Joan Didion Books Left An Indelible Mark On Literary Journalism

Joan Didion, the eminent journalist, author and documenter of contemporary America, has died from Parkinson’s at 87. The cause of death was Parkinson’s disease, according to Paul Bogaards, an executive at Didion’s publisher Knopf. 

Known for her pioneering blend of the personal and the political in her journalism and essays, Didion became a household name with her writing on US society that was collected in books including Slouching Towards Bethlehem and The White Album

The Sacramento, California native, Joan Didion who graduated from the University of California, Berkeley with a Bachelor of Arts degree in English in 1956, began her career with Vogue after winning the “Prix de Paris” essay contest sponsored by the magazine in her senior year. 

She started off as a promotional copywriter before becoming an associate feature editor.

Best Joan Didion Books

The Year of Magical Thinking (2005) (View On Amazon)

Described as a classic book about mourning and one of the most intimate looks into the life of Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking is a memoir that recounts the year following the death of the writer’s husband, John Gregory Dunne. The book received rave reviews and won the 2005 National Book Award for Nonfiction. 

It was further a finalist for both the Pulitzer Prize for Biography/Autobiography and the National Book Critics Circle Award.

Quotes from the book

• I did not always think he was right nor did he always think I was right but we were each the person the other trusted. – The Year of Magical Thinking (2005)

• Life changes fast. Life changes in the instant. You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends. – The Year of Magical Thinking (2005), which explores grief following the death of her husband

South and West (2017) (View On Amazon)

Fans of Joan Didion know that the writer has kept her life in notebooks of observations, overheard dialogue, interviews, drafts of essays and articles. 

To put together this non-fiction book, she opens her notebook to recount a road trip that she and her husband, John Gregory Dunne, took through the Southeastern United States; Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama in the 1970s.

Quotes from the book

• In the South, they are convinced that they have bloodied their place with history. In the West we do not believe that anything we do can bloody the land, or change it, or touch it.― South and West (2017)
• The devastation along the Gulf had an inevitability about it: the coast was reverting to its natural state. ― South and West (2017)

Slouching Towards Bethlehem (1968) (View On Amazon)

Slouching Towards Bethlehem is the first non-fiction book written by Joan Didion. It features a collection of essays about the writer’s experiences in California during the 1960s. These experiences include meeting a 5-year-old girl whose mother always gave LSD and a neglected young boy who nearly sets his house on fire.

Quotes from the book

• Character – the willingness to accept responsibility for one’s own life – is the source from which self-respect springs. – Slouching Towards Bethlehem (1968)
• One of the mixed blessings of being twenty and twenty-one and even twenty-three is the conviction that nothing like this, all evidence to the contrary notwithstanding, has ever happened to anyone before. – Slouching Towards Bethlehem (1968)

Play It as It Lays (1970) (View On Amazon)

Undoubtedly one of the most famous works of fiction, Didion’s Play It as It Lies, paints a ruthlessly real picture of American life in the late 1960s. 

The book’s impact was adapted into a movie of the same name two years after it was published. Time magazine has also since included the novel among the 100 Best English-language Novels from 1923 to 2005.

Quotes from the book

• There was silence. Something real was happening: this was, as it were, her life. If she could keep that in mind she would be able to play it through, do the right thing, whatever that meant.– Play It as It Lays (1970)
• The notion of general devastation had for Maria a certain sedative effect (the rattlesnake in the playpen, that was different, that was particular, that was punitive), suggested an instant in which all anxieties would be abruptly gratified, and between the earthquake prophecy and the marijuana and the cheerful detachment of the woman whose house was in the Tajunga Wash, she felt a kind of resigned tranquility. – Play It as It Lays (1970)

The White Album (1979) (View On Amazon)

The White Album is another collection of essays by Didion that is also based around the events in California. 

It specifically centers around the history and politics of the state in the late ’60s and early ’70s. 

Most of the essays that appeared in the book had previously been published in magazines like Life, Esquire, The Saturday Evening Post, The New York Times, and The New York Review of Books.

Quotes from the book

• We tell ourselves stories in order to live. – The White Album (1979)
• The fancy that extraterrestrial life is by definition of a higher order than our own soothes all children, and many writers. – The White Album (1979)

Joan Didion Recognized Work

Didion was a prominent figure of the New Journalism movement in the 1960s and ’70s. Among many of her several awards were:

• In 1981, Didion was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters
• The Edward MacDowell Medal in 1996
• The American Academy of Arts and Letters Gold Medal in Belles Letters and Criticism in 2005
• The National Book Foundation’s Medal of Distinguished Contribution to American Letters in 2007
• The National Medal of Arts and Humanities awarded to her by former President Barack Obama in 2013