Joan Didion - marie claire

Joan Didion: she documented the mayhem of the ’60s, survived the unimaginable loss of her husband and daughter, and became an icon along the way. Alexandra English looks back on the life of the literary legend.

It’s 1975, and the head of the English Department at the University of California, Berkeley is waiting for Joan Didion to arrive for dinner. He doesn’t know much about the magazine writer and novelist who spent her formative years at Berkeley, trudging around in a dirty raincoat and eating nuts from her pockets. Twenty years after graduating, she has been offered a prestigious teaching appointment at the university, and so this formal faculty dinner is in her honour. 

Eventually, Didion walks in: five-foot-two at an exaggeration, dressed in a Chanel suit and white-knuckling a purse that she won’t set down the entire evening. She’s 41, but the vibe she’s giving off is of someone trying their best to look like an adult, but who might duck under the table any second. Once she leaves, the faculty decides this woman – ostensibly miserable, inarticulate, unsure of herself and wearing the entirely wrong thing (who wears Chanel to a dinner party? Apparently, no-one in the ’70s) – will be eaten alive in the classroom. 

The department secretary, seeing an opportunity to humiliate Didion, books the university’s largest theatre for her public address, thinking she won’t be able to fill it. Then, suddenly, it’s a madhouse. Women are crying as they’re turned away from the door; others stand on tiptoes in the back or sit on the floor, happy just to catch a glimpse of their tiny idol whose voice barely registers above a whisper. “There’s something weird going on with Joan Didion and women,” the faculty head declares, realising this sparrow of a woman doesn’t just have readers, she has fans. 

…

Joan Didion was born on December 5, 1934, into a prominent family that had lived in Sacramento, California, for five generations. Her father, Frank, was in the Army Air Corps, and so the family was always on the move. Joan didn’t attend school regularly and skipped second grade altogether, but wrote ferociously in a notebook she said her mother, Eduene, had given her “with the sensible suggestion that I stop whining and learn to amuse myself by writing down my thoughts”.

In the mid-’40s, the family – now complete with little brother Jim – moved back to Sacramento. As an adult, Joan would become famous for writing about California. Back then, though, she couldn’t wait to get out. She won a guest-editorship at Mademoiselle magazine and moved to New York for the assignment. She then won an essay competition at Vogue, which landed her a job in the city that paid $45 a week. She worked there for nearly a decade, making a name for herself and maintaining her byline as her fame grew. In the evenings, she went to fabulous parties, freelanced for other magazines, and tried to write a novel. Her boyfriend introduced her to the Time magazine journalist John Gregory Dunne as “the guy you ought to marry”, and so, in 1964 just before her 30th birthday, she did. “Out of the blue, he asked me to come [to visit his mother],” Didion recalled. “And the minute I got into this house of great calm and order and peace and well-being, I thought, I want to marry him.”

Desperately homesick for the flat horizons of California after so long in New York, Didion convinced Dunne to move back to LA with her. There, she wrote her two most famous essay collections, Slouching Towards Bethlehem and The White Album, making her name synonymous with the ’60s. She documented the era of rising crime rates and televised war, youth experimenting with sex and drugs, and cult members murdering celebrities. She wrote about the Doors (Jim Morrison flirted with her as she sat in on a recording session), the Black Panthers, Charles Manson, runaway children and cultural meltdown. Her writing intertwined Los Angeles’ madness with the madness she felt creeping inside her. She was prone to migraines, drank a lot and relied on cigarettes. Breakfast was a can of ice-cold Coca-Cola and a tin of almonds consumed in silence behind dark sunglasses just before midday. She went blind in one eye for six weeks, and the doctors suspected she had multiple sclerosis. 

Didion built a reputation as a “public pulse taker” and a keen “observer of the chaos”. She was a pioneer of the New Journalism, in which the reporter puts themselves at the centre of the story. In Slouching (now considered one of the most influential essay collections of the past 60 years), she immersed herself in the new hippie culture of Haight-Ashbury, spotting a five-year-old who was tripping on LSD. (“Let me tell you, it was gold,” she said later.) In The White Album, she wrote about the Manson murders and was unsettled that she and Roman Polanski, whose pregnant wife, Sharon Tate, was killed, were godparents to the same child. She also spent time interviewing Linda Kasabian, the cult’s getaway driver and lookout, who told her the Family had driven past Didion’s house, where the lights were on and the windows were open, on the night of the murders. 

In 1966, as Didion’s career was taking off, she and Dunne adopted a baby girl, naming her Quintana Roo – or Q for short. They lived in an ocean-fronted house where peacocks roamed the grounds, and they threw parties for hundreds of guests, including Gore Vidal, Truman Capote, Steven Spielberg, Martin Scorsese and Janis Joplin. “[Didion] could make dinner for 40 people with one hand tied around her back while everyone else was passed out on the floor,” remembered artist and writer Eve Babitz. Q was also leading a charmed and strange existence. She grew up hearing the latest Fleetwood Mac albums before anyone else, and she went to school with Bob Dylan’s son Jesse, who eventually married her best friend. “Quintana had no idea how much we needed her,” Didion would write of her daughter decades later in her book Blue Nights. “I needed her in the sense that she was … simply the center of my life. I needed someone to take care of.”

Didion and Dunne, with their best-selling books, prolific reporting and effortlessly glamorous lifestyle, were regarded as the golden couple of the American literary elite. They moved to Malibu and began writing Hollywood screenplays – and found they were good at it. The Panic in Needle Park, starring Al Pacino, was shown at the 1971 Cannes Film Festival; A Star Is Born won Barbra Streisand the Golden Globe award for best actress. (The 2018 remake nabbed five Oscar nominations.) 

Didion was the more famous of the two (people called them The Didions), but the couple were adamant there was no jealousy between them. “What was good for him was good for me; his success was my success, and vice versa,” Didion said. “[We were] terrifically, terribly dependent on one another.” Those close to the couple agreed. “They were like one person,” said Dunne’s brother Dominick. 

In the ’70s and ’80s, Didion’s writing took on a political bent. She travelled to El Salvador on assignment to cover the civil war, arriving shortly after four journalists had been shot; she wrote about the Bush administration and the Iraq war. The family lived in a quiet residential neighbourhood at the time, but their lives were not as peaceful as their streets. Doctors had told Dunne that he was a “candidate for a cardiovascular catastrophe”, while Q was dealing with bipolar disorder (which Didion poetically referred to as her “depths and shallows, her quicksilver changes”) and alcoholism. 

Tragedy struck on Christmas Eve 2003 when Quintana fell ill and slipped into a coma. Five nights later, after returning home from visiting her in the ICU, Dunne sat down at the dining table and had the heart attack they’d been dreading. “John was talking, then he wasn’t,” Didion wrote later. “The minute I got to him, I knew he was dead.” He was 71. Q recovered but died less than two years later from acute pancreatitis. She was 39.

In the brief period between her husband’s and daughter’s deaths, Didion wrote The Year of Magical Thinking as a way of processing the desperate, deranging sense of grief she felt after losing Dunne. “Nothing I read about grief seemed to exactly express the craziness of it,” she said. “The way in which you obsessively go over the same scenes again and again and again trying to make them end differently.” She wrote it in 88 days. It was like “sitting down at the typewriter and bleeding”, she said. “Some days I’d sit with tears streaming down my face.”

The Year of Magical Thinking won a National Book Award and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, it was adapted into an internationally produced play, and therapists regularly recommend it as required reading for the recently bereaved. It helped Didion reach a new audience and a new generation of readers. Six years after Quintana died, Didion wrote the unofficial sequel, Blue Nights, about her daughter.

The cult of Joan Didion reached a new peak in the mid-2010s, and she became proof that an interest in fashion and politics needn’t be mutually exclusive in a woman. Maybe it was because of her stylised book covers (think of her leaning against her bright yellow Corvette Stingray – smoking, disaffected, maybe even bored, on the cover of The White Album) that she was a muse for designers. In 2015, 81-year-old Didion became the sunglass-clad face of Céline’s S/S campaign, shot in her New York apartment by Juergen Teller. There was also a time when you could buy a $1200 leather jacket with an illustration of her face on the back.

Barack Obama awarded Didion the National Humanities Medal, and Harvard and Yale granted her honorary degrees. A campaign for (the only) official film about her life became the third-highest-funded documentary on Kickstarter in 2014. The film, The Center Will Not Hold, was made by her nephew Griffin Dunne and grandniece Annabelle Dunne, perhaps the only people she trusted with her story. 

The film of her 1996 book, The Last Thing He Wanted, premiered at Sundance Film Festival last year with Anne Hathaway in the lead, and her 1977 novel, A Book of Common Prayer, is in pre-production with Mad Men’s Christina Hendricks and Allison Janney attached. Now that she is 86, Didion’s new book of essays, Let Me Tell You What I Mean, a collection drawn from her astonishing five-decade career, has connotations of a swan song. But given everything she’s been through, chances are Joan Didion is not done yet.

Let Me Tell You What I Mean, by Joan Didion (HarperCollins, $27.99). 

This article originally appeared in the June 2021 issue of marie claire.