Joan Didion, Legendary American Writer, Dead at 87

New York Post ^ | RSS FEED | Andrew Court

[nickcarraway]

Joan Didion has died at the age of 87, her publisher has confirmed.

The legendary essayist, novelist and screenwriter — who had long been revered as one of America’s pre-eminent writers — passed away at her Manhattan home Thursday morning.

“We are deeply saddened to report that Joan Didion died earlier this morning at her home in New York due to complications from Parkinson’s disease,” Penguin Random House/Knopf said in a statement.

[Clemenza]

She did. Ditto Gary Wills.

[SE Mom]

Wow. Well, Godspeed Joan. She wrote some brilliant things early on- I think she lurched left in later years. Talebted writer, regardless.

[Albion Wilde]

She also critiqued the way politics was reported by American journalists, writing in her 1988 essay “Insider Baseball” that members of the media were “a self-created and self-referring class, a new kind of managerial elite” that “tend to speak of the world not necessarily as it is but as they want people out there to believe it is.”

Forward-thinking.

[x]

I liked her non-fiction essays. Her work was Exhibit A for people still reading but not bothering with novels anymore. She did go through a major change from Goldwater girl to NYRB heartthrob. Her husband probably had something to do with it, but I think it was mostly just living in NYC and LA.

Didion was published in National Review early on. Buckley liked people who could write and when it came to the back of the magazine book reviews and such, he wasn't too picky about their politics. WFB gave ultra-lefty John Leonard a job early on, and he discovered David Brooks.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/12/joan-didion-the-national-review-years/

The Reagans rubbed her the wrong way, but I suspect it wasn't that they were that different from what she was, but that people around her despised them and eventually she came to share the feeling. She came to be really cynical about America and about California. That's understandable in literary circles, but it was a pity. What she came to believe wasn't any less mythic than what she came to reject.

[x]

Sad that neither her husband nor her daughter survived her.

Her husband died in December, around the holidays, and her daughter was sick then, too. I guess she couldn't take another one. Her husband's family used to think of themselves as the Kennedys of Connecticut. That's asking for trouble. Her brother-in-law Dominick Dunne also had his share of tragedies and secrets too.

[fieldmarshaldj]

RIP.

[hinckley buzzard]

If you want to know about the craziness of California in the 60’s I recommend Tom Wolfe: Pumphouse Gang, Kandy-Kolored Tangerine Flake Streamline Baby, Electric KoolAid Acid Test. Might as well go for the real thing.

[Rummyfan]

I did enjoy The White Album. RIP Joan Didion.

[Veto!]

Indeed. I loved her early works, Slouching Toward Bethlehem was xlnt. I actually drove up to her house in Malibu after it was published and knocked on the door.

Nobody answered.

[who_would_fardels_bear]

Tom Wolfe was indeed the real deal, but so was Didion, at least in her early years. I'm not a big fan of completely shoving people down the Memory Hole because they moved left.

Peggy Noonan wrote some great speeches for Reagan. Buckley discovered Joe Sobran and D. Keith Mano. Even George Will did some good work decades before suffering TDS.

I will always remember Didion fondly for her poetic take on the last golden flickerings of the California Dream.

[who_would_fardels_bear]

I was a teenager then making extra money doing lawn work. Later when I discovered her I wished I had rode my bike out there and offered to do her yard work.

[Veto!]

LOL.