R.I.P. Joan Didion, author, essayist, literary giant

Joan Didion, the master of melancholy novels, essays, and screenplays, has died. Her works, including Play It As It Lays, The Year Of Magical Thinking, and Slouching Toward Bethlehem, inspired generations of readers and spoke to a feeling of sadness and disappointment so profound it spawned an archetype: The Didion Woman. An executive at Didion’s publisher, Knopf, confirmed her death, citing Parkinson’s disease as the cause. She was 87.

It’s impossible to extricate Didion from the state from which she hails: California. Her family descended from a group of frontier settlers who exited the Donner Party before they became infamous. It was a curiously appropriate lineage that incepted a tinge of pensive irony that readers felt throughout her career. Didion’s birth wasn’t so dramatic. She was born in Sacramento, California, to Frank, an Army finance officer, and Eduene (née Jerrett) Didion in 1934. Her father’s work moved the family across the states before landing back in Sacramento after World War II.

Didion learned to write by deconstructing and dissecting Ernest Hemingway as a teen, internalizing his incisive and deeply felt eye for loneliness. She said Hemingway taught her to type and how sentences work by copying chapters. Hemingway’s sentences, she said, “were so simple, but you came away from a string of them with this overwhelming feeling of what he had in mind for you to feel.”

Throughout her early career, Didion climbed the ladder of the literary world. As a student at UC Berkeley, in 1956, she won Vogue magazine’s Prix de Paris, a writing contest that offered her a trip to Paris. She turned it down, opting to work for the magazine as a promotional copywriter, crafting precise eight-line captions.

She worked at Vogue in New York City for seven years, eventually graduating to associate features writer, but her heart was in California. During this time, she experienced “a yearning for her home so raw” that she wrote herself a “California river.” The result of her longing was her first novel, Run, River, published in 1963.

Run, River was both a modern depiction of a family dissolving and a critical history of California, the end of a lineage that began with the pioneers. The weariness of Didion’s prose spoke from a place of sadness even when exalting the beauty and splendor of the natural world. She would carry this sense of ironic, complicated wonder to her first work of nonfiction, Slouching Towards Bethlehem (1968), a collection of her previously published magazine essays about, what else, California.

Helping her on River was friend John Gregory Dunne, whose relationship with Didion would turn romantic. The couple married in 1964, adopting their daughter, Quintana Roo Dunne, into the family two years later.

Dunne and Didion’s collaboration deepened throughout the 1960s. By 1970, they had completed their first screenplay, The Panic In Needle Park, telling of a pair of heroin addicts from Manhattan’s Upper West Side. The film would give Al Pacino his first lead role and allow Didion and Dunne to continue scripting.

Their next screenplay, an adaptation of Didion’s second novel, Play It As It Lays, would arrive in 1972. The pair struck gold in 1976 with their third screenplay, a remake of A Star Is Born, which would star Barbara Streisand and Kris Kristofferson. The film was a smash hit and earned four Oscar nominations.

Didion’s success would carry her through the ‘80s and ‘90s. During that time, she produced a series of revolutionary texts that included novels, such as Democracy and The Last Thing He Wanted, and nonfiction, including After Henry, a book of essays that featured a famous work about the wrongful conviction Central Park Five. But, ever the truth-teller, the author didn’t delude herself into thinking her opinion on the matter had any impact on the case. Earlier this year, she told Time, “However I felt didn’t get me or them anywhere.”

At the start of the 2000s, tragedy punctured Didion’s life repeatedly, first with her husband’s death in 2003 and next, with the death of her daughter, Quintana Roo, due to pancreatitis and septic shock, in 2005. The experience inspired Didion to write The Year Of Magical Thinking, which became a one-woman Broadway hit starring Vanessa Redgrave.

Didion’s life inspired a legion of admirers, readers, and fans. Her nephew, actor Griffin Dunne, was one of them, and he directed the 2017 Netflix documentary Joan Didion: The Center Will Not Hold. The A.V. Club named the film one of the best of the year. “A searing sense of honesty imbues The Center Will Not Hold,” we wrote in 2017, “with a magnetism as powerful as the voice at its center.”

Through her work, Didion uncovered the sadness that permeates all of American culture, a deep-seated resignation that no matter how comfortable one is, it comes on the back of incredible grief, tragedy, and malaise. Still, she searched to find the core of that feeling, knowing full well that the truth of loss could never be entirely understood. Surely, facing Didion’s own death, her readers could relate. As she wrote of her husband’s death in Year Of Magical Thinking:

I am a writer. Imagining what someone would say or do comes to me as naturally as breathing. Yet on each occasion these pleas for his presence served only to reinforce my awareness of the final silence that separated us. Any answer he gave could exist only in my imagination, my edit. For me to imagine what he could say only in my edit would seem obscene, a violation. I could no more know what he would say about UCLA and the trach than I could know whether he meant to leave the “to” out of the sentence about J.J. McClure and Teresa Kean and the tornado. We imagined we knew everything the other thought, even when we did not necessarily want to know it, but in fact, I have come to see, we knew not the smallest fraction of what there was to know.