Peerless prose stylist tackled politics and personal loss
NEW YORK — Joan Didion, the author and essayist whose precise social and personal commentary in such classics as The White Album and The Year of Magical Thinking made her a uniquely clear-eyed critic of turbulent times, has died. She was 87.
Didion died from complications from Parkinson’s disease, her publisher, Penguin Random House, said Thursday. The company said: “Didion was one of the [United States’] most trenchant writers and astute observers. Her bestselling works of fiction, commentary and memoir have received numerous honours and are considered modern classics.”
Along with Tom Wolfe, Nora Ephron and Gay Talese, Didion reigned in the pantheon of “New Journalists” who emerged in the 1960s and wedded literary style to non-fiction reporting. Tiny and frail even as a young woman, with large, sad eyes often hidden behind sunglasses and a soft, deliberate style of speaking, she was a novelist, playwright and essayist who once observed 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.” Or, as she more famously put it: “Writers are always selling somebody out.”
Didion received a National Humanities Medal in 2012, when she was praised for devoting “her life to noticing things other people strive not to see.” For decades, she had engaged in the cool and ruthless dissection of politics and culture, and was noted for her distrust of official stories.
Slouching Towards Bethlehem, The White Album and other books became essential collections of literary journalism, with notable writings including her takedown of Hollywood politics in Good Citizens and a prophetic dissent against the consensus that in 1989 five young Black and Latino men had raped a white jogger in Central Park (the men’s convictions were later overturned).
Didion was equally unsparing about her own struggles. In her 30s, she was found to have multiple sclerosis and around the same time suffered a breakdown. In her 70s, she reported on personal tragedy in the heartbreaking 2005 work, The Year of Magical Thinking, formed out of the chaos of grief that followed the death of her husband and writing partner, John Gregory Dunne. Didion adapted it as a one-woman Broadway play that starred Vanessa Redgrave.
In 2003, Dunne had collapsed at their table and died of a heart attack as their adopted daughter, Quintana Roo Dunne Michael, was gravely ill in hospital. The memoir was a bestseller and a near-instant standard, the kind of work people would instinctively reach for after losing a loved one.
Quintana Roo died in 2005 at 39 of acute pancreatitis. Didion wrote of her daughter’s death in the 2011 publication Blue Nights.