Eldergays, please explain Joan Didion to me

Some people ask. I never do.

I believe she's a writer. She writes books.

I think they've done Didion.

Check out the old threads.

California ennui. Dour beyond words.

I bought one of her books due to DL - I couldn't get through it to the end. Yes, dreary.

Nonfiction > fiction on a cloud-filled morning on Fountain Avenue.

She’s serious about her cooking:

The ultimate 70s Malibu writerly lifestyle:

[quote]She’s serious about her cooking:

So marry her.

Her book "The Year of Magical Thinking", a memoire of her life after the death of her husband (fellow author Gregory Dunne) is a great book, and definitely worth a read.

She was addicted to coca cola and would go into rages if someone took the last can.

First thing she drank when she got up. Yuck.

I’ve posted this in other threads, but it was a bit bizarre how Dominick Dunne, who has dropped every name in the phone book, seemed to just refer to her as “my sister-in-law” but rarely used her name.

Amazing she's still alive, being an alcoholic smoker and all.

She has a very identifiable style: stream of conscience, somewhat detatched and unemotional (much like a journalist's style), very detailed and descriptive. It isn't everyone's bag, but I've always loved her writing.

Spoiled Ungrateful Overrated Solipsistic Cunt

Her husband and daughter died.

Or maybe that was someone else.

She writes clearly. If that’s what defines a good writer, she’s good

If she had been born 40 years earlier she’d be writing young adult fiction. Such is what our current society does with talent.

Ice queen chic bitch cunt. Some of the essays are wordy. I thought she and Gertrude Stein were everything when I was in High School in the 70's.

Incredibly unpleasant woman.

Her nephew Griffin made a movie about her last year. Netflix may still have it. "Joan Didion: The Center Will Not Hold". It's a by the numbers TV bio, but will give you the basics about her life and work.

Headache inducing cunt. Overrated and exhausting. Better writer than Kevin Sessums...but that isn’t saying much...he writes and looks like “special needs”. A junkie.

She was a better writer than her social climbing middlebrow husband, thought I bet he was more fun at parties.

What did the daughter die from?

Her essay "Goodbye To All That" is one of the best farewells to New York City and to youth in general, ever written--still holds up in 2018--but most of her other writing is as other posters have called it.

And then in the early 00s she wrote a Good Bye to All That about LA and returned to New York

It wasn't as good though R25

There's something she managed to crystallize about the sense of having unlimited possibilities, of being able to be anything you wanted, to realizing that there were limits, that while you were out drinking and having fun, other people were working and settling down and suddenly everything mattered and you couldn't get away with only being 23 anymore.

Likely of more impact to someone from a similar upper middle class background to Didion, but still quite poignant.

R23: Acute Pancreatitis, which is caused by alcoholism.

Joan never mentioned either though in ‘Blue Nights’, her memoir about Quintana Roo.

Like Gore Vidal, she has this reputation as an "old Hollywood hand"--meaning, they both wrote some lousy-to-shitty movies--I mean, the Barbra/Kris "Star is Born" or--on Gore's resume--"Is Paris Burning"? Garbahge.

The only cool things about her were that she partied and drove a Corvette really.

R28 "The Panic in Needle Park" was OK; I agree about the rest.

I read The Year of Magical Thinking at the suggestion of several people after the sudden death of an immediate family member. I found it incredibly overrated and pedestrian. I also could not imagine how such a self-involved person ever managed to make it through life.

Self-involvement defined the New Journalism and it was diverting at that time. Now in the age of narcissism its very ordinary.

Thanks guys. I always heard the name but didn't know anything about her

I read her books about the death of her husband, and her daughter, finding her to have quite the entitlement mentality.

She lost one child to history and another to complications.

I wrote a screenplay in which Didion, Anna Wintour, and Gloria Steinem find themselves in First Class on a New York Paris flight and there is a mysterious very old bitter feud.

Was Karen Black flying that plane?

R36 could not be gayer if he were wearing bedazzled jean shorts and drinking camomile tea.

You can't go home again.

Oops. That was Thomas Wolffe. Same thing.

Thomas Wolffe (sic) is not Tom Wolfe.

Here is an article about her written by someone that did not find her appealing that might give the OP a taste of exactly why she isn't.

Where did Didion write about leaving Los Angeles, please?

If you didn't come of age in America until the 80s or later and want to have a sense of the dizzying quality of reality in America from roughly the mid-60s to the mid-70s, you should read her two collections of essays "Slouching toward Bethlehem" and "The White Album." Her novels "Play It as It Lays" and ,"A Book of Common Prayer" are two of the finest novels of the same period. While some of her work since that time is good, I don't think any of it--including "The Year of Magical Thinking"--reaches the heights of that earlier work.

I always preferred her social climbing, lowbrow brother in law.

I think you is an excellent writer. " Slouching Towards Bethlehem" should be required reading. I find her interesting, detailed, and aloof. For some writers that brings out a great craft. And she leaves you thinking, not judging. That's because she assumes you are smart too. Love her.

I love the Play It As It Lays movie with Tuesday Weld.

Hear hear r44.

Check out the hottie in the plaid shirt in r48's pic. Smokin' ass!

I liked her reporting books, like the one on El Salvador and the one on Miami. She's a very good reporter. Back in the 60s her essays could be really excellent. I'm not interested in the novels.

R50 = Ted Boynton

Decamping to NYC again = Where I Was From (2003)

You like?

With handsome nephew Griffin Dunne:

I think the Dunnes returned to NYC in 1988. Where I Was From was about her home state, but I don’t think she’d been living there for many years by 2003.

R49, I was about to post the same thing!

R56 I remember a status report she wrote in 1998 about still being in LA and loving it, which is why I was surprised when Where I was From came out just a few yesterday later.

Just a Few Yesterdays Later

[quote] just a few yesterday later.

Perfect.

The hatchet job done on her by Barbara Gruzzetti Harrison at R42 is better than anything Didion ever wrote.

Martin Amis on Didion:

Play It As It Lays is a work of genius. The rest of her oeuvre? Meh.

She and John McPhee are the two greatest American non-fiction writers alive today.

Cheers R42. An exceptional essay by Harrison. She summed up much of my own feelings about Didion that proved to elusive to articulate.

OP thinks she’s literate because she heard Andie mention her in Devil Wears Prada.

She is a fine prose stylist; I enjoy reading her essays.