After winning an essay contest sponsored by Vogue straight out of college, Joan Didion packed up her life in California and headed to New York City, where she would write for the magazine for the next seven years. This move launched a prolific career that would span six decades, and was the first of many moves back and forth between the nation’s cultural capitals.
Didion wrote dozens of essays, mostly exploring the frenetic culture of 1960s California. Her straightforward journalistic voice, which launched New Journalism, transferred over to her fiction works as well. Her writing posed a constant barrage of questions, investigating the sociopolitical and cultural climates of America with the type of humility that never expected a direct answer. She was often labeled “The Voice of America,” though mostly by those whose “America” was shaped an awful lot like California or New York.
She was a disciplined and deliberate writer, taking inspiration from monotony and tragedy in equal measure. It was also a vocation in which she would never be content to rest on her laurels; despite decades of praise and prizes, she approached each essay, novel, and screenplay with the same careful consideration. “To shift the structure of a sentence alters the meaning of that sentence as definitely and inflexibly as the position of a camera alters the meaning of the object photographed,” noted Didion. As a teenager, Didion would type out Hemingway’s sentences to “see how they worked.”
Following the death of her husband and their daughter’s illness, Didion penned one of her most famous works, “The Year of Magical Thinking.” It is a cathartic walk through grief, but one gets the sense she’s investigating it as she goes, tapping into her journalistic roots to make sense of the world falling apart around her through the same subjectivity with which she explored Hollywood and counterculture 50 years before.
Didion passed away in her Manhattan home two days before Christmas following a long battle with Parkinson’s disease.