COMMENTS

  1. Read 12 Masterful Essays by Joan Didion for Free Online, Spanning Her

    In a clas­sic essay of Joan Didion's, "Good­bye to All That," the nov­el­ist and writer breaks into her narrative—not for the first or last time—to prod her read­er. She rhetor­i­cal­ly asks and answers: "…was any­one ever so young? I am here to tell you that some­one was."

  2. How the Manson murders changed Hollywood, according to Joan Didion

    As Joan Didion wrote in her essay "The White Album," the title piece of her 1979 collection, "Many people I know in Los Angeles believe that the Sixties ended abruptly on August 9, 1969,...

  3. Hollywood: Having Fun

    Hollywood: Having Fun Joan Didion March 22, 1973 issue Reviewed: Memo from David O. Selznick selected and edited by Rudy Behlmer Viking, 518 pp., $15.00 Figures of Light: Film Criticism and Comment by Stanley Kauffmann Harper & Row, 296 pp., $2.95 (paper)

  4. Joan Didion on Hollywood's Diversity Problem: A Masterpiece from 1968

    In an essay titled "Good Citizens," written between 1968 and 1970 and found in the altogether indispensable The White Album (public library) — which also gave us Didion on driving as a transcendent experience — she turns her perceptive and prescient gaze to Hollywood's diversity problem and the vacant pretensions that both beget and ...

  5. How Joan Didion the Writer Became Joan Didion the Legend

    Joan Didion arrived in Los Angeles in 1964 on the way to becoming one of the most important writers of her generation, a cultural icon who changed L.A.'s perception of itself. Lili Anolik mines...

  6. Joan Didion dead at 87: Essential books, essays to read now

    Joan Didion, who died Thursday at 87, produced decades' worth of memorable work across genres and subjects: personal essays, reporting and criticism on pop culture, political dispatches from...

  7. When Joan Didion Was a Hollywood Schlockmonger

    Dec 23, 20215:47 PM Netflix Joan Didion wrote elegant, spare prose that summed entire zeitgeists up with piercing remove, as widely memorialized upon her death Thursday at 87.

  8. From The Archive: Joan Didion On Hollywood, Her Personal Style & The

    20 February 2020 Henry Clarke/Getty Images Joan Didion looks too insubstantial to be the author of Salvador or Miami; the first a book about political repression and terror, the second about the violent domain where Cuban exiles continue to play out the revolutionary politics of Havana.

  9. Joan Didion's "Let Me Tell You What I Mean" on inspirations

    Joan Didion in 2007. (Liz O. Baylen / Los Angeles Times) Hilton Als, the New Yorker critic and avowed Didion fan, mentions the shimmer in his foreword to "Let Me Tell You What I Mean.". By his ...

  10. California Native Joan Didion Understood Hollywood Better ...

    In her famous 1973 essay in The New York Review of Books, "Hollywood: Having Fun," Didion skewered film reviewing as a "vaporous occupation" and disdained outsider coverage of Hollywood...

  11. Joan Didion Was Our Bard of Disenchantment

    December 23, 2021 In 1988, Joan Didion joined a scrum of reporters on the tarmac of the San Diego airport to witness the writing of the first draft of history. The assembled journalists were...

  12. From Hollywood to Malibu: Mapping Joan Didion's Los Angeles

    There, as Hollywood pulsed around her, Didion wrote her collection of essays Slouching Towards Bethlehem. Its skeptical observations of life in countercultural Haight-Ashbury in San Francisco echoed the vibrations of her own neighborhood, which was also undergoing a renaissance of a mixed caliber.

  13. What We Get Wrong About Joan Didion

    Didion, now eighty-six, has been an object of fascination ever since, boosted by the black-lace renaissance she experienced after publishing " The Year of Magical Thinking " (2005), her raw and...

  14. Joan Didion's Magic Trick

    This is the Joan Didion who invented Los Angeles in the '60s as an expression of paranoia, danger, drugs, and the movie business. The Joan Didion who took amphetamines to work and bourbon to ...

  15. There's a reason Joan Didion's work endures: she changed the way we

    Similarly, the dress worn in the trial of Linda Kasabian in The White Album essay is a vehicle to describe Didion's horror at both the banality and evil at the heart of the Charles Manson ...

  16. Beyond the Books: Joan Didion's Essays, Profiles and Criticism

    Joan Didion, who died on Thursday at 87, is best known for her essay collections — " Slouching Towards Bethlehem ," " The White Album " and " After Henry ," to name a few — though she also...

  17. California cool and Magical Thinking: Joan Didion at 86

    David Hare, who worked with her to bring her memoir of grief, The Year of Magical Thinking, to the stage, describes her as having "a horror of disorder". Eleven years after Slouching Towards ...

  18. Joan Didion

    Career Vogue During her seven years at Vogue, from 1956 to 1964, Didion worked her way up from promotional copywriter to associate feature editor. [14] [16] Mademoiselle published Didion's article "Berkeley's Giant: The University of California" in January 1960. [17]

  19. Joan Didion's new collection of old essays holds the key to her 'shimmer'

    Joan Didion in 2007. (Liz O. Baylen / Los Angeles Times) Hilton Als, the New Yorker critic and avowed Didion fan, mentions the shimmer in his foreword to "Let Me Tell You What I Mean.". By his analysis it is a "physics or energy" related to Sigmund Freud's concept of the uncanny — "synonymous with and expressive of 'all that ...

  20. On Self-Respect: Joan Didion's 1961 Essay from the Pages of

    On Self-Respect: Joan Didion's 1961 Essay from the Pages of Vogue By Joan Didion December 23, 2021 Joan Didion, author, journalist, and style icon, died today after a prolonged...

  21. The Manson Family Story That Should've Been Turned Into a Movie

    In the titular essay of her 1979 book The White Album, Didion outlines the chaotic dissonance of the '60s. She writes of witnessing The Doors record bits of their third studio album, recalls...

  22. New York Public Library Acquires Joan Didion's Papers

    Joan Didion transcended ordinary literary fame to become a symbol of bicoastal chic and, with her husband, John Gregory Dunne, an ideal of intellectual-conjugal partnership. ... Hollywood and ...

  23. Joan Didion Dead: 'Magical Thinking' Author Was 87

    Joan Didion, the journalist and ... Knopf, told The Hollywood Reporter. ... Berkeley, she won a Vogue essay contest, whose first prize was a job at the magazine's New York office.

  24. Years Later, 'The Year of Magical Thinking' Wields Different Magic

    As his own life unfolds, an artist reconsiders his reaction to Joan Didion's memoir about loss. By Mike Dawson Living through the loss of a loved one is a universal experience. But the ways in ...

  25. 'Feud' Episode 5: James Baldwin and Truman Capote's Real Relationship

    The writers and executive producers of the second season in Ryan Murphy 's FX anthology use a fictionalized meeting between Capote ( Tom Hollander) and writer and civil rights activist James ...

  26. Opinion

    Dr. Currid-Halkett is a Guggenheim fellow and professor of public policy at the University of Southern California. On Jan. 8, 2020, as I was parking my car, I got a long-awaited phone call from ...