Joan Didion (1934–2021) was an American novelist, essayist, and memoirist. An unsparing observer of American culture, she is celebrated for her lucid prose style and incisive portrayals of social unrest and psychological fragmentation.
Born in Sacramento, California, Didion graduated from the University of California at Berkeley. She was a copywriter and an editor of Vogue 1956–63. Her essays were featured in such magazines as the Saturday Evening Post, Esquire, and the National Review, and published as Slouching Towards Bethlehem (1968,) The White Album (1979,) and After Henry (1992.)
Didion’s novels depict contemporary social tensions in a terse style. Run River (1963) was her first novel, but she is well-known for A Book of Common Prayer (1977,) a tale of personal and political tragedy in a fictional banana republic. Her other works include the novels Democracy (1984) and The Last Thing He Wanted (1996,) and non-fiction such as Salvador (1983) and Miami (1987.)
Following the death of her husband, Didion wrote The Year of Magical Thinking (2005,) in which she recounted their marriage and mourned his loss. The memoir won a National Book Award, and Didion adapted it for the stage in 2007. She again wrote about tragedy and loss in Blue Nights (2011,) a memoir that followed the death of her daughter.
Didion’s life and career are the focus of the documentary Joan Didion: The Center Will Not Hold (2017.)
More: Wikipedia • READ: Works by Joan Didion
The secret point of money and power in America is neither the things that money can buy nor power for power’s sake… but absolute personal freedom, mobility, privacy. It is the instinct which drove America to the Pacific, all through the nineteenth century, the desire to be able to find a restaurant open in case you want a sandwich, to be a free agent, live by one’s own rules.
—Joan Didion
Topics: Wealth
We all have the same dreams.
—Joan Didion
Topics: Teamwork
Of course great hotels have always been social ideas, flawless mirrors to the particular societies they service.
—Joan Didion
Topics: Travel
The secret point of money and power in America is neither the things that money can buy nor power for power’s sake but absolute personal freedom, mobility, privacy.
—Joan Didion
Topics: Wealth
Grammar is a piano I play by ear. All I know about grammar is its power.
—Joan Didion
We forget all too soon the things we thought we could never forget. We forget the loves and the betrayals alike, forget what we whispered and what we screamed, forget who we were.
—Joan Didion
Topics: Memory
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.
—Joan Didion
Topics: Assurance, Respect, Confidence, Self-respect, Self Respect
Many people I know in Los Angeles believe that the Sixties ended abruptly on August 9, 1969, ended at the exact moment when word of the murders on Cielo Drive traveled like brushfire through the community, and in a sense this is true. The tension broke that day. The paranoia was fulfilled.
—Joan Didion
Topics: Twentieth Century
There is one last thing to remember: writers are always selling somebody out.
—Joan Didion
Topics: Authors & Writing, Writers, Writing
The willingness to accept responsibility for one’s own life is the source from which self-respect springs.
—Joan Didion
Topics: Character, Self-respect, Acceptance, Responsibility
To cure jealousy is to see it for what it is, a dissatisfaction with self, an impossible claim that one should be at once Rose Bowl princess, medieval scholar, Saint Joan, Milly Theale, Temple Drake, Eleanor of Aquitaine, one
—Joan Didion
Topics: Jealousy
Americans are uneasy with their possessions, guilty about power, all of which is difficult for Europeans to perceive because they are themselves so truly materialistic, so versed in the uses of power.
—Joan Didion
Topics: Possessions, Property
The fancy that extraterrestrial life is by definition of a higher order than our own is one that soothes all children, and many writers.
—Joan Didion
Topics: Science Fiction
We are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not. Otherwise they turn up unannounced and surprise us, come hammering on the mind’s door at 4am of a bad night and demand to know who deserted them, who betrayed them, who is going to make amends. We forget all too soon the things we thought we could never forget.
—Joan Didion
Topics: Past, The Past, Reflection
There is in Hollywood, as in all cultures in which gambling is the central activity, a lowered sexual energy, an inability to devote more than token attention to the preoccupations of the society outside. The action is everything, more consuming than sex, more immediate than politics; more important always than the acquisition of money, which is never, for the gambler, the true point of the exercise.
—Joan Didion
Topics: Hollywood
It is impossible to think of Howard Hughes without seeing the apparently bottomless gulf between what we say we want and what we do want, between what we officially admire and secretly desire, between, in the largest sense, the people we marry and the people we love. In a nation which increasingly appears to prize social virtues, Howard Hughes remains not merely antisocial but grandly, brilliantly, surpassingly, asocial. He is the last private man, the dream we no longer admit.
—Joan Didion
Topics: Wealth
A place belongs forever to whoever claims it hardest, remembers it most obsessively, wrenches it from itself, shapes it, renders it, loves it so radically that he remakes it in his own image.
—Joan Didion
Topics: Travel
We were that generation called “silent,” but we were silent neither, as some thought, because we shared the period’s official optimism nor, as others thought, because we feared its official repression. We were silent because the exhilaration of social action seemed to many of us just one more way of escaping the personal, of masking for a while that dread of the meaningless which was man’s fate.
—Joan Didion
Topics: Twentieth Century
A pool is, for many of us in the West, a symbol not of affluence but of order, of control over the uncontrollable. A pool is water, made available and useful, and is, as such, infinitely soothing to the western eye.
—Joan Didion
Topics: Water
To free us from the expectations of others, to give us back to ourselves—there lies the great, singular power of self-respect.
—Joan Didion
When we start deceiving ourselves into thinking not that we want something or need something, not that it is a pragmatic necessity for us to have it, but that it is a moral imperative that we have it, then is when we join the fashionable madmen, and then is when the thin whine of hysteria is heard in the land, and then is when we are in bad trouble.
—Joan Didion
Topics: Morality, Morals
To cure jealousy is to see it for what it is, a dissatisfaction with self.
—Joan Didion
Topics: Jealousy, Envy
Wondering Whom to Read Next?
Cynthia Ozick American Novelist, Essayist
Annie Dillard American Writer
Isabel Allende Chilean Novelist
Joyce Carol Oates American Novelist
Maxine Hong Kingston American Novelist, Memoirist
Joyce Maynard American Novelist
Anne Lamott American Novelist
Norman Mailer American Novelist, Journalist
Alice Walker American Novelist, Activist
Katherine Anne Porter American Writer