Lectures

Lecture 8

Joan Didion

Joan Didion comes from a family who pioneered California; family legend has it that they traveled with the Donner Party. She was born in Sacramento in 1934; her father was in the Army Air Corps, and the family moved quite a lot, but eventually settled back in Sacramento. She went to college at the University of California at Berkeley.

Didion started writing as a child; she wrote her first story at age five, about a woman who dreams she is freezing to death in the Arctic, only to wake and discover she is dying from the heat in the desert. In college, she won the Vogue writing contest; the prize was an editorial job in New York City. She wrote articles and stories, and eventually a novel, Run River (1963).

In 1964, she married another writer, John Gregory Dunne, and they moved to Los Angeles. They intended to stay for six months, but ended up staying for 20 years. They adopted a baby girl, whom they named Quintana Roo. Didion's first collection of essays, Slouching Towards Bethlehem, was published in 1968; her second novel, Play It as It Lays, in 1970.

In 1971, Didion and her husband collaborated for the first time on a screenplay, Panic in Needle Park; they eventually wrote a number of screenplays, among them the movie adaptation of her novel Play it as it Lays (1972), a remake of A Star is Born (1976), True Confessions (1981), and Up Close and Personal (1996).

Didion published another novel in 1977, A Book of Common Prayer; then a second collection of essays in 1979: The White Album. In 1983, she wrote Salvador; in 1984, Democracy; in 1987, Miami. In 1992, she published another collection of essays, After Henry; then another novel, The Last Thing He Wanted (1996), and another collection of essays, Political Fictions (2001). Where I was From (2003) is a volume of essays on California.

In 2003, Didion's daughter Quintana became critically ill with pneumonia and then septic shock; five days after she was hospitalized, Didion's husband, John Gregory Dunne, had a heart attack and died suddenly at the kitchen table. When Quinatan awoke weeks later, Didion had to tell her that her father had died. Several months later, Didion began writing an account of the year following her husband's death, The Year of Magical Thinking. It appeared in 2005 and won the National Book Award for Nonfiction. While Didion was on tour promoting the book, Quintana's health once again collapsed and she died in August 2005, at age 39.

Joan Didion currently lives in New York City

New Journalism

Didion is one of a group of writers often called "New Journalists." These are journalists who believe that the literary devices of fiction (point of view, stream of consciousness, scenes, dialogue, etc.) can be useful in journalism to write accurate nonfiction in a way that can, as Tom Wolfe put it, "excite the reader both intellectually and emotionally." Not all of the writers who have been called "New Journalists" agree on that designation--they have sometimes used other terms. Truman Capote, for instance, called In Cold Blood a "nonfiction novel." Nevertheless, all of them agree that the old separation between fiction and nonfiction, intellectual and emotional, should be collapsed, and that storytelling is more important than moralizing.

Among the New Journalists are Tom Wolfe (The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby, 1965; The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, 1968), Truman Capote (In Cold Blood, 1965), George Plimpton (Paper Lion, 1966), Hunter S. Thompson (The Hell's Angels, 1966), Joan Didion (Slouching Towards Bethlehem, 1968), Norman Mailer (The Armies of the Night, 1968; Miami and the Siege of Chicago, 1968), Gay Talese (The Kingdom and the Power, 1969); Jimmy Breslin (Can't Anybody Here Play This Game?, 1963), Annie Dillard (Holy The Firm, 1977; Teaching a Stone to Talk, 1982), William Least-Heat Moon (The Blue Highways, 1982), Tracy Kidder (House, 1985); Among Schoolchildren, 1989), Melissa Fay Greene (The Temple Bombing, 1996), Eric Schlosser (Fast Food Nation, 2001; Reefer Madness, 2003), Jon Krakauer (Into the Wild, 1996; Into Thin Air, 1997); Susan Orleans (The Orchid Thief, 1998.

If you'd like more information on any of the topics covered in this lecture, go to the Links page. Enjoy!

Some of the information in this lecture derives from:

1. Robert S. Boynton, The New New Journalism, 2005, http://www.newnewjournalism.com/about.htm
2. Wells, Walter. Didion's 'Los Angeles Notebook.'." The Explicator 52.3 (1994): 181+. Academic OneFile. Web. 18 Oct. 2010.
3. Zseleczky, Joan. "Joan Didion." Modern American Women Writers. Ed. Elaine Showalter, Lea Baechler, and A. Walton Litz. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1991. Literature Resource Center. Web. 18 Oct. 2010.
4. Heaton, David M. "Joan Didion: Overview." Contemporary Novelists. Susan Windisch Brown. 6th ed. New York: St. James Press, 1996. Literature Resource Center. Web. 18 Oct. 2010.

The final story, the final chapter of western man, I believe, lies in Los Angeles. ~Phil Ochs