the common denominator of all we see is always, transparently, shamelessly, the implacable ‘I.” This observation seems especially fitting for a writer who candidly reports through the filter of the self.

Cover for Joan Didion’s Slouching Towards Bethlehem

‘On Self Respect’

This philosophical musing pays homage to the wrestling with the self that perhaps writers know best. It was first published in Vogue magazine in 1961, where it can be found in its original form . ‘To assign unanswered letters their proper weight, to free us from the expectations of others, to give us back to ourselves – there lies the great, the singular power of self-respect.’

‘The Santa Ana’

Didion calls upon the eerie desert mythology of the Santa Anas, the wicked winds that brings a tangible unease and tension to Los Angeles whenever they blow through the city. In this essay, LA is not always sunny as it’s so often portrayed. In this strange ode to place, Didion writes, ‘the violence and the unpredictability of the Santa Ana affect the entire quality of life in Los Angeles, accentuate its impermanence, its unreliability. The winds shows us how close to the edge we are.’

‘Goodbye to All That’

In one of Didion’s most known essays, she recounts a love affair with New York City that calls upon the city’s deeply arresting aura with delicious turns of phrase: ‘I would stay in New York, I told him, just six months, and I could see the Brooklyn Bridge from my window. As it turned out the bridge was the Triborough, and I stayed eight years.’

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Joan Didion on Self-Respect

By maria popova.

From her 1968 essay anthology Slouching Towards Bethlehem ( public library ) comes “On Self Respect” — a magnificent meditation on what it means to live well in one’s soul, touching on previously explored inadequate externalities like prestige , approval , and conventions of success .

Joan Didion with her typewriter in Brentwood, 1988 (Photograph: Nancy Ellison)

Didion writes:

The dismal fact is that self-respect has nothing to do with the approval of others — who are, after all, deceived easily enough; has nothing to do with reputation, which, as Rhett Butler told Scarlett O’Hara, is something people with courage can do without. To do without self-respect, on the other hand, is to be an unwilling audience of one to an interminable documentary that deals with one’s failings, both real and imagined, with fresh footage spliced in for every screening. There’s the glass you broke in anger, there’s the hurt on X’s face; watch now, this next scene, the night Y came back from Houston, see how you muff this one. To live without self-respect is to lie awake some night, beyond the reach of warm milk, the Phenobarbital, and the sleeping hand on the coverlet, counting up the sins of commissions and omission, the trusts betrayed, the promises subtly broken, the gifts irrevocably wasted through sloth or cowardice, or carelessness. However long we postpone it, we eventually lie down alone in that notoriously uncomfortable bed, the one we make ourselves. Whether or not we sleep in it depends, of course, on whether or not we respect ourselves. […] Character — the willingness to accept responsibility for one’s own life — is the source from which self-respect springs. Self-respect is something that our grandparents, whether or not they had it, knew all about. They had instilled in them, young, a certain discipline, the sense that one lives by doing things one does not particularly want to do, by putting fears and doubts to one side, by weighing immediate comforts against the possibility of larger, even intangible, comforts. […] Self-respect is a discipline, a habit of mind that can never be faked but can be developed, trained, coaxed forth. It was once suggested to me that, as an antidote to crying, I put my head in a paper bag. As it happens, there is a sound physiological reason, something to do with oxygen, for doing exactly that, but the psychological effect alone is incalculable: it is difficult in the extreme to continue fancying oneself Cathy in Wuthering Heights with one’s head in a Food Fair bag. There is a similar case for all the small disciplines, unimportant in themselves; imagine maintaining any kind of swoon, commiserative or carnal, in a cold shower. […] To have that sense of one’s intrinsic worth which constitutes self-respect is potentially to have everything: the ability to discriminate, to love and to remain indifferent. To lack it is to be locked within oneself, paradoxically incapable of either love or indifference. If we do not respect ourselves, we are on the one hand forced to despise those who have so few resources as to consort with us, so little perception as to remain blind to our fatal weaknesses. On the other, we are peculiarly in thrall to everyone we see, curiously determined to live out — since our self-image is untenable — their false notion of us. We flatter ourselves by thinking this compulsion to please others an attractive trait: a gist for imaginative empathy, evidence of our willingness to give. Of course I will play Francesca to your Paolo, Helen Keller to anyone’s Annie Sullivan; no expectation is too misplaced, no role too ludicrous. At the mercy of those we cannot but hold in contempt, we play roles doomed to failure before they are begun, each defeat generating fresh despair at the urgency of divining and meting the next demand made upon us. It is the phenomenon sometimes called ‘alienation from self.’ In its advanced stages, we no longer answer the telephone, because someone might want something; that we could say no without drowning in self-reproach is an idea alien to this game. Every encounter demands too much, tears the nerves, drains the will, and the specter of something as small as an unanswered letter arouses such disproportionate guilt that answering it becomes out of the question. To assign unanswered letters their proper weight, to free us from the expectations of others, to give us back to ourselves — there lies the great, the singular power of self-respect. Without it, one eventually discovers the final turn of the screw: one runs away to find oneself, and finds no one at home.

Slouching Towards Bethlehem is a superb read in its entirety. Also from it, Didion on keeping a notebook and not mistaking self-righteousness for morality .

— Published May 21, 2012 — https://www.themarginalian.org/2012/05/21/joan-didion-on-self-respect/ —

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“To Be A Writer, You Must Write”: How Joan Didion Became Joan Didion

Evelyn mcdonnell on the writing process of one of america's leading literary ladies.

Joan Didion looks straight at the camera, with her fist curled in front of her mouth—as if to indicate it is through her hands that the taciturn thinker speaks. Appropriately, a manual typewriter takes up half the frame in this iconic black-and-white photo taken by Nancy Ellison in 1976.

When she was a teenager, Didion taught herself to type and to write by pecking out stories by Ernest Hemingway and Joseph Conrad on an Olivetti Lettera 22. Her goal: “To learn how the sentences worked,” she told the Paris Review . Thus began her immersion in the physical act as well as the craft of writing. Call it a form of machine learning. “I’m only myself in front of my typewriter,” Didion once told an editor at Ms. magazine.

At some point her father, in one of his random financial schemes, bought a load of Royal 200 typewriters, one of which became Didion’s accomplice. She took it with her everywhere. A typewriter is included in the carry-on items in the packing list she published in The White Album . Her idea was not to write on the plane, but while she waited in the airport, she would sit “and start typing the day’s notes.” This is one of many instructive lessons offered by Joan Didion. She must have hauled a typewriter with her in 1955, when, at age twenty, she took a train alone from Boston back to Sacramento, after a month spent in Mademoiselle ’s guest editor program. She typed multiple letters to her Mademoiselle colleague and college friend Peggy LaViolette on hotel stationery along the way. “Never being one to throw myself wholeheartedly into Adventure, I carefully got a seat alone, barricaded myself in with wicker basket, typewriter, mangled copies of old magazines and thought I could sleep all night,” she typed in one missive.

Many writers become so attached to a physical process that changing tools with the times is not easy; some never manage it. Neil Gaiman, the futurist, has said he prefers to write his novels in longhand. I still print out my writing and edit it on paper, a routine I was chuffed to hear Didion recommend to Hilton Als in an interview late in her life. Over the decades Didion graduated from notebook to manual typewriter to electric typewriter to computer, again demonstrating her openness to progress. Still, she did complain to author Maxine Hong Kingston about the transition to electric in a 1978 letter, saying that combined with moving and quitting smoking, the “reprogramming…had caused an inordinate amount of stress.” She switched to a computer in 1987 and eventually came to love the editing capabilities of word processing programs. “It did for me what geometry was supposed to have done,” she said.

Writers are prone to obsessive interest in other writers’ processes. We write because we are readers, and we read, in part, to see how others write. Didion was a bookworm. When she wasn’t sitting on the fender of her car, she was far from the snakes at the Sacramento library on a Friday night with her friend Maurice, or maybe her gal pal Nancy Kennedy (whose brother Anthony later became a Supreme Court justice and spoke at Joan’s memorial). Photos and videos document her various homes stacked floor to ceiling with books. Among the items sold at auction by her estate in 2022 were Didion’s collections of works by George Orwell, Elizabeth Hardwick, Joyce Carol Oates, and Norman Mailer.

Joan was an avid consumer of culture in general, with broad interests that did not divide art into high and low: She named one anthology after a Yeats poem, another after a Beatles album. Writer and friend Calvin Trillin called her Brentwood home “the West Coast literary consulate,” but she and Dunne largely financed it with Hollywood hack work. She loved biker films, interviewed Jim Morrison for the Saturday Evening Post and Joan Baez for the New York Times , wrote an important essay about Georgia O’Keeffe, and was close friends with writer and artist Eve Babitz ( Slow Days, Fast Company ) and writer and screenwriter Nora Ephron ( When Harry Met Sally ).

There’s a 1971 interview with Joan on YouTube, posted by the Center for Sacramento History. Some of the audio is missing, but the footage of Didion in her office in her Franklin Avenue house is, well, pure gold. She’s wearing a brown flared miniskirt and a black V-neck shirt that fastens in the back. She has tucked her shoulder-length strawberry blond hair behind her ears, as she did, and freckles dot her cheeks. She’s talking about growing up in rural environments; her Valley accent is strong. I’m not talking San Fernando Valley here; I’m talking the almost southern twang of the Central Valley, that Didion said she picked up from the many refugees from the Oklahoma dust bowl with whom she went to school. This is how Didion spoke: not with the English accent of Vanessa Redgrave, who portrayed her in the stage version of The Year of Magical Thinking , or the crisp patrician consonants of Barbara Caruso, who reads the audiobook of that text, but like a freckle-faced country girl. The camera pans across shelves full of books and books piled on the desk, lingering on volumes written by Didion and Dunne. Joan snips an article out of a newspaper in front of a cabinet of haphazardly placed manila folders, presumably full of other clippings. She’s talking about worrying herself sick about a comma being out of place while admitting she doesn’t have the same fastidious approach to her housekeeping. (This is the secret life of women writers: We can’t be good mothers, wives, daughters, writers, cooks, and housekeepers.) She sits on a black leather couch with leopard-print pillows, smoking a cigarette and reading a paperback that’s open on her lap.

“I like words and I’m very excited by seeing what can be done with words,” she says. “ Play It a s It Lays is a very short novel. I worked on it for five years but when I finished it, I thought every word was exactly right. Now I can’t even read it because words pop out at me, or sentences that I think ought to be changed.”

Didion once told a participant in a writing seminar that to get through writer’s block, you had to write one sentence, and then another, and then another.

To be a writer, you must write.

__________________________________

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Joan Didion’s best books, from essays to fiction

On Thursday, it was announced that prolific writer Joan Didion had died at the age of 87.

An executive at her publisher, Knopf, confirmed the author's death to TODAY in an email and said that Didion passed away at her home in Manhattan from Parkinson's disease.

Here, we round up seven necessary reads by the late author, who was best known for work on mourning and essays and magazine contributions that captured the American experience.

Here are the best books by Joan Didion:

'the year of magical thinking' (2005).

Probably her best known work, this gutting work of non-fiction profiles Didion's experience grieving her husband John Gregory Dunne while caring for comatose daughter Quintana Roo Dunne.

"The Year of Magical Thinking" quickly became an iconic representation of mourning, capturing the sorrow and ennui of that period. It won numerous awards, including the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Awards, and was later adapted into a play starring Vanessa Redgrave.

'Blue Nights' (2011)

A continuation of what is started in "The Year of Magical Thinking," this poignant 2011 work of non-fiction features personal and heartbreaking memories of Quintana, who passed away at the age of 39, not long after Didion's husband died.

"It is a searing inquiry into loss and a melancholy meditation on mortality and time,” wrote book critic Michiko Kakutani of the New York Times.

'Slouching Towards Bethlehem' (1968)

Didion's first collection of nonfiction writing is revered as an essential portrait of America — particularly California — in the 1960s.

It focuses on her experience growing up in the Sunshine state, icons of that time John Wayne and Howard Hughes, and the essence of Haight-Ashbury, a neighborhood in San Francisco that became the heart of the counterculture movement.

'The White Album' (1979)

A reflective collection of essays, "The White Album" explores several of the same topics Didion touched on in "Slouching Towards Bethlehem," this time focusing on the history and politics of California in the late 1960s and early '70s. Its matter-of-fact and intimate stories give the reader a feeling of what California and the atmosphere was like during that time period.

'Play it as it Lays' (1970)

Set during a time before Roe vs. Wade, this terrifying and at times disturbing novel profiles a struggling actress living in Los Angeles whose life begins to unravel after she has a back-alley abortion.

"(Didion) writes with a razor, carving her characters out of her perceptions with strokes so swift and economical that each scene ends almost before the reader is aware of it, and yet the characters go on bleeding afterward," wrote book critic John Leonard for the New York times.

'Miami' (1987)

Joan Didion Speaks At The College Of Marin

A great example of Didion's journalistic work, "Miami" paints a portrait of life for Cuban exiles in the south Florida city.

Didion writes a stunning and passionate page-turner set against the backdrop of Miami’s decline caused by economic and political changes with the refugee immigration from Cuba after Fidel Castro’s rise to power.

Alexander Kacala is a reporter and editor at TODAY Digital and NBC OUT. He loves writing about pop culture, trending topics, LGBTQ issues, style and all things drag. His favorite celebrity profiles include Cher — who said their interview was one of the most interesting of her career — as well as Kylie Minogue, Candice Bergen, Patti Smith and RuPaul. He is based in New York City and his favorite film is “Pretty Woman.”

Joan Didion Was Our Bard of Disenchantment

The prolific writer, who died today at 87, was a penetrating anthropologist of American myths.

In 1988, Joan Didion joined a scrum of reporters on the tarmac of the San Diego airport to witness the writing of the first draft of history. The assembled journalists were trailing the Democratic presidential candidate Michael Dukakis. She was trailing the journalists. Didion watched as a baseball was procured, a staffer tossed the ball to the candidate, he tossed it back—and as the cameras dutifully captured the exchange. She watched as presidential fitness was redefined as athletic prowess with the consent of the national media—as the myths that shape, and limit, Americans’ sense of political possibility were manufactured in real time. She documented the moment in an essay for The New York Review of Books . It was titled “Insider Baseball,” and it has since been, like so many of Didion’s essays, so widely imitated that its innovations can be easy to overlook. But the piece was singular, and scathing: a collective profile of, as she wrote, “that handful of insiders who invent, year in and year out, the narrative of public life.”

Didion died today at 87, still one of this moment’s most debated and admired and consequential writers. Thinking about her wide body of work—essays, novels, memoirs, pieces of criticism, each with their own tendrils and limbs—I keep coming back to “Insider Baseball,” because it captures something so essential about her approach. She was a storyteller who rejected mythology. She had no patience for the pablum sold in the hectic American marketplace: bootstraps, merits, salvations. Her most common subject, instead, was entropy. And her second-most-common subject was grief. She observed the world that was, even as she mourned the world that might have been.

Read: We sell ourselves stories in order to live

The first line of “The White Album,” Didion’s partially autobiographical account of L.A. in the 1960s, goes like this: “We tell ourselves stories in order to live.” What is sometimes forgotten is the series of lines that comes after it. “We interpret what we see, select the most workable of the multiple choices,” she writes, in part. “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.”

Readers today might chafe at all these strident assessments declared on their behalf: Who is “we” here, exactly? But humans’ desire to make the world meaningful is a species-level seduction. Our craving for story is elemental, and therefore inescapable. Didion’s work may be easy to romanticize—I read her speech turned essay “Why I Write” when I was young, and her account of the world as a series of pictures that “shimmer around the edges” still evokes the old tenderness—but her project was distinctly anti-Romantic. She looked into herself, yes. She wrote “On Self-Respect” and “Goodbye to All That” and “On Keeping a Notebook” and other works that are sometimes recycled, today, as silk-screened wisdom. But even in the more sentimental of her writings, her own emotions were not the end of her stories. They were the beginning. She was her own data point.

Read: Slouching towards Bendel’s

Her coolness had a double valence. See, in one shot, the portrait of her as a young woman, posed in front of that Corvette Stingray, her cigarette dangling from her fingers, her face frozen in an insouciant glare. But she directed the coolness inward as well. She interrogated her own perceptions with the stoicism of a scientist. She was, one might say, a misplaced modernist. She learned her craft in part by rewriting Hemingway’s stories on her typewriter, trying to train her tendons into his rhythms and arrhythmias. She expanded the possibilities of what language could do, not just in the techniques-of-fiction-applied-to-nonfiction way of New Journalism, but also in a starker sense: Her words lodge and stab and scar. They itch. They hurt. Her work acknowledges the power that stories have to shape reality; her sensibilities were thus also squarely postmodern. In the clinical precision of her prose, she captured the cellular intimacy of narrative, the hold it can have on the soft tissues of the human heart. But she also instructed readers to resist “the imposition of a narrative line.” She doubted herself, and wanted us to doubt her too. When she talked about the stories we tell ourselves in order to live, she wasn’t offering a gauzy pronouncement. She was issuing an indictment.

That brand of jaded realism—that roving frustration with fictions that claim to be transcendent truths—is part of the reason her work has remained so urgently relevant, over an improbable number of decades. (“You are getting a woman,” Didion writes of herself in “In the Islands,” “who somewhere along the line misplaced whatever slight faith she ever had in the social contract, in the meliorative principle, in the whole grand pattern of human endeavor.”) Optimism, that most renewable of American resources, can crush people as easily as it can buoy them. With an anthropologist’s eye and an artist’s imagination, Didion documented disillusionments and disenchantments—dreams both quick and dead. She named her own regrets and mourned the paths she’d left untaken. She examined her grief. She examined others’ grief too. She wrote about California, the place of her birth and later her chosen home, as dusty and often delirious, her writing conjuring a place where most everything, dreams and cars and homes and people, might be made disposable. Something better will surely be in store, her characters tell themselves, because that is the line they’ve been told. They throw away what they have to make space for what they won’t.

Didion’s writing is cinematic, not because it is sweeping or epic—on the contrary, the typical piece of Didion prose is prickly in its precisions—but because her words are informed by the grammars of film. Didion lived, for a time, in Hollywood; her work lives in Hollywood too. She used jump cuts to get from one moment in time to the next. She was attuned, always, to the framing of scenes. She channeled the camera’s gaze. Her reeling reports can sometimes read as horror. In her book South and West: From a Notebook , she mentioned a man she once dated. “We lived together for some years,” she remarked, “and I think we most fully understood each other when once I tried to kill him with a kitchen knife.” In Slouching Towards Bethlehem, Didion wrote of a woman whose husband died—accidentally or not, because some things cannot be fully known—in a raging car fire. She observed a 5-year-old girl in Haight-Ashbury whose mother had given her LSD. She made decay visceral. “Adolescents drifted from city to torn city,” she wrote, “sloughing off both the past and the future as snakes shed their skins, children who were never taught and would never now learn the games that had held the society together.”

Read: Joan Didion doesn’t owe the world anything

This is not the Instagram-friendly Didion, the Didion of curated quotes and branded iconographies and the $1,200 jacket . It is Didion the journalist, who coined the term Dreampolitik and who insisted on seeing the world as it was. A common, and fair, criticism of Didion is that her coolness sometimes verges on coldness. In The Center Will Not Hold , the documentary about Didion directed by her nephew Griffin Dunne, Dunne asks her about that scene in the Haight that would, repackaged as pointillist prose, help to make her famous: 5-year-old Susan, sitting on the floor of her living room, small and vulnerable and tripping on acid. What was it like, Dunne wondered, to witness? One might think, the New Yorker writer Rebecca Mead suggested , that Didion would answer as a person—describing a panic she felt, or an impulse to call an ambulance, or the turn of her thoughts toward her own tiny daughter. Instead Didion, the detached observer, plunges the knife: “Let me tell you,” Didion says. “It was gold.”

The line calls to mind Didion’s pronouncement, in “Why I Write,” that writing, with its distances and finalities, “is the tactic of a secret bully.” Didion saw Susan, in that moment, not as a child in need of help, but as an idea in need of expression. “It was the first time I had dealt directly and flatly with the evidence of atomization, the proof that things fall apart,” she writes in the preface to Slouching Towards Bethlehem .

Didion is often, these days, associated with the “I”—the pronoun of memoir, of Romantic tempest, of the self. “I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means,” she wrote in “Why I Write.” But, as always, there’s more to the story. (The title of Didion’s final essay collection is deeply ironic and also perfectly apt: Let Me Tell You What I Mean . She will tell you. But she will tell you at length.) The rest of the essay explains what Didion means. She’s talking not about herself to the exclusion of the world. She is simply recognizing that the world will always be refracted through the self.

Read: The autumn of Joan Didion

The first person can be indulgent. It can be incurious, focusing only on the psyche’s chasms and crests. But Didion’s “I” is analytical. She anticipated with striking alacrity the debates that still shape American journalism, among them its ruling class’s assumption that objectivity—the rules-based refereeing of reality—is possible. Didion long ago said goodbye to all that. Her stories doubled as meditations on questions that have only become more urgent: How does one earn the right to tell a story? What does the author owe to her reader in terms of self-disclosure? Whose stories are fair to tell? In her essay “In the Islands,” Didion lets the reader in on the fact that she and her husband, John Gregory Dunne, have gone to Hawaii in lieu of getting divorced. “I tell you this not as aimless revelation,” she writes, “but because I want you to know, as you read me, precisely who I am and where I am and what is on my mind. I want you to understand exactly what you are getting.”

This is the “I,” strident and lucid and frank. It is an “I” that levels with the reader: Didion’s writings are refracted through the prisms of her many privileges, and she sees no need to pretend otherwise. But hers is an “I” that rejects the sentimentalism of the current American moment. Feel is now a default verb in literary criticism. Donald Trump constructed his political movement from a collection of prefabricated furies. The business models of several of the most powerful companies in the country rely on keeping Americans inflamed and resentful and mistrustful. We live in an era of bad feelings. We live in a time of frayed nerves and fraying stories. We live in a moment that finds our old binding agents dissolving into our poisoned air. Didion saw it coming. She mourned what would be lost. She knew how possible it was, even and especially in the land of golden dreams, for things to fall apart.

JOAN DIDION

We are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not..

From the essay “On Keeping a Notebook” in Slouching Towards Bethlehem

ABOUT | QUOTES | BOOKS | NEWS | ARCHIVE

Photo: Jerry Bauer

1934–2021

About joan didion.

Joan Didion was a journalist, novelist, memoirist, essayist, and screenwriter who wrote some of the sharpest and most evocative analyses of culture, politics, literature, family, and loss. She won the National Book Award in 2005 for The Year of Magical Thinking .

THE ARCHIVE

The new york public library acquires the papers of joan didion and john gregory dunne.

JOAN DIDION BOOKS

biography & memoir .

Joan Didion Blue Nights book cover with a portrait of Joan Didion and her infant daughter, Quintana Roo Dunne.

ESSAYS

Joan Didion Let Me Tell You What I Mean book cover with a portrait of Joan Didion.

FICTION

Joan Didion Run River book cover with a photo of tree branches reflected in water

WORLD POLITICS

Joan Didion Salvador book cover with a portrait of Joan Didion

THE NATIONWIDE BESTSELLER

Let me tell you what i mean.

With a foreword by Hilton Als, these pieces from 1968 to 2000, never before gathered together, offer an illuminating glimpse into the mind and process of a legendary figure. They showcase Joan Didion’s incisive reporting, her empathetic gaze, and her role as “an articulate witness to the most stubborn and intractable truths of our time” ( The New York Times Book Review ).

THE LATEST

JANUARY 27, 2023

New york public library acquires joan didion’s papers.

The joint archive of Didion and her husband, John Gregory Dunne, includes manuscripts, photographs, letters, dinner party guest lists and other personal items.

NEW YORK TIMES »

MEMORIAL SERVICE

A celebration of the life of joan didion.

On September 21, 2022, the Cathedral Church of Saint John Divine hosted a celebration of Joan Didion’s life and work.

Joan Didion’s Estate Is Heading to Auction

By Jessica Ritz

ARCHITECTURAL DIGEST »

Joan Didion Talks to Hari Kunzru About Loss, Blue Nights, and Giving Up the Yellow Corvette

By Hari Kunzru

LITERARY HUB »

Joan Didion and the Opposite of Magical Thinking

By Zadie Smith

THE NEW YORKER »

Joan Didion’s Magic Trick

By Caitlin Flanagan

THE ATLANTIC »

Our Lady of Deadpan

By Darryl Pinckney

NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS »

Remembering Essayist Joan Didion, a Keen Observer of American Culture

By Terry Gross

NPR | FRESH AIR »

Didion’s Prophetic Eye on America

By Michiko Kakutani

Joan Didion and the Voice of America

By Hilton Als

The Radical Transparency of Joan Didion

By Frank Bruni

THE DOCUMENTARY

The center will not hold.

Joan Didion reflects on her remarkable career and personal struggles in this intimate documentary directed by her nephew, Griffin Dunne.

PBS NEWSHOUR

Remembering joan didion.

“She captured moments in American culture with penetrating clarity and style,” says PBS News Hour’s Jeffrey Brown in this remembrance of the life and work of Joan Didion.

Gathered here are some of the files, photographs, manuscripts, notes, book jackets, and other items connected to Joan Didion’s life and legacy. We’re making this remarkable body of work accessible to everyone and will be adding stories and galleries as new items become available.

Joan Didion, ‘Goodbye to All That’ and the struggle to see yourself clearly

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Anyone who’s completed the climb out of their early twenties hopefully has the wits to remember when life was as vivid as Kodachrome and the experience to recognize that perhaps all those new colors were duller than they seemed. Perspective, after all, is one of the great pleasures of getting older. But at the date of her death Thursday at the age of 87, Joan Didion’s 1967 essay “Goodbye to All That” remains the permanent sunspot obscuring the center-vision of many maturing writers even contemplating leaving a place like New York and telling other people about it. Only a great artist creates and ruins a genre at the same time. For millennial writers who grew into the body of essays, novels and literary journalism Didion already had waiting for them, it was like sitting down to grainy footage of a party that ended long before they would ever arrive.

Re-reading “Goodbye to All That” today — in the era of online, shortform oversharing — it’s striking to a contemporary reader how those 1967 sentences trail on and curl over themselves, like smoke lifting off a cigarette in a breezeless room. “When I first saw New York I was twenty, and it was summertime, and I got off a DC-7 at the old Idlewild temporary terminal in a new dress which had seemed very smart in Sacramento but seemed less smart already, even in the old Idlewild temporary terminal, and the warm air smelled of mildew and some instinct, programmed by all the movies I had ever seen and all the songs I had ever sung and all the stories I had ever read about New York, informed me that it would never quite be the same again,” Didion writes in an opening sentence of the piece. “In fact it never was.” That first sentence has six commas and six and s. It then lands with the kind of five-word Didionism that marked her career’s dehumidified approach to writing and evaluating her own experiences.

Joan Didion, masterful essayist, novelist and screenwriter, dies at 87

Didion bridged the world of Hollywood, journalism and literature in a career that arced most brilliantly in the realms of social criticism and memoir.

Dec. 23, 2021

A certain degree of ruthlessness with yourself conveys honesty, and it’s true that some naivete comes with being young. But not everybody might be so hard on themselves when it comes time to take stock of getting older. “Was anyone ever so young?” Didion wonders, recalling how she was afraid to call a hotel front desk to turn down the air conditioning when she was frigid, feverish and alone. “I am here to tell you that someone was. All I could do during those three days was talk long-distance to the boy I already knew I would never marry in the spring.” A husband shows up, along with some furniture, after Didion film-dissolves through a couple pages of life in minimally furnished apartments and all-night parties with strange piano salesmen and various failed writers and self-promoters of her acquaintance.

The essay is so classically a New York story, a journal entry about an outlander’s temporary harmonic alignment with a place that most Americans only recognize from their televisions. But the most universal appeal of “Goodbye to All That” is less about New York than its depiction of youth itself, the only city we’ve all lived in. “I had a friend who could not sleep, and he knew a few other people who had the same trouble, and we would watch the sky lighten and have a last drink with no ice and then go home in the early morning light, when the streets were clean and wet (had it rained in the night? we never knew) and the few cruising taxis still had their headlights on and the only color was the red and green of traffic signals.” Think about the last time you really admired the violence of how a stoplight red looks against wet pavement on an empty street. After a while, you realize that’s just how the world looks when you’re alone.

Joan Didion, author of "Play It as It Lays", and "Slouching Towards Bethlehem", is pictured here on May 1, 1977.(AP Photo)

Column: Joan Didion, California and the enduring power of ‘our special history’

Joan Didion continues to resonate in California, even with a generation nothing like her.

Looking back, Didion seems frustrated that she couldn’t see herself clearly, couldn’t more sharply perceive at the time that being wowed has a natural expiration date that was rapidly approaching. “You see I was in a curious position in New York: it never occurred to me that I was living a real life there,” she writes. “In my imagination I was always there for just another few months, just until Christmas or Easter or the first warm day in May.” She stayed eight years.

Eventually she got tired. Many do. Finally, Didion left for Los Angeles, where the essay wraps up so suddenly that the white space arrives with the stopping power you’d meet in an electric fence. “The golden rhythm was broken,” she shrugs. After her essay appeared in the Saturday Evening Post and her book “Slouching Towards Bethlehem,” Didion went on to have a distinguished career, which included a lot of formidable books, including 2005’s classic “The Year of Magical Thinking,” a painful memoir about grieving the sudden death of her husband, John Gregory Dunne. “It was in fact the ordinary nature of everything preceding the event that prevented me from truly believing it had happened, absorbing it, incorporating it, getting past it,” she writes of his death. Almost 40 years later, there she was, still struggling to perceive herself clearly, while offering herself to readers to be seen.

It takes time to see clearly after a departure. She knew that.

Remembering Joan Didion: A look back at her writing, interviews and more

The celebrated prose stylist, novelist and screenwriter who chronicled American culture and consciousness died Dec. 23 at 87.

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Matt Pearce was a reporter for the Los Angeles Times from 2012 to 2024. He previously covered the covering internet culture and podcasting, the 2020 presidential election and spent six years on The Times’ national desk, where he wrote stories about violence, disasters, social movements and civil liberties. Pearce was one of the first national reporters to arrive in Ferguson, Mo., during the uprising in 2014, and he chased Hurricane Harvey across Texas as the storm ravaged the Lone Star State in 2017. A University of Missouri graduate, he hails from a small town outside Kansas City, Mo.

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When It Was Magic Time in New Jersey

By Joan Didion

Image may contain John Gregory Dunne Joan Didion Book Publication Indoors Library Face Head Person and Photography

Blessed with the gift for banter of a Calvin Coolidge and the conviviality of an Increase Mather, I am not what you would call a Television Natural. Although I once met a man on a plane who asked me what my line was, the man was not John Daly; none of my secrets would interest Garry Moore. And as for The Price Is Right , I not only have no idea what a fully-equipped Thunderbird costs, no idea what a fully-equipped pine-paneled snack bar costs, but in fact have some difficulty remembering, from paycheck to paycheck, what I cost.

Nonetheless, I once had my hour, however inadvertent, as a Television Personality: it wasn't "21" and it wasn't "64," but there I was, seen by the cognoscenti (all those acquaintances who could be alerted by telephone) for three consecutive nights on WNTA-TV, the New York channel which first gave the world not only me but Open End and Play of the Week.

As television careers go, mine began in relative ignorance (it ended, as things worked out, in much the same way) with a chance remark at a party that I was good at crossword puzzles. Since my bolt is in truth shot once I have hit upon the three-letter word meaning Japanese Sash, this was at best an overstatement of the facts, but it had been simply a case of wanting to seem agreeable: someone had said he liked to work crossword puzzles; did I?

Thirteen hours later, when I was called to account by an appeal to stand by as a contestant on what my informant called "some crossword show in Newark," I felt somewhat less agreeable. Uncomfortably, I could recall insisting, with a silvery laugh, that I was a perfect fiend for crossword puzzles, couldn't get enough of crossword puzzles; could remember suggesting in fact that we hunt up the crossword in that morning's New York Times.

At any rate, I assured myself that whatever Some Crossword Show In Newark involved, it could not be as disastrous as the time I had so convinced someone of my craze for dancing that he entered me in a dance contest at Small's Paradise in Harlem; nor could it be as bad as the morning I found myself, suffering from both vertigo and the recollection that I had only a week before declared my mania for skiing, on the chair lift at Squaw Valley.

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At six-thirty that afternoon, I walked into a darkened Newark studio where Some Crossword Show was to begin at seven. (I appeared on the program two nights before I was certain of its name, Double Cross , partly because it seemed too late in the game to ask its name and partly because the pretty little girl who ran things referred to it as "Magic Time." I was pretty much in the dark as to whether "Magic Time" was some bit of televisiana in current usage among the In-group or simply the name of the program; her vox angelica delivery suggested the first hypothesis, but the sheer frequency of delivery lent considerable credence to the latter.)

I had been accompanied to Newark that night by the very acquaintance toward whom my modest claim had been directed; we were to be, he announced with misguided confidence, partners. Not long after he had remarked cheerfully that with any luck we would get our chance tonight and not long after I had stumbled on a cable, run my stocking, and burst into tears while attempting to reply in kind, we were apprehended by a young woman in a dirndl and flat-heeled shoes whose function in the operation never did become clear; my first thought was that she was scheduled to do her impression of a field-hockey captain from Wellesley, but we were never to know because she never appeared again. Assuring us that "the others" (Wellesley girls? Crossword fiends?) would arrive " toute suite , angels," she loped off, pausing only to add heartily: "You'll recognize Allyn Edwards, natch."

She was wrong there, but before long a man showed up who so clearly assumed that he had been recognized that I assumed he was Allyn Edwards, whoever Allyn Edwards was. (He was, in fact, the quizmaster.) For several minutes the three of us exchanged portentous simpers, and after five minutes we even exchanged a few words: I had an ashtray, and he wanted it.

Next in was the pretty little girl who wanted to know if we were ready for Magic Time. She wanted to be called "Mary Ann," and there was an interlude of deceptive merriment before she produced a clipboard so large that it might have held all the cues for fifty-two weeks of the Como show, frowned prettily, and asked me, in so many words, what made me interesting. "You know," she prompted. "Outside-interest-wise."

It was soon clear that nothing did, Mary-Ann-wise. Although she brightened when my partner said he had gone to Harvard ("We once had another very bright contestant; not only was he a graduate of Harvard," and here she paused meaningfully, "but he also worked for BBDO."), I could offer no such gimmick. With the delicate deliberation of a huntress hot on the track of the biggest game of all, Mary Ann asked then if the two of us were "friends." When we denied this canard, she abandoned her clipboard in perceptible disgust.

It was about this time when I first asked Mary Ann how to play the game. (So far were we from having the answers that we did not even have the rules.)

"It couldn't be simpler," she said suspiciously. "There's nothing to it."

My partner assured her that we would doubtless catch on, but would, nonetheless, appreciate some sketchy information.

Mary Ann glanced furtively at her watch and began edging toward the set. "You arrived late, you know." "The game," I repeated. "What is it."

"You've certainly watched it," she said, with an air of settling the question for once and all. Although we denied it, there was no convincing Mary Ann, who was by then conveying the distinct impression that she would, if pressed further, take the Fifth. She handed me a folding chair, put one finger to her lips (it was Magic Time), and we spent the next fifteen minutes watching the Champions (an affable army sergeant and a radio and television performer, equally affable, named John Reed King) down the Challengers, on grounds which eluded me. I decided that it had perhaps been an affability contest.

It was fortunate that my partner employed those fifteen minutes more constructively, because before you could have said Here's-Barbara-Britton-for-Revlon (unhappily for Double Cross , you couldn't have), there we were, introduced to Greater New York as a couple of advertising copywriters, a biographical note which was in my case inaccurate. Before I could stall for time by correcting it, however, we had plunged on into the game, whatever the game was. Representing, spuriously or no, the great wordplay tradition of Bruce Barton and Raymond Rubicam, I glanced at the monitor, watched myself smirk fatuously, and failed to identify a five-letter word meaning Huckster.

Nonetheless, the half-hour ended in a dead heat. Promising to appear the next night, we learned that the fun had just begun: part of the package was a dinner for the contestants at the Essex House in Newark.

The New York Times once called WNTA-TV a "three-ring circus." I don't know about that, but this was a three-ring dinner. At the head of the table, Mary Ann mourned For Love or Money , a network quiz which had at one time carried a peculiar merry sadism out across America: F or Love or Money contestants were offered a choice between merchandise in the hand and an undisclosed amount of money in the bush, and the entertainment lay in watching their greed trip them up. For Love or Money was a table topic of greater interest than you might think, because John Reed King, one of the evening's Champions, had been its master of ceremonies. Mary Ann twinkled mischievously as she described Mr. King's way of telling contestants that they had passed up the combination-refrigerator-freezer-and-spin-drier for three cents cash. Unfortunately both for Mr. King and for Mary Ann, who had worked on the show, CBS dropped For Love or Money late one Friday afternoon while Mary Ann was alone in the office working (quite superfluously, as the situation developed) on the Monday show. Mary Ann became gamer and gamer during this recital: That's Show Biz , as I feel certain she would have been the first to say had not the affable sergeant beaten her to it.

It seemed that the sergeant was in show business himself, kind of, in a manner of speaking; he made training films for the Strategic Air Command. Although he was, every time I turned his way, panning in over Great Falls, Montana, the sergeant was no man to drop all his eggs over Great Falls. He had recently completed, he told me, a novella . "I mean a short novel," he explained. "A fictional work."

Apparently on a theory that we might all improve our dispositions at dinner and emerge, at Magic Time, as veritable Tic-Tac-Dough contestants, we were asked to dinner, the next night, before the program. We had that night a new pair of nonplussed standbys, both of whom worked for the same paper company and neither of whom could persuade anyone to explain the rules. Vis-à-vis their bewilderment, the sergeant's geniality, and Mary Ann's determination, even I was touched by an uneasy camaraderie.

Although the central principle of the game still eluded me, I was pronounced a Champion that night, apparently because my partner rang a bell and announced that the double answer to what was called "the double cross clue," both make good catches , could be nothing but Yogi Berra and June Bride. How he arrived at this answer gnaws at my imagination still, but Mary Ann and I both counted him a credit to Harvard. Wondering expansively if together we might not crack prime network time, I managed to get off, ad lib, a mild witticism: "Good for you, Bob," I said, and Mr. Edwards smiled approvingly. I parlayed that coup by smiling proudly at what I thought was the studio audience, and my elation was dampened not at all by the discovery that the scattered applause at our success had originated in a drove of duck-tailed gnomes snapping their fingers and dripping pizza around the set, hangers-on from the preceding program, Hy Lit's Teenage Dance Party.

Our moment of glory was, however, short-lived: on the following night those paper salesmen proved astute enough to figure out that the new double cross clue, ways to go, meant Airship and Dogsled . When I confided that I had been thinking more along the lines of High Road and Low Road , my partner comforted me by declaring that I had an extremely poetic turn of mind and could scarcely have been expected to notice that High Road and Low Road did not have exactly the same number of letters as there were spaces.

Combined, our winnings for the three nights totalled two pen-and-pencil sets, two bottles of "L'Aimant" Eau de Cologne, and two books by Bergen Evans; prizes which, in retrospect, more or less guaranteed that the fix had not been in. Although Mr. Edwards seemed to think that we had won two transistor radios as well, Mary Ann motioned no. I began to think that Mr. Edwards understood the rules about as well as I did, or possibly that Mary Ann made them up as the game progressed. There was about the entire program, as far as that went, something hauntingly suggestive of Tonight We Improvise.

Double Cross did gain me the interest and concern of all my friends, if not of the Internal Revenue. I received midnight calls from five acquaintances, three of whom wanted me to know that I could get better prizes and 3 ¼% besides by depositing $25 in the New York Savings Bank. (I countered with the fact that the New York Savings Bank would not transport me to and from Newark in a Carey Cadillac, as Double Cross would and did. As one of them conceded, "Sweetie, you got interests in Newark, this is strictly the deal.")

A sixth friend, after trying three bars, all tuned in on Men of Annapolis , caught my act right in the NTA offices in the Coliseum Building. He was first stopped at the door by a man (reportedly wearing a George Raft suit and a J. Press tie) who said they didn't have any television sets at NTA. Pressed, he allowed finally that NTA did, after all, have a set; had, in fact, two sets, and before long my friend was helping me on from a cobbler's bench arranged tastefully in front of one of them. When his disgust with my performance became audible, he was brought up short by the gentleman in the George Raft suit, who banged the cobbler's bench, delighted. "We hooked you," he crooned. "When you start talkin' back to the set, sweetheart, we got you hooked."

Nonetheless, my fan had the Double Cross monkey off his back before he was even downstairs, and can offer no more leads than I can as to what became of Double Cross . All America knows what happened to the fast guns: to the boys who shot it out way out there where the ratings began, to the women who stood beside them. But what of Mr. Edwards? What of Mary Ann? Whither the magic that was in Newark?

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‘The role of the novelist is to imagine’: Rebecca F Kuang photographed in Boston, Massachusetts

Rebecca F Kuang: ‘I like to write to my friends in the style of Joan Didion’

The author of bestseller Yellowface on her agent’s fears about publishing the novel, the joys of a social media purge and being a workaholic who gets bored easily

R ebecca F Kuang, 27, is an American writer. She and her family emigrated to the US from Guangzhou, China, when she was four; she grew up in Dallas, Texas. Her first novel, The Poppy War , a grimdark fantasy with a plot drawn from elements of the second Sino-Japanese war, was published in 2018. Two sequels followed. A fourth novel, the bestselling Babel , set in 1830s England, came out in 2022. Kuang followed this with a controversial departure: Yellowface . A contemporary melodrama in which a white author steals the manuscript of a dead, far more successful Asian-American novelist and passes it off as her own, it wickedly satirises identity politics in the world of publishing. It comes out in paperback this month. Kuang has postgraduate degrees from both Oxford and Cambridge Universities, and is currently a doctorate student at Yale.

Is it true that your agent cautioned against publishing Yellowface when you first told her about the idea? Yes, that’s true. She was a bit stunned, caught off guard. “I’m really worried it’s going to offend people,” she said. But I was convinced both by its strength as a story, and by what I was trying to say, so I asked her to get second reads from other people at her agency – and to her credit, she did. She really stuck her neck out.

Were you nervous as publication approached? It’s risky to bite the hand that feeds you. I might have been nervous if this had been my first book, but I’d been through the whole publishing cycle four times already. I’d got used to the idea that no matter what you say, some people will really resonate with it and love your work, and some people will think you’re absolute trash. There’s no perfect story that appeases everybody, and if there was, it would be so trite and boring and toothless, it wouldn’t be worth producing. I knew some reactions to this book would be polarised.

Yellowface has lots to say about identity politics, especially the notion that only certain people are allowed to write certain stories. What do you feel about this idea personally? Where does it leave the imagination? I think people should write about whatever they like. The role of the novelist is to imagine. If everyone only wrote from their own perspectives, we’d only ever write memoirs, autobiographies or autofiction. That would be very limiting. Many men have written about women very badly, but that’s an issue of craft, not biological qualification.

What about social media? Your narrator, June , is terrorised by publishing Twitter. Our relationship with social media is so extremist. I’d like not to have an Instagram account, but I like to see my friends wearing pretty dresses, and to stay connected with them. What has been really helpful for me is a book by Cal Newport called Digital Minimalism . He encourages a digital purge, then a very selective bringing back into your life of the social media tools you think work for you. It broke my addiction entirely. I severely limit my Instagram time now.

And cancel culture? Does it exist? I find a lot of this so disingenuous. The shape of an internet takedown would go something like this: somebody would err, and often there would be pretty genuine complaints about their conduct. But there’s also a really big spectrum of what counts [as bad behaviour]. It could be something quite egregious and harmful, and it could also be something as silly as misrecognising a breakfast cereal. We conflate all of these scales of harm. Anyway, someone would air this complaint, and then there would be a back and forth with that complaint, and then, very quickly, it would spread to the corners of the internet, and those with no stake in it at all would spread disinformation. Nobody would ever seem interested in the truth, or in reparations, or in genuinely understanding what happened. It’s so self-serving and frivolous.

Are you from a bookish family? My dad came to the US to study electoral engineering in grad school, and part of the way he taught himself English was by reading the classics. When I was a child, there were always classics around the house. He encouraged me to read way above my age and, to be honest, my understanding. We read George Orwell’s Animal Farm together. I just thought it was about some animals that were really mean to each other.

Did you always want to be a writer? It’s hard for me to say because I can’t remember a time when I wasn’t able to write. My mum [a translator] encouraged me to keep a diary, and every time we went on a family holiday or something happened at school, she’d say: “OK, write two pages about it.” I always had a notebook with me.

Which writers are an influence on you? Susanna Clarke ’s Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell is a lingering influence. So is AS Byatt’s Possession . Sylvia Plath is a recent obsession. I reread The Bell Jar and then this brilliant biography of her by Heather Clark, which got me interested in her journals and letters. Joan Didion is an obsession. I like to write my friends letters in the style of Joan Didion.

What book do you have by your bedside right now? My bedroom’s far away, but I’ll tell you what’s by my desk: Marina Keegan’s The Opposite of Loneliness . It’s a really special book. She was younger when she died than I am now; she was killed in a car crash a few days after she graduated from Yale, and her parents worked with some professors to put this collection of her essays and short fiction together. I’ve been asked to write an introduction to the 10th-anniversary edition. I think a lot about female genius, and careers that end too early, and the potential we never get to see.

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You’re still only 27, and you’ve already published five books. Are you very driven? I do set high goals for myself, but really I just think I’m a compulsive workaholic. It’s very hard for me even to sit still in a movie. I’m very bad at going on holiday. I can’t just sit by the ocean and relax. I need to be doing something.

Is the plan in the future to combine an academic career with a writing life? That’s definitely my hope. Teaching is a vocation for me. I’m passionate about being in the classroom. I feel like it’s a kind of magic, an important kind of work that’s distinct from writing novels. But the job market is really discouraging. I don’t know if there will be posts available when I’m on the market in two or three years’ time.

What are you working on now? My next book is set in the 80s. It’s a fantasy novel, but it’s very different from The Poppy War trilogy. It’s Neil Gaiman meets… Lewis Carroll. There’ll be a big emphasis on nonsense and riddles and mysteries. It’s an entirely new genre. I like to feel like I’m moving forward. I get bored very easily.

Yellowface by Rebecca F Kuang is published in paperback by the Borough Press (£9.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com . Delivery charges may apply

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Joan didion, novelist and essayist, when you write, you’re always revealing a difficult part of yourself..

Joan Didion was born in Sacramento, California. Didion spent most of her childhood in Sacramento, except for several years during World War II, when she traveled across the county with her mother and brother to be near her father, who served in a succession of posts as an officer in the Army Air Corps. Her family had deep roots in the West; family tales of pioneer days informed her first novel, as well as her later memoir, Where I Was From .

By her own account, Didion was a shy, bookish child, although she also pushed herself to overcome her shyness through acting and public speaking. In her final year at the University of California, Berkeley, she won an essay contest sponsored by Vogue magazine. The first prize was a job in the magazine’s New York office. Didion remained at Vogue for two years, progressing from research assistant to contributing writer. At the same time, she published articles in other magazines and wrote her first novel, Run River (1963). Although the novel sold poorly, it attracted favorable reviews, and she was offered a contract to write a second book.

In 1964, Didion married John Gregory Dunne, an aspiring novelist who was writing for Time magazine. The couple moved to Los Angeles with the intention of staying six months, and ended up making their home there for the next 20 years. The pair adopted a baby girl they named Quintana Roo, after the state on the eastern coast of Mexico.

The atmosphere of California in the 1960s provided Didion and Dunne with ample opportunities for writing in the personal mode that was becoming known as the New Journalism, also associated with the writers Norman Mailer, Tom Wolfe, Hunter Thompson and Gay Talese. Didion’s essays on the ’60s counterculture were collected in the volume Slouching Towards Bethlehem (1968). Published to critical acclaim, the book is one of the signature works of the decade. Didion’s second novel, Play It As it Lays (1970), set among aimless souls adrift at the edges of the film industry, captured a mood of anomie and alienation that crept over the film colony at the decade’s close.

Joan Didion and John Gregory Dunne, partners in life and literature, at home in New York City, 2000. (© Richard Schulman/CORBIS)

Working in collaboration for the first time, Didion and Dunne wrote the screenplay for the film Panic in Needle Park (1971). Set among homeless drug addicts in New York City, the film introduced film audiences to the actor Al Pacino. Their work on the film was much admired, and the pair would become one of Hollywood’s most sought-after screenwriting teams, a lucrative sideline to their journalism and fiction. Among the many screenplays they wrote together, the best known are screenplays for the film adaptation of Play It As it Lays (1972); the 1976 remake of A Star Is Born, featuring Barbra Streisand and Kris Kristofferson; the film version of Dunne’s novel True Confessions (1981); and Up Close and Personal (1996) with Robert Redford.

Didion published a second volume of essays, The White Album , in 1979. She had won a national reputation as an intensely acute social observer and prose stylist; her voice was admired for its gemlike precision and elegance. In the 1980s, Didion’s interest turned to the state of her country’s relations with its southern neighbors, examined in two book-length essays, Salvador (1983) and Miami (1987). Travels in Central America and the Pacific also provided the background for novels of political intrigue, including A Book of Common Prayer (1977), Democracy (1984) and The Last Thing He Wanted (1996).

Over the years, Joan Didion and John Gregory Dunne often found themselves in the position of explaining New York to Californians, and California to New Yorkers. In the mid-1980s, the couple moved back to New York City. Many of Didion’s observations of the city appear in her essay collection After Henry (1992). Years of Didion’s essays on American politics and government were collected in the volume Political Fictions (2001). Her thoughts turned back to California in Where I Was From (2003), a wide-ranging volume of reflections on California’s past and present. Her first seven books of nonfiction have been collected in a single volume, We Tell Ourselves Stories in Order to Live .

American Academy of Achievement Awards Council member Justice Anthony M. Kennedy presents the Golden Plate Award to Joan Didion at the 2006 International Achievement Summit in Los Angeles.

In late 2003, Didion’s daughter, Quintana, fell gravely ill. Shortly after returning from a visit to their comatose child in the hospital, her husband, John Gregory Dunne, suffered a fatal heart attack. Joan Didion wrote a searing account of her journey through grief in The Year of Magical Thinking . At the time she finished the book, her daughter appeared to be recovering from her illness, but by the time the book was published, Quintana had died. The Year of Magical Thinking was published to widespread acclaim and received the National Book Award for Nonfiction in 2005.

In her first foray into writing for the theater, Didion adapted The Year of Magical Thinking to the stage. The Broadway production opened in 2007 and starred Didion’s friend Vanessa Redgrave, who repeated the role at Britain’s National Theatre. The play has since been performed throughout the English-speaking world, and in French, Spanish and Norwegian translations. Didion continued to document her experience of personal loss in the 2011 memoir Blue Nights , which directly addressed the death of her daughter, among wide-ranging observations on childhood, motherhood, grief, mortality and the aging process.

In 2013, President Barack Obama awarded Joan Didion the National Medal of Arts. She is the subject of a feature-length documentary film, directed by her nephew Griffin Dunne. The film, The Center Will Not Hold, premiered on Netflix in 2017. The same year saw the publication of a book of earlier travel essays, South and West . In 2019, Library of America began republishing all of Didion’s novels and books of essays in a collected edition, beginning with Joan Didion: The 1960s and 70s . Let Me Tell You What I Mean , a volume of Didion’s previously uncollected essays, drawn from the years 1968 to 2000, was published early in 2021. Library of America’s second volume of Didion’s collected works Joan Didion: The 1980s and 90s , appeared in April 2021.

Since the 1960s, Joan Didion has been one of America’s finest novelists and most acute social observers. As an undergraduate at Berkeley, she won an essay contest sponsored by Vogue magazine and was offered a job in the New York office of the magazine’s publisher, Condé Nast. In New York, she met her husband, the novelist John Gregory Dunne.

The couple moved to Los Angeles, where they enjoyed a unique partnership as Hollywood’s most sought-after screenwriting team. The Hollywood scene and the California counterculture provide the backdrop for her novels of the 1970s: Play It As it Lays and A Book of Common Prayer . Her reflections on the turbulent era appeared in her bestselling essay collections, Slouching Towards Bethlehem and The White Album . She won a devoted audience and the profound admiration of her peers with her immaculate prose and penetrating eye for the revelatory detail. In the 1980s, she broadened her range with provocative explorations of hemispheric politics in the book-length essays Miami and Salvador . In Where I Was From , she explores her memories of childhood in the Sacramento delta, and how history and experience have altered her view of her native region.

Her memoirs, The Year of Magical Thinking and Blue Nights , unflinchingly describe her response to her husband’s sudden death and the fatal illness of their only child. From the depths of grief, Joan Didion has risen to the height of her powers and turned unbearable experience into transcendent art.

You were working at Vogue magazine when you wrote your first novel. Did you always see yourself as a novelist?

I did see myself as a novelist, even though I was having trouble finishing this first novel. After it was published, it was only read by about ten people, but they happened to be ten people who gave it to ten other people and eventually — you know, not only was it not a commercial success, it wasn’t by any means, I don’t think, a success on its own terms. I didn’t know how to do it, and it ended up, because I didn’t know how to do it — I wanted to have a shattered narrative, but I didn’t have a clue how to do that, and so it was confusing. So the publisher pressed me to straighten out the chronology, so it became just a simple novel with a flashback, which wasn’t my intention at all. But anyway, enough people read it so that I was offered a contract for a second novel.

Joan Didion, a young journalist in the 1960s. (Time Life Pictures/Getty Images)

What was the first novel called?

Joan Didion: Well, that was another thing. It was called Run River , but that was the publisher’s title. I said, “What does it mean?” He said, “It means life goes on,” and I said, “That’s not what the book is about.”

And what was the second book?

Joan Didion: The second was Play It As It Lays .

You’ve said that one of your intentions in that work was to write a novel that moved so fast that it would be over before you noticed it, so fast that it would scarcely exist on the page.

Joan Didion: I just wanted to write a fast novel. You always have a vision of what kind of object a piece of fiction is going to be, or anything that you’re making. In that case, it was going to exist in a white space. It was going to exist between the paragraphs. Some of the chapters are only three or four lines long in that book, and I found a way to speed it up. I had started it — just because I didn’t know how else to start it — I started it with two or three characters (who) have short first-person statements, and then it goes into a “close third” for what appears to be the rest of the book, but as the book comes to an end and starts gaining momentum, you can pick up a lot of momentum by going back to this device from the beginning. This sounds so technical. You go back to that first person and shorter and shorter bursts, and it really gives you a lot of speed. So I was sort of thrilled with that.

Joan Didion hits the L.A. freeways in a white Stingray in 1970, the year of her L.A. novel Play It As It Lays. (Time Life Pictures/Getty Images)

It was a fairly revolutionary structure, wasn’t it, to employ both third- and first-person narrators that way?

Joan Didion: There is nothing you can’t do, it turns out.

Faulkner, in As I Lay Dying , used all these different first-person narrators, but you mixed that up even further by having first and third-person narrators. When you say you wanted the book to move fast, do you mean you want the reader to kind of gobble it up?

Joan Didion: I always want everything read in one sitting. If they can’t read it in one sitting, you’re going to lose the rhythm of it. You’re going to lose the shape of it. I myself love to read those Victorian novels which go on and on, and you don’t read them in one sitting. You might read one over the course of a summer, but that isn’t what I want to write.

To this day, your books are fairly short, for the most part. Did a publisher ever give you any trouble about that?

Joan Didion: No. Publishers now, it turns out, like short books. They didn’t used to like short books, but they are now convinced that that’s what people want.

I would imagine that it’s harder to write a short book because every word has to be so exact. Isn’t it easier to write long?

Joan Didion: It might be for some people, but it wouldn’t be for me because I would lose interest as it kind of meandered on.

Author John Gregory Dunne (1932 - 2003). He and Joan Didion were married for almost 40 years and collaborated on half a dozen screenplays. (© Michael Brennan/CORBIS)

Could you tell us about how you met John Gregory Dunne and how you came to work together as a team?

Joan Didion: We were friends for a long time before we decided to get married. I met him, he was working for Time . He was writing foreign news for Time , and he was just someone I liked and he made me laugh, and we would occasionally have lunch. We had friends in common. Then, for some reason — I don’t remember exactly why — but one night we had dinner. He said he was going to drive to Hartford the next day — he was from Hartford — did I want to come up, and I said sure. So I went up to Hartford, where his family lived, and I was so taken with this entire family that we started seeing each other in a more serious light. Really, at that time, he was, as I said, working for Time . I had published one novel. Neither one of us was very well established, and we went to California and started supporting ourselves by writing pieces. So that required one or the other of us — me to read his pieces, him to read my pieces. So we began to trust each other as first reader.

At what point did you and your husband first collaborate on something together?

Joan Didion: We didn’t collaborate until we wrote a screenplay, which I think was 1969. We did Panic in Needle Park . That’s all we ever collaborated on was screenplays.

Did that change the balance of how you worked together as editors?

Joan Didion: No, because it was a totally different activity.

Academy of Achievement Awards Council member and singer/activist Naomi Judd with Joan Didion at a reception prior to the Banquet of the Golden Plate during the 2006 International Achievement Summit in Los Angeles.

And also because you were dealing with a studio? As in A Star is Born ?

Joan Didion: You’re always dealing with somebody else. Yes.

We did A Star Is Born in 1972 or ‘3, yeah. That movie was actually John’s idea, because it was conceived as a rock-and-roll remake of A Star Is Born . The names that came to mind were not necessarily the names who were going to be in it, but it was just two faces. It was Carly Simon and James Taylor, and Warner Brothers picked this up right away because they had a lot of music, so they got the idea. They had Warner Brothers music. So it was very easy to set up a contract, and Warner Brothers set up so we could do the research. We went out on tour with bands that summer and then wrote the screenplay, which we had a lot of fun doing because it was totally research. It was fun. You’d find yourself in Johnstown, Pennsylvania, on a summer night with a really bad English metal band — you know, I mean just hopeless — and being really thrilled. Then it got to be heavy weather on that picture because the question of casting came up, and it turned out to be a lot of other personalities involved.

January 2007: Joan Didion in her New York City apartment. She has adapted her book The Year of Magical Thinking and turned it into a one-woman play starring Vanessa Redgrave. (Aristide Economopoulos/Corbis/Getty)

As writers, you don’t have that much control in movies.

Joan Didion: You don’t on a movie, no. Never.

There are so many different aspects of California life in that era that come up in your writings. One that stands out is the Manson murders and how they jolted the town from its previous state of self-satisfaction or complacency. Could you tell us about that?

Joan Didion: What struck me about the Manson murders was how at the moment they happened, it seemed as if they were inevitable. It seemed as if we had been moving toward that moment for about a year.

There were a lot of rumors about stuff, a lot of stuff going on around town, which you would kind of hear about on the edges of your mind and not want to know any more about. After the fact, it was kind of amazing to see how many lives had intersected with the Manson Family’s. I can remember we had a babysitter from Nayarit then, and she was very frightened on the night of the murders, or the afternoon when we heard about the murders, and I assured her, “Don’t worry. It has nothing to do with us,” but it did. It had to do with everyone. Then later I was interviewing Linda Kasabian, who was the wheel person — she wasn’t the “wheel man,” she was the “wheel person” — for the LaBianca murder. I can’t remember. Maybe also for Tate. But anyway, the night they did the LaBianca murder, they were driving along Franklin Avenue looking for a place to hit, and that’s where we lived, and we had French windows open, lights blazing all along on the street.

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12 books for dealing with grief, bereavement or loss.

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Joan Didion, author of "The Year of Magical Thinking," speaks at the College of Marin in Kentfield, ... [+] California in February, 1977.

Grief is a profound and complicated experience. The process of grief entails far more than just sadness—it often takes control, and fills us with countless confusing and exasperating emotions. Yet through it all, many people find the most solace in the written word.

Books about loss can be a comforting companion. They offer us unexpected insights and stories—and sometimes even laughter—through the most unimaginably challenging times. Whether it’s a novel that transports you to another world, a memoir that shares the rawness of loss or a self-help guide with practical advice, books on grief can be a powerful means to rediscover life after loss.

Top Books On Grief And Grieving

In this list, I’ve gathered 12 books for bereavement that approach grief from different angles. Each provides a unique perspective on navigating the path toward acceptance and peace. Based on user reviews and therapist recommendations, these books can be a thoughtful gift for a grieving friend or a meaningful addition to your personal post-loss journey.

1. When Breath Becomes Air by Paul Kalanithi

When Breath Becomes Air is a poignant memoir from the late Dr. Paul Kalanithi, a neurosurgeon diagnosed with terminal lung cancer at the age of 36. The 2016 biography offers a candid look at Kalanithi’s journey—from a dedicated surgeon to a patient facing his own mortality—as he grapples with the transition from saving lives to understanding the value of his own.

This book is an ideal read for anyone trying to come to terms with terminal illness—their own or of a loved one. Its raw and introspective narrative can resonate deeply with anyone who has faced loss or is searching for meaning while anticipating grief. You can find the memoir at Penguin Random House .

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Wwe smackdown results winners and grades on may 10 2024, the 8 best trampolines with insights from an industry expert, 2. on grief and grieving by elizabeth kübler-ross & david kessler.

On Grief and Grieving is a seminal work by Elisabeth Kübler-Ross and David Kessler, published in 2005. The book explores the well-known five stages of grief—denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance—providing a framework for understanding the complex emotions that accompany loss.

Through real-life examples and compassionate insights, the authors delve into how these stages manifest and how to navigate them. This book is particularly beneficial for those seeking structure in their grieving process, those who appreciate a more clinical approach to understanding grief or those seeking a guided path through mourning. It can be purchased at Simon & Schuster .

3. Notes On Grief by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Notes on Grief by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie is a bittersweet reflection on loss. The 2021 memoir follows Adichie’s experience with the sudden death of her father, exploring the waves of emotion, memory and deep sense of absence that follow such a significant loss. Through a series of intimate essays, Adichie shares her grief with raw honesty and vulnerability.

This book is an ideal purchase for those who appreciate heartfelt narratives and are seeking comfort from someone who knows and understands the reality of unexpected grief. It can be especially helpful for those looking for a sense of shared experience, and the solace that can come from knowing they’re not alone in their feelings of loss. You can find the memoir at Penguin Random House Canada .

4. The Long Goodbye by Meghan O’Rourke

The Long Goodbye by Meghan O’Rourke is a touching memoir, published in 2011, that explores the deep and complex emotions that accompany the loss of a loved one. O’Rourke reflects on her experience of losing her mother to cancer, the slow unraveling of her life and the process of rebuilding in the aftermath.

The book provides an unrefined account of the pain, confusion and disorientation that often follows the death of a close family member. The Long Goodbye is especially valuable for those coping with long-term illness—either themselves or vicariously—offering a voice that speaks to the drawn-out nature of grief. O’Rourke’s memoir can be found at Penguin Random House .

5. The Grieving Brain: The Surprising Science Of How We Learn From Love And Loss by Mary Frances O’Connor

The Grieving Brain by Mary-Frances O’Connor is an enlightening exploration of the neuroscience behind grief, published in 2022. O’Connor, a renowned neuroscientist and grief expert, delves into the brain’s response to loss and provides a scientific perspective on the grieving process.

She explains how different areas of the brain contribute to the experience of grief, covering topics like why grief can be so overwhelming and how it evolves over time. This novel is ideal for readers seeking insight on why we grieve, and how we can learn to cope with loss from a logical, research-based, neurological standpoint. You can find the book at HarperCollins .

6. The Year Of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion

The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion, a profound memoir published in 2005, is a deeply personal account of grief and loss. Didion explores the sudden death of her husband, writer John Gregory Dunne, and the subsequent confusion and shock that followed.

Through her candid and introspective retelling, Didion delves into the surreal experience of grief, and the struggle to accept reality while yearning for the impossible. This book is ideal for those who have lost a partner or spouse, as it offers a compassionate exploration of the chaotic emotions that often accompany this profound loss. You can find Didion’s memoir at Penguin Random House .

7. A Monster Calls by Patrick Ness

A Monster Calls by Patrick Ness is a compelling and emotionally charged novel. Published in 2011, the story follows a young boy coping with his mother’s terminal illness, who is visited by a monster. Through a series of intense and often unsettling tales, the monster helps him confront his deepest fears and the harsh realities surrounding him.

This book masterfully weaves together elements of fantasy and psychological depth. It’s particularly suited for younger readers and teens dealing with grief, as it helps readers make sense of the complex and unimaginable nature of grief. However, its universal themes and gripping storytelling make it resonant for anyone seeking an empathetic portrayal of the grieving process. You can find the novel on the Walker website.

8. PS, I Love You by Cecelia Ahern

PS, I Love You by Cecelia Ahern is a heartwarming novel that was published in 2004. The story follows a young widow struggling to cope with the sudden loss of her husband. Before his death, he writes a series of letters containing instructions and messages intended to help her navigate her grief. As she reads, she slowly heals, finds hope and learns to live without him by her side.

This book is ideal for those seeking an uplifting approach to grief, with moments of humor and warmth amid sorrow. It is an ideal novel for those who have lost a partner or spouse, or anyone looking for a comforting read that celebrates love even in the face of loss. The novel is available from Hachette .

9. It’s OK That You’re Not OK by Megan Devine

It's OK That You're Not OK by Megan Devine—a grief advocate and psychotherapist—is a compassionate guide to navigating grief, published in 2017. It offers a refreshing perspective on loss, challenging conventional wisdom about how people “should” grieve. She emphasizes that grief is not something to be fixed or rushed, but instead embraced as a natural part of the healing process.

This book is ideal for those who feel external pressure to “move on” quickly, as it validates the diverse emotions that often accompany grief. It creates a safe space to explore the realities of living with loss—without judgment or pressure to conform. You can find the book on the Sounds True website.

10. Bearing The Unbearable: Love, Loss, And The Heartbreaking Path of Grief by Joanne Cacciatore

Bearing the Unbearable by Joanne Cacciatore is a powerful exploration of bereavement, published in 2017. Cacciatore, a leading grief counselor and researcher, delves into the profound pain that comes with losing a loved one, shares personal stories from her own experience and those of her clients, and emphasizes that grief is a natural response to love and should be honored rather than suppressed.

This guide is best suited for those dealing with deep and intense grief, particularly after the loss of a child or a tragic event. It is an ideal read for people seeking empathy and practicality following profound loss. You can find the book at Explore .

11. Grief Is The Thing With Feathers by Max Porter

Grief Is the Thing with Feathers by Max Porter is an innovative and poetic novel published in 2015. It tells the story of a family reeling from the sudden death of their mother, with the central figure being a shape-shifting character who enters their lives to help them navigate the aftermath. The narrative alternates between the perspectives of the grieving father and his two young sons, exploring the confusing and sometimes surreal emotions that accompany grief.

This book is an ideal purchase or gift for those who appreciate experimental narratives and poetic storytelling. It’s especially suited for readers seeking a more abstract and metaphorical exploration of grief, offering an imaginative approach to understanding the process of healing. The novel is available from Faber .

12. It’s Okay To Laugh: (Crying Is Cool Too) by Nora McInerny Purmort

It's Okay to Laugh by Nora McInerny is a heartfelt and humorous memoir published in 2016. McInerny describes her journey through a series of major life events, including the loss of her husband to brain cancer, the miscarriage of her child and the death of her father—all within a short span of time. Despite the heaviness of these experiences, she brings a lighthearted and irreverent approach to her storytelling, balancing grief with moments of humor and warmth.

This book is ideal for those who believe that laughter can be a healing balm, even during loss and grief. McInerny’s honest and relatable voice offers a refreshing perspective on navigating grief with a touch of humor. You can find the memoir at HarperCollins .

Bottom Line

Books can be an unexpected source of comfort and enlightenment during times of grief. These 12 carefully selected books span memoirs, guides and novels, each offering a unique perspective on bereavement. Whether you’re seeking empathy, guidance or a touch of humor, these books can empower you through your journey of healing and remembrance.

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Leslie Jamison's new memoir Splinters examines motherhood and the end of her marriage

Leslie Jamison sits in a pink chair looking at the camera. She has one arm resting on the seat back.

Leslie Jamison has been reading a lot of Helen Garner lately.

The American writer and associate professor at Columbia University is writing the introduction to Garner's three-volume collection of diaries ahead of their release in the US next year.

"I'm a huge Helen Garner fan, but I'm just reading her diaries for the first time," says Jamison, who visits Australia next week as part of Melbourne Writers Festival.

"One of the things that I love in her diaries is these moments where she reckons with the anxiety that telling more personal or domestic stories doesn't matter as much."

It's an anxiety Jamison also grapples with, as a woman writing from her personal experience — whether of heart surgery and abortion in her bestselling debut essay collection The Empathy Exams; her alcoholism and recovery in first memoir The Recovering; or the tiny moments of wonder and drudgery of being a mother to a newborn in her raw new memoir Splinters, which comes out in Australia next week.

A book cover for Splinters by Leslie Jamison. It is yellow and features a photographer of the author torn in two.

"The same person who wrote The Children's Bach wrote This House of Grief," Jamison continues, citing Garner's interior second novel about messy interpersonal relationships, and her non-fiction book about the trial of Robert Farquharson , who murdered his children by driving into a dam in 2005.

"One can pay attention to the everyday and the ordinary and find profound truth there, and also pay attention to the extraordinary or the dramatic or the newsworthy and find a great truth there. These zones of interest or insight aren't actually in opposition."

Jamison, who has been compared to Joan Didion and Susan Sontag, similarly finds profound truth in both the everyday and the extraordinary.

She approaches her subjects — who range from fans of the "world's loneliest whale" to people suffering from a medically disputed skin condition, to herself, her friends, lovers and family – with what feels like radical empathy . A tattoo on Jamison's arm , written in Latin, translates to: "I am human: nothing human is alien to me."

Kindred books

Jamison first came across Garner when a friend recommended she read the Australian author's 1977 semi-autobiographical "grunge lit" debut novel Monkey Grip, while she was writing Splinters.

In Monkey Grip, a fictionalised Garner raises her daughter in the bohemian share houses of 70s Melbourne, at the same time as she tries to extricate herself from an increasingly destructive relationship with a heroin addict.

Author Helen Garner, pictured looking solemnly at the camera against a dark background.

In Splinters, Jamison charts her early experiences of motherhood, at the same time as her marriage is ending. But it's not only a memoir of motherhood and romantic relationships as Jamison starts dating again: It's also a memoir about being an artist and art's place in our lives, friendships between women, and teaching.

"I do think of it [Monkey Grip] as a kind of kindred book [to Splinters]. It's almost like meeting a friend later in life who you feel such a strong soul communion with," Jamison says.

The books ask similar questions, she explains: "How is one trying to be a mother and an artist? How does a work of literature try to find meaning and great profundity in many, many ordinary moments of living?

"What does the collision look like between the deep hungers for romantic partnership and love and the different kind of love that attaches itself to a child? How can romantic love hold that desire to save somebody?"

Dislodging the cocktail-party version of her divorce

In Splinters, the person Jamison realises she is not able to "save" is her then-husband and the father of her daughter, the writer Charles Bock. Bock's first wife died in 2011, of leukaemia, an experience Bock drew upon for his second novel Alice & Oliver.

Jamison met Bock in 2014, the year she published The Empathy Exams. Six months later, the couple eloped to marry at a chapel in Las Vegas, and they had their daughter, Ione Bird, in 2018, before splitting up in 2019.

A book cover for The Empathy Exams by Leslie Jamison. It features a newsprint image of the top half of a woman's face.

Jamison soon started taking notes for Splinters, while living in a sublet next to a fire station with her daughter.

She wasn't interested in writing an autopsy – or the "cocktail-party version" — of the story of her marriage.

"I'm always fighting the impulse to tell a reductive version of the story that maybe leans so hard into what was hard that it forgets what was good, or leans so hard into what's good that it forgets about what's hard," she says.

"I feel like the truth always lives in letting it be all the ways at once."

Instead, Jamison wrote about falling in love with Bock; about his wit, loyalty, laugh and sharp gaze; as well as about his anger; and the distance in their relationship in the first year of their daughter's life.

"All the ways at once" sums up Splinters: the Jamison depicted is at once a mother, an artist, a partner, an ex, a teacher, a friend, and asks how it's possible to be all those things at the same time, even when they're in opposition to each other.

'Not just my own fodder'

But Jamison is not only writing about herself. Writing about other people — whether in essays that mix reportage and personal stories or in works of memoir — has forced the writer to wrestle with how she portrays other people on the page.

A book cover for Make It Scream, Make It Burn by Leslie Jamison. It is yellow and features a drawing of a brown-haired woman.

She usually shares her writing with the people depicted well before publication, to listen and make changes based on their feedback.

"I believe that practice is what's right for me, and what I believe in, and how I live with what I do," she says.

But it's knottier when it comes to representing her own daughter, who won't be able to have those conversations with her mother for many years.

Jamison navigated the ethical questions by only writing about her daughter up until the age of two (Ione Bird is now six years old).

"The fact that she was young, so young, made it feel less of an invasion of a sort of developed human's life and privacy," Jamison explains.

But she also wanted her daughter to be a very distinct character in the book.

"Before I became a parent, I hadn't spent that much time around babies and very small children," she says.

"I just did not understand the extent to which babies and toddlers have very distinct and actually quite fascinating personalities and subjectivities at very young ages."

While she doesn't rule out writing about motherhood again, Jamison plans to approach writing about her daughter in the future carefully.

"Writing about her over the remaining stretch of her childhood is something that I think I will do much more sparingly and with a great deal of respect for her privacy and for her experiences being hers and not just my own fodder," she says.

"Perhaps some of the writing about her as a child, I'll have to hold onto it until she and I can go through [it together] too. And I imagine I'll probably grant her a bit more veto power than I do to some of the other folks in my life."

Not another Didion

Jamison is part of a tradition of women writers grappling with how to be an artist and a mother at the same time.

A book cover for The Recovering by Leslie Jamison. It features a glass of hard liquor, with a typewriter in it.

She says she's honoured to be likened to her influences, including Joan Didion, but is all too aware of the differences in their writing.

"I think Didion's voice has a kind of coldness or a chill or an aloofness to it, but my voice strives for something close to the opposite," she explains.

Jamison's writing — especially in Splinters — can instead be compared to that of contemporaries who also apply an artist's gaze to the experience of motherhood: from Kate Zambreno (To Write as If Already Dead) to Sheila Heti (Motherhood) and Maggie Nelson (The Argonauts).

But, like domestic life, motherhood is often dismissed as a subject for literary non-fiction.

"There's so much of a sense of, 'well, why do you think your life matters so much? Why do you think your trauma is so extraordinary?' As if one has to think one's trauma is extraordinary in order to write about one's life," she says.

"Just because somebody is interested in themselves doesn't mean they're not interested in the world.

"In my own experience, of being a human among humans, it's often the people who are most curious about themselves who are actually also most genuinely curious about other people."

She says that literary and experimental works exploring motherhood — like that of Jamison and her peers — are helping to change these ideas.

"To bring those traits of writing that we associate with the literary to the zone of motherhood has done a lot of work to position motherhood really where it should always have been: a zone of literary concern, just like any other aspect of experience."

Splinters by Leslie Jamison is published by Allen & Unwin.

Melbourne Writers Festival runs from May 6–12.

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Frank Bruni

The Radical Transparency of Joan Didion

By Frank Bruni

Mr. Bruni is a contributing Opinion writer who was on the staff of The Times for more than 25 years.

Joan Didion had migraines, excruciating ones, which descended on her as often as once a week, leaving her “almost unconscious with pain” and forcing her to shut down and shut out the world until, like a terrifying storm, they passed. We’re aware of the details because she insisted that we be. She laid them out in an essay published in 1968, making certain that we understood her vulnerability.

In another essay , she clued us into how innocent she was when she arrived in Manhattan in her 20s and how jaded she was when, years later, she returned to California, “the Golden State,” which she appraised through a filter not of sunshine but of dread. The Santa Ana winds were always in the offing. The earth could quake at any moment.

And in yet another essay, she confessed the strains and uncertainty of her marriage. “I am sitting in a high-ceilinged room in the Royal Hawaiian Hotel in Honolulu watching the long translucent curtains billow in the trade wind and trying to put my life back together,” she reported. Her husband, John Gregory Dunne, was with her. “I avoid his eyes,” she wrote. “We are here on this island in the middle of the Pacific in lieu of filing for divorce.”

Didion, who died on Thursday , at the age of 87, from complications related to Parkinson’s disease, was a model and trailblazer in many ways. She belonged, in some measure, to the school of New Journalism, which integrated techniques associated with fiction into nonfiction. She had an eye for detail that was a kind of X-ray vision. She had an ear for absurdity no less acute. And her sentences — dear Lord, her sentences! She was, as I noted in a tribute to her in 2017 , a sorceress of syntax, with a cadence to her words and a music to her paragraphs that were utterly spellbinding.

But she also stood out — and had enormous impact — for something else: She conceded her subjectivity. Traced her blind spots. Showed her hand. Instead of mimicking the swagger and voice-of-God authority that many other journalists affected, she stipulated — sometimes as the very subject of an essay, other times in its margins — to what a peculiar narrator she could be. She cataloged her own oddities, and she did so not as an exercise in narcissism but as an act of candor.

In the news business over recent years, there has been significant discussion about whether any one writer can be wholly objective and neutral, whether it’s wise to assert (or, perhaps, pretend) as much, whether the idea that a particular account could have been produced in its exact form by any number of different reporters is patently false on its face. Some outlets now give their audiences more information about the people bringing them the news or permit those journalists to create profiles on social media that are a kind of piecemeal, steadily accruing autobiography. That’s not intended as a surrender to subjectivity. It’s meant as transparency.

Well, Didion was there long ago. Her signature essays from the 1960s and 1970s — which, for the true Didion cultist, mattered infinitely more than her novels or than anything else until her grief memoir, “ The Year of Magical Thinking ,” in 2005 — were radically transparent. That’s not to say that she didn’t selectively edit the aspects of her life that she presented for public consumption, hold on to secrets, turn herself into a character of her choosing. Every writer does that. Every human does that.

But Didion had the boldness and brilliance to realize, ahead of her time, that she bolstered her credibility and cemented her bond with readers if she volunteered that her sensibilities invariably steered her in certain directions and circumscribed her observations. So she owned up to her prejudices and parameters. She copped to her leanings and limits.

In that dispatch from Hawaii, after mentioning the prospect of divorce, she added: “I tell you this not as aimless revelation but because I want you to know, as you read me, precisely who I am and where I am and what is on my mind. I want you to understand exactly what you are getting: You are getting a woman who for some time now has felt radically separated from most of the ideas that seem to interest other people. You are getting a woman who somewhere along the line misplaced whatever slight faith she ever had in the social contract, in the meliorative principle, in the whole grand pattern of human endeavor.”

That essay appears in “The White Album,” a collection that was published in 1979. Another collection, “Slouching Towards Bethlehem,” was published in 1968, and in the preface to it, she delineated characteristics that made her ill suited for journalism. She was “bad at interviewing people,” she wrote. She didn’t like making telephone calls.

“My only advantage as a reporter,” she continued, “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 best interests. And it always does. That is one last thing to remember: Writers are always selling somebody out. ”

She gave her readers notice of that and, in other essays, of her disinclination to find patterns where she was supposed to and of her estrangement from the idealism and protests of the very decade that she was most famous for covering. “If I could believe that going to a barricade would affect man’s fate in the slightest I would go to that barricade, and quite often I wish that I could, but it would be less than honest to say that I expect to happen upon such a happy ending,” she wrote in the essay “On the Morning After the Sixties,” which appears in “The White Album.” She was saying that she was an imperfect witness. Which, of course, made her a perfect one.

Just hours before I got the news that Didion had died, I had typed her name into my laptop. I was constructing the syllabus for a course in first-person writing that I’ll be teaching at Duke University this spring, so I was compiling material for my students to read. Two of Didion’s essays from “Slouching Towards Bethlehem” — “Goodbye to All That” and “On Self-Respect” — were my first and second items on that list.

That’s because they’re gorgeous, with phrases and flourishes that represent the highest level of prose. It’s because they demonstrate the manner in which a writer can universalize the personal, wringing a collective moral from an individual experience.

But it’s also because of how she pokes fun — and even gapes — at herself, encouraging readers not so much to follow her lead as to marvel at how lost she can get. It’s a cunning invitation. Didion grasped something essential about not just journalism but life: The most trustworthy and likable guides are the ones who occasionally ask others for directions.

Frank Bruni ( @FrankBruni ) is a professor of public policy at Duke University, the author of the forthcoming book “The Beauty of Dusk,” and a contributing Opinion writer. He writes a weekly email newsletter and can be found on Twitter , Instagram and Facebook . @ FrankBruni • Facebook

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Joan Didion’s Longtime Upper East Side Apartment Sells for $5.4 Million

By Katie Schultz

Joan Didion seated on the back of cream sofa in her apartment looking out window lined with glass lamps builtin...

Literary icon Joan Didion’s Upper East Side apartment has officially sold, according to the New York Post . The 1928-built co-op unit was listed in January 2023 for $7.5 million, about a year after the famed writer died inside the home at the age of 87. It underwent a couple of generous price cuts before entering into contract in January of this year. Last week, the dwelling finally changed hands in a $5.4 million deal.

Didion and her husband, the writer John Gregory Dunne, bought the four-bedroom, five-bathroom abode in 1988 and used it as their primary residence. The Slouching Towards Bethlehem author was an active member of the co-op board during her 33-year tenancy in the building. Dunne died in the roughly 3,600-square-foot home in 2003.

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The residence is located just a block from Central Park in the neighborhood of Lenox Hill. It offers picturesque window views of the nearby Gothic Revival -style St. James Church. A split-level living and dining area features herringbone floors and a wet bar. The space is warmed by a wood-burning fireplace flanked by pale blue built-in shelving.

Other highlights include a cozy library den, a home office , and an eat-in kitchen with vintage wooden cabinetry and a high-end double range. A small staff wing connects to the kitchen through a butler’s pantry.

As chef Joshua Weissman welcomes AD into his Austin home in the latest episode of Open Door, he jokes that he doesn’t actually live in a kitchen.

In 2022, an auction of Didion’s belongings grossed nearly $2 million. Among the most iconic pieces in the 224-item catalog were the writer’s Celine sunglasses, which fetched $27,000. A Victorian-style rattan peacock chair, which Didion was photographed sitting in, sold for $28,000.

Joan Didion in rattan peacock chair in her Upper East Side apartment

Didion seated on her rattan peacock chair in her Upper East side apartment.

The buyer of the Year of Magical Thinking memoirist’s New York City pad is not publicly known. Whoever they are, they nabbed the final—and perhaps most intimate—piece of the legend’s estate.

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Remembering essayist Joan Didion, a keen observer of American culture

What Joan Didion Saw

New Yorker Favorites

6 Essays By Joan Didion You Should Know

‘John Wayne: A Love Song’

‘On Self Respect’

‘The Santa Ana’

‘Goodbye to All That’

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Places to Stay

The Best Beach Hotels to Book in California, USA

Guides & Tips

The Best Accessible and Wheelchair-Friendly Hotels to Book in California

The Best Vacation Villas to Rent in California

The Best Hotels to Book in Calistoga, California

A Solo Traveler's Guide to California

The Best Hotels in Santa Maria, California

See & Do

The Best Hotels With Suites to Book in San Francisco

Not-to-miss activities in San Luis Obispo County

The Best Family-Friendly Hotels to Book in San Diego, California

Joan Didion on Self-Respect

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“To Be A Writer, You Must Write”: How Joan Didion Became Joan Didion

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Enduring Epics: Emily Wilson and Madeline Miller on Breathing New Life Into Ancient Classics

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Become a Lit Hub Supporting Member : Because Books Matter

Joan Didion’s best books, from essays to fiction

Here are the best books by Joan Didion:

'Blue Nights' (2011)

'Slouching Towards Bethlehem' (1968)

'The White Album' (1979)

'Play it as it Lays' (1970)

'Miami' (1987)

Joan Didion Was Our Bard of Disenchantment

JOAN DIDION

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1934–2021

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THE DOCUMENTARY

PBS NEWSHOUR

Joan Didion, ‘Goodbye to All That’ and the struggle to see yourself clearly

Joan Didion, masterful essayist, novelist and screenwriter, dies at 87

Column: Joan Didion, California and the enduring power of ‘our special history’

Remembering Joan Didion: A look back at her writing, interviews and more

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