Joan Didion (b.1934) is an American novelist, essayist, and memoirist 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 have been 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
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: Morals, Morality
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
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
Anne Lamott American Novelist
Joyce Maynard American Novelist
Norman Mailer American Novelist, Journalist
Alice Walker American Novelist, Activist
Katherine Anne Porter American Writer