Joan Didion, the revered author and essayist whose precise social and personal commentary made her a uniquely clear-eyed critic of turbulent times, has died.
Portrait of American author Joan Didion in Berkeley, Calif., April 1981. — Joan Didion, the revered 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.
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 nonfiction reporting.
Dunne had collapsed in 2003 at their table and died of a heart attack even as their daughter, Quintana Roo Dunne Michael, was gravely ill in a hospital. The memoir was a best-seller and a near-instant standard, the kind of work people would instinctively reach for after losing a loved one. Didion said she thought of the work as a testament of a specific time; tragically, “Magical Thinking” became dated shortly after it was published.
Didion’s subjects also included earthquakes, movie stars and Cuban exiles, but common themes emerged: the need to impose order where order doesn’t exist, the gap between accepted wisdom and real life, the way people deceive themselves — and others — into believing the world can be explained in a straight, narrative line.
Didion prided herself on being an outsider, more comfortable with gas station attendants than with celebrities. But she and her husband, whose brother was the author-journalist Dominick Dunne, were well placed in high society. In California, they socialized with Warren Beatty and Steven Spielberg among others and a young Harrison Ford worked as a carpenter on their house.
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