Joan Didion is DEAD TO ME

A true original, albeit with many imitators in later years.

So many more people seem to be getting Parkinson's. What the hell is causing it?

She'd been frail for years, I thought she was on death's door back in 2017 when I saw The Center Will Not Hold.

My sister in law.

Year of Magical Thinking is a great memoir that deals with loss and grief. I’ve read it and recommended it to patients who have experienced traumatic loss and protracted grief. RIP Joan.

She had the very valuable and rare talent of knowing when not to say something.

She and John had the most diverse and well-stacked medicine cabinet in Southern California.

^stocked.

I am devastated, someone who I discovered in college and continued to shape my life with each new writing she did. It wasn’t the pop star divas that I admired, it was this incredible woman. The last decades of her life may have writ like some Greek tragedy, but she was the embodiment of stoicism. Now she will join John and Quintana Roo at St. John the Divine and they will never be separated again.

Has Harrison Ford commented yet?

My favourite Didion line was about the governor’s mansion built by Ronald Reagan: "I have seldom seen a house so evocative of the unspeakable."

I loved A Book of Common Prayer. It is strange to because I ordered it to my Kindle last week to reread it and now she is dead.

When Tom Wolfe died someone eulogized him as the “greatest living essayist” but I always thought it was Didion. RIP.

[quote]I loved A Book of Common Prayer. It is strange to because I ordered it to my Kindle last week to reread it and now she is dead.

So it's YOUR fault.

Has Linda Kasabian been reached for comment?

And eight years, almost to the day, after John.

Longer than 8 I think. We need a fact check.

Nooooooooo!

Sorry, no, 18.

Christ I'm old.

But I still look 23.

First Anne and now Joan. December is the cruelest month.

Cunt.

A driveling hack often cited and quoted by the Bourgeois as a way to gain bohemian cache, without realizing what mainstream basic bitches they appeared to be by doing so, essentially she was the Bob Dylan of literature.

87 is an amazing run for a smoker.

[quote]My favourite Didion line was about the governor’s mansion built by Ronald Reagan: "I have seldom seen a house so evocative of the unspeakable."

And she was so right. There are only a few photos available online -- it's that ghastly. Here's the history

There are two books that natives to LA must read (and usually love):

Fante's Ask The Dust.

Didion's Play It As It Lays.

A true genius, Joan.

This is how I would like to remember her...

R21 Is a miserable and spiteful cunt. The Bob Dylan comparison is apt because they were both legitimate geniuses who are now called "hacks" by contrarians and retards who think their taste is just a cut about the "bourgeois mainstream" (MARY!)

Anyways, RIP. One of the greatest to ever do it.

[quote]First Anne and now Joan.

Who is Anne? You mean first Eve and now Joan.

[quote] 87 is an amazing run for a smoker.

I read at one point she was down to something like three cigarettes a day. I suppose that’s still smoking but better than an intake of packs per day.

R27 If Eve Babitz and Joan Didion are now gone, how long does my other favorite 1970s Angeleno, Linda Ronstadt, have?

Losing Janet Malcolm and Joan Didion in one year is the end of an era. I hope John McPhee is vaxxed and boosted somewhere.

To lose both her and Janet Malcolm, in the same year no less -- too sad. Didion, Malcolm, Hardwick, McCarthy and Sontag were the great female essayists of the literati. May she rest in peace. United with John and Quintana.

I've always used a liking for Joan as a little personal barometer when judging people. I liked her and liked people who liked her.

I once went to a Halloween party as Charlette Douglas.

What did you wear, R33? A dress made entirely of ribbons? A Chanel suit with a safety pin on the hem? Did you carry a $600 handbag with a broken clasp?

I fucking love that book and have since I was 21. The literary world has lost a star. It's refreshing that even here, only R21 stands out as a raginig cunt among posts of respect.

R21 if you’re going to attempt to present yourself as intelligent, you need to understand the difference between “cachet” and “cache”.

Who’s the “drivelling (sic) hack” now?

I've never read anything she's written.

Is she any good?

I still remember that time I made the passage from the Hollywood on to the Harbor over four lanes of traffic on the diagonal without braking or losing a beat, it WAS exhilarating.

An elegant writer who wrote far better essays than novels. She should have written more, and I was frustrated by the slow release of her books during her heyday.

[quote]I've never read anything she's written. Is she any good?

No, Rose. She was a Reader's Digest consumate witness reporting from SoCal.

She was snobby, though.

OMG RIP

[quote] I was frustrated by the slow release of her books during her heyday.

Who do you think I was? Joyce Carol Oates?

She would have been the perfect commentator on the current Woke Culture

Sounds like she's good at painting pictures with words. I'll check her out.

The Year of Magical Thinking is a gorgeous look at death and loss.

[quote]87 is an amazing run for a smoker.

Hold my coffee.

What sort of people start a thread about my death?

What shall I do?

How do I deal with being dead?

What sort of people die?

What do people do with this?

What sort of people are reading this?

I just don't know.

Happy santa day

What makes Iago evil, some people ask. I never ask.

“Death was up close, at home. The average adult was expected to deal competently, and also sensitively, with its aftermath. When someone dies, I was taught growing up in California, you bake a ham. You drop it by the house. You go to the funeral. If the family is Catholic you also go to the rosary but you do not wail or keen or in any other way demand the attention of the family. In the end Emily Post’s 1922 etiquette book turned out to be as acute in its apprehension of this other way of death, and as prescriptive in its treatment of grief, as anything else I read. I will not forget the instinctive wisdom of the friend who, every day for those first few weeks, brought me a quart container of scallion-and-ginger congee from Chinatown. Congee I could eat. Congee was all I could eat.”

“I knew why Charlotte went to the airport even if Victor did not.”

“I knew about airports.”

Last one for the road, Ms Didion

Bette Davis smoked like a freight train to the very end and made it to 81.

Wasn't she, along with John Gregory, implicated in Quintana Roo's death by pharmaceuticals? Their well-stocked cabinets were welcomed and at her disposal. John had always been particularly vicious with his adoptive daughter, belittling her writing ability relentlessly. Dominique, her cousin, was very close to her and supportive.

Didion and JGD were horrendous, medicine cabinet addicts who couldn't pull it together for their "adoptive" child, let alone her best friend Dominique; their own blood and flesh relation viciously killed and they supported her murderer by keeping their public dinners at the restaurant Wolfgang Puck kept him ostentatiously employed.

I suppose they wanted to blight Dominique's support of their adoptive, "failure" daughter who did not add up to pretentious, adoptive father John Gregory or his eventually more successful brother.

A fantastic writer who captured a time, but someone I'm really glad I never liked, because she and her husband were awful humans bent upon themselves.

It's

Her husband was particularly vicious to the girl, mercilessly criticizing her writing as both launched on their pharma medicated adventures!

Joan just bowed and motioned her husband forward.

They were particularly vicious, notably and loudly attending the restaurant where their niece's killer was employed by the eatery's PR, apparently Wolfgang Puck, who whole & heartedly employed a touch-trigger murderer.

Let this sink in:. Joan and John wholeheartedly, completely nd çunabjectly supported the murderer who snuffed out Dominique Dunne's live through long and painful strangulation on her own front yard.

Please reassess Joan as a shitty human she always was when she swallowed up humans for her benefit, as she downed handfuls of the contents from their family medicine cabinet.

Sorry for editing problems at r 55!

R55: that’s so interesting. But just curious: where can one read more about the unseemlier side of the Dunnes, especially their amazing medicine cabinet?

R57 - these were profiles over the years from Vanity Fair or New Yorker through the '70s and early aughts. Julia Phillips "You'll Never Have Lunch on this Town Again" was a likely source. As was Dion's memoir where she dissimulated about her daughter's many obvious years of heavy alcoholism and the resulting pancreatitis she succumbed to.

Didion's later life intellectualizations aimed at self-absolution were so self-involved and truly snicker-worthy. It's like she was saying Quintana's death was OK, cause it gave her lots of "material" to reflect upon.

R55 Is a third rate sleaze spouting retarded conjecture. How the fuck were they supposed to know her murderer was employed there? And eating in a restaurant doesn't mean they "supported" a murderer, any more than buying cigarettes means you support your grandma's death from lung cancer.

Didion was no more or less an awful person than any famous pill addict (which is the majority of famous people). Criticizing her daughter's writing makes her an "awful human?" It's somehow her fault an ADULT WOMAN died of drug addiction? To say she's somehow uniquely manipulative or cruel and trying to smear a woman when she's not even buried is unbelievably vile, rot in hell.

R58 Julia Phillips is a liar and far more a druggie than Joan ever was, a cokehead. She's been called out for her "tall tales" many, many times.

It's not her fault as a parent that her adult daughter was an addict. At some point you can't control those things. And how someone grieves their daughter is none of your business to call "self-involved" - of course it was self-involved, she was her fucking MOTHER.

She and John Gregory Dunne adapted "The Panic in Needle Park" for the screen, as well as Dunne's novel "True Confessions". Pretty good movies. Let's not talk about "A Star is Born" and "Up Close and Personal"...

RIP

R59 - You wish is my command, right? I'm that sleazy that I'd please you? Very well!!! Cuz, I aim to please idiots like you into submission:

[Quote]In the beginning, Dominick didn’t know whether to attend the trial or not. Then he went to a meeting of Parents of Murdered Children meeting. A grieving father insisted he never miss a day of the trial. “It’s the last business of your daughter’s life,” he said.

[Quote]The following day, John and Joan asked if a plea bargain had been offered by the defense team. Dominick told them no, there hadn’t been a plea bargain. He didn’t think much about the conversation until, two days later, a friend of his brother phoned. It was Barry Farrell, who worked with John at Time magazine in the 1960s. Farrell relayed a message from Sweeney’s lawyer, a public defender named Marvin Adelson: they wanted a plea bargain, and Sweeney would be willing to go to prison for fifteen years. Farrell went on to say that Adelson saw the case as that of “a blue-collar kid who got mixed up in Beverly Hills society and couldn’t handle it.” Dominick knew what that meant, and it offended him. The case would be tried “not as a crime, but as a tragedy.”

[Quote]John then made separate phone calls to Dominick and Lenny, asking each of them to accept the plea bargain. He said he had spoken to a lawyer friend, Leslie Abramson, and she told him it was not unusual for a plea bargain to be presented to the victim’s family through an intermediary. Abramson herself had been approached to perform that very duty but refused because she knew Joan and John personally.

[quote]And there were worse things than phone calls being made. “We got reports that Joan and John were going to Ma Maison,” said Alex Dunne. “In Los Angeles at that time, there were two restaurants that were the power places to be seen. One was Chasen’s. The other was Ma Maison. And we got reports that Joan and John continued to dine at Ma Maison. Being seen there was what they cared about.” What made their appearance even more galling was that many people in the entertainment business boycotted Ma Maison to show their support of the Dunne family. In fact, the restaurant’s reputation never fully recovered.

I had to read At the Dam for English 1A & I couldn’t get into it back the . I referred to it as At the Goddamn Dam. My professor was gaga for her. She was a great writer & she’ll be sorely missed.

R62 Wow, there are REPORTS of her as ALLEGED by Dominick Dunne that she went to a restaurant. Literal third hand gossip, you miserable cunt. You're just looking for things to smear a dead genius over for whatever reason.

R62, I, for one, have personally heard reports that your mother is sucking cocks in hell!

R64/r65 -. Don't worry! Her corpse probably has enough residual unfettered Benzodiazepines for BOTH of you to partake in ritual communion. Just send an effusive literary request once you figure yourselves out her funeral home, OK?

The best essay writer possibly ever.

No longform magazine writer or essayist has surpassed her.

I've never read a magazine writer who's been able to do *once* what she's done for me many times—create sentences, images and distillations that come back to you repeatedly, at random moments, as just the perfect way to capture or understand something.

Hey, if taking handfuls of benzos and whatever else gets you to age 87, sign me the fuck up!

My mother never touched a substance and died at 50. And she was way more of a miserable abusive cunt than Joan, I can guarantee you.

I'm sure the literary Dunne-Didions had much in common with the sensitive, concerned Leslie Abramson to have had some kind of a "social relationship" with her.

F&F the Didion hating cunt (Dominick Dunne’s ghost?) who keeps posting salacious nonsense in a mourning thread about a truly great woman when she’s not even in the ground yet…..

It all went downhill for Joanie after that woman kept bumping her shopping cart into hers. And all for wearing a bikini at a supermarket!

I would have loved to have the privileges Quintana Dunne had.

Travel, literate parents, expansive homes in LA and NYC, shit-tons of cash to finance whatever I wanted to do creatively, shit-tons of cash to finance whatever mental health care I needed.

She had all those advantages and blew them. She even found a guy to marry her and see her through rehab and she drank herself to death anyway.

That's genetics, not Joan's parenting. Quintana's bio parents were Deadhead druggies.

The most elegant shade anyone ever threw was Joan vs. Nancy Reagan, in her pieces "Pretty Nancy" and "In the Realm of the Fisher King."

Fuck, they're brutal and great.

[quote]"Nancy Reagan has an interested smile, the smile of a good wife, a good mother, a good hostess, the smile of someone who grew up in comfort and went to Smith College and has a father who is a distinguished neurosurgeon (her father's entry in the 1966-67 'Who's Who' runs nine lines longer than her husband's) and a husband who is the definition of Nice Guy, not to mention Governor of California, the smile of a woman who seems to be playing out some middle-class American woman's daydream, circa 1948. The set for this daydream is perfectly dressed, every detail correct.

[quote] Nancy Reagan says almost everything with spirit, perhaps because she was once an actress and has the beginning actress's habit of investing even the most casual lines with a good deal more dramatic emphasis than is ordinarily called for on a Tuesday morning on 45th Street in Sacramento. 'Actually,' she added then, as if about to disclose a delightful surprise, 'actually, I really do need flowers.'"

[quote]"She took refuge in a certain kind of piss-elegance, a fanciness (‘the English-style country house in the suburbs’), in using words like 'inappropriate.'"

Sometimes it’s nice to be reminded that LA isn’t all Khloe, Kim, Kourtney & Khlamydia

This

[quote] That's genetics, not Joan's parenting. Quintana's bio parents were Deadhead druggies.

To pack and wear

R59, they actively supported the murderer in his defense in court, mainly because they were friends with Leslie Abramson, Sweeney's attorney. They pushed Dominick to take what he thought was a lenient plea deal because it would help their pal Leslie out. Then on top of that, they went to Ma Maison, knowing that's where Sweeney worked, knowing they were very visible and everyone would see them at the restaurant.

In short, you don't know what you're talking about. You flew off the handle when you should have gone to Google.

Hey, hey, hey, don’t disparage Up Close and Personal, it brought us this lovely gem of a song and Robert Redford getting a very thinly interpreted life story rendition of Jessica Savage as played by Michele Pfieffer freed from a prison riot before she got gang raped into existence and that DOESN’T happen every day!

One of the things I liked about Didion was she focused on being a great writer, not marketing herself as a great person the way so many authors try to in the age of social media. She and her husband seemed like tremendous snobs and coldly unpleasant to the hoi polloi. But I don’t need her to be my friend to get something out of her work.

R77 This is Dominick’s heavily emotionally driven side of the story, and you’re presenting it as fact. The man was a well known fabricator, especially about his, uh personal dealings.

And he was always name dropping Joan no matter the context, anything to bring attention……Dominick was a bitter closeted social climber who reaped what he sowed in many cases. You sound like the same troll who’s bent on convincing people Angela Lansbury is the devil because her idiot daughter hung with the Mansons. Anything to tear down well liked old women for no damn reason…..

Huge SHADES are never out

From my old stack of Interview magazines.

I remember liking John Gregory Dunne’s essay about attending a preview of Doctor Doolittle. The executives were all son confused. Rex Harrison on a giraffe?!? What have we done!?!?

Some of you need to lay off the sauce tonight...

The best lack all conviction, while the worst Are full of passionate intensity.

And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

Slouching was my favorite. Those essays are timeless.

[quote] while the worst Are full of passionate intensity

Ain’t that the fucking Truth

Which one is that, r86? That she and ubercunt homophobe John Gregory, who wasn't pleased about Dominick's homosexuality and consequently (more than empirically determined), rejected his own brother because he was too much of a faggot?

Seriously, have you EVER attempted to read anything historic that has a gay man suffering intense personal consequences of their family's personal denial and loses practically perpetuated by the brother and nosey wife, sticking their heads in for personal gain?

You are Leslie, yes? Because you r frizzed, fucked up head was last welcomed in L.A DECADES AGO!!!

I

.......

[quote]She would have been the perfect commentator on the current Woke Culture

Except she would have positioned herself in a "maelstrom" of faux idiots who promptly surrounded her and pawed for her approval and worse, her needy attention. She would have been the perfect recipient and abuser of current *wokedom."

Joan was always susceptible to the many sycophants who sought her and she paid them right back. And she regally sprinkled them with her attention or disdain. Saddened, disappointed, and ultimately scrambling for better paying opportunities that wouldn't left their skin scalded by the many notions she left them dismembered, disavowed, scarred, and generally hating themselves. But that was the point of such --She's SUCH A GRAND thing, she is, isn't she?

[quote]So many more people seem to be getting Parkinson's. What the hell is causing it?

Parkinson's is more common among people with obsessive-compulsive personality traits -- perfectionism, rigidity, workaholism. So I guess it's more present in high achievers, people who we are likely to read about in the news.

Didion on the Black Panthers of yore. But, mutatis mutant is, her observation wouldn’t have been that much amiss re: BLM:

[quote] “To be black and conscious in America is to be in a constant state of rage,” Eldridge Cleaver wrote in large letters on a pad of paper, and then he added: “Huey P. Newton quoting James Baldwin.” I could see it emblazoned above the speakers’ platform at a rally, imprinted on the letterhead of an ad hoc committee still unborn. As a matter of fact almost everything Huey Newton said had the ring of being a “quotation,” a “pronouncement” to be employed when the need arose. I had heard Huey P. Newton On Racism (“The Black Panther Party is against racism”), Huey P. Newton On Cultural Nationalism (“The Black Panther Party believes that the only culture worth holding on to is revolutionary culture”), Huey P. Newton On White Radicalism, On Police Occupation of the Ghetto, On the European Versus the African. “The European started to be sick when he denied his sexual nature,” Huey Newton said, and Charles Garry interrupted then, bringing it back to first principles. “Isn’t it true, though, Huey,” he said, “that racism got its start for economic reasons?” This weird interlocution seemed to take on a life of its own. “The small room was hot and the fluorescent light hurt my eyes and I still did not know to what extent Huey Newton understood the nature of the role in which he was cast. As it happened I had always appreciated the logic of the Panther position, based as it was on the proposition that political power began at the end of the barrel of a gun (exactly what gun had even been specified, in an early memorandum from Huey P. Newton: “Army .45; carbine; 12-gauge Magnum shotgun with 18" barrel, preferably the brand of High Standard; M-16; 357 Magnum pistols; P-38”), and I could appreciate as well the particular beauty in Huey Newton as “issue.” In the politics of revolution everyone was expendable, but I doubted that Huey Newton’s political sophistication extended to seeing himself that way: the value of a Scottsboro case is easier to see if you are not yourself the Scottsboro boy. ”

^ mutatis mutantis

The woman hated carpool lanes.

^ Well, not just woman

[quote] People are afraid to merge on freeways in Los Angeles

Try again, r92.

R95: I knew something wasn’t quit right 😂🤣🥂

She made the nondescript suburb of Lakewood sound more interesting than it ever has been.

I'm shocked this thread has gotten so few replies, considering Didion has been on the DL's radar for years. I mean, hell, her death has gotten fewer comments that the man with the adult diaper fetish. A well-known author's death is upstaged by a pervert with a diaper fetish? Come on! This is a new low even for DL.

She was a guest lecturer at Berkeley in the 80’s and appeared so out of it that someone in the lecture hall yelled, “Valium!”

R98, I think it's because a lot of the responses re: her death were spread over multiple threads made at once.

R99: OMG is that really true? Good for the old gal!

I haven't yet read her last collection of essays, "Let me tell you what I mean." A good read?

Leotard on the Beach

Any word yet for a St. John the Divine memorial?

It seems somehow telling of DL that some in this thread appear intent on dragging Joan into what was apparently a longstanding feud between her husband and his brother. It's like something that would happen to a character in ... a Joan Didion novel.

Needless to say her accomplishments far outstripped those of either of the Dunne brothers.

Also worth noting that Griffin, son of Dominick and brother of Dominique, maintained and publicly celebrated his connection to Joan until the end.

I read "A Book of Common Prayer" for the first time over the last three days. It blew my mind. So good.

Those Dunne boys are Done! Just Done!

Joan was a throwback in her championing of her husband’s work when hers was clearly so much better. Even Dominick’s was better than his brother’s, in the sense that it was enjoyably juicy to read. She must have known that?

Was she anorexic like Joyce Carol Oates?

R108, JCO is anorexic? I know the woman has a Twitter addiction...

Karen Blixen aka Isak Dinesen lived on cigarettes, Champagne and air for like the last decade of her life, I think Joan did something similar. Or perhaps just congi.

A lot of "I'm here to help" writers toss together a book about coping with grief, with some smug idea that it's just what the world needs. And Joan wrote a heartfelt account of her own experiences losing her husband and along the way has helped many explore their own grief. I was talking to a widowed neighbor who told me ' The Tear of Magical Thinking' gave her a lot of comfort when her husband died. It didn't seem she'd read anything else of Didion's.

Overall what an amazing body of work: essays, novels, memoirs, screenplays, and oh, a book that helps many who've lost a spouse/child.

For anyone I know who loses a spouse I immediately send them a copy of The Year of Magical Thinking.

R73 Very cunty for a writer to do.

I watched the Joan documentary a few years ago. All I really remember is she and John were into parties, having them and attending them. Parties, parties.

I liked some of her essays. I thought she could be rather pretentious at times. She certainly is beloved. I think at least some of that is how good she looked in photos, smoking and looking angsty and cool.

r113 Nancy Reagan deserved that.

Receiving the National Humanities Medal from President Obama in 2012.

A great writer should never write about her children [yes I’m talking specifically about female authors].

Husbands, yes.

Kids, NO.

For the maternal instinct will almost always take over and interfere with the writer self, to the detriment of the end product.

Prime exhibit: Ms Didion’s ‘Blue Nights’. For crying out loud, she couldn’t even bring up alcoholism, let alone the telling cause of her daughter’s death: acute pancreatitis.

She really should have stopped at ‘The Year of Magical Thinking’

Poor Joan. Her own passing has been eclipsed by Betty White's. I'm sure she would write up some observations about [italic]that[/italic].

The Betty White Album?

Slouching Towards Bethenny Frankel.

A Book of Common Betty

The Last Thing Betty Wanted

Potato masher of manifest destiny.

[quote]There was a jasmine vine grown over the verandah of the big house on Franklin Avenue, and in the evenings the smell of jasmine came in through all the open doors and windows. I made bouillabaisse for people who did not eat meat. I imagined that my own life was simple and sweet, and sometimes it was, but there were odd things going around town. There were rumors. There were stories. Everything was unmentionable but nothing was unimaginable. This mystical flirtation with the idea of “sin”—this sense that it was possible to go “too far,” and that many people were doing it—was very much with us in Los Angeles in 1968 and 1969. A demented and seductive vortical tension was building in the community. The jitters were setting in. I recall a time when the dogs barked every night and the moon was always full. On August 9, 1969, I was sitting in the shallow end of my sister-in-law’s swimming pool in Beverly Hills when she received a telephone call from a friend who had just heard about the murders at Sharon Tate Polanski’s house on Cielo Drive. “The phone rang many times during the next hour. These early reports were garbled and contradictory. One caller would say hoods, the next would say chains. There were twenty dead, no, twelve, ten, eighteen. Black masses were imagined, and bad trips blamed. I remember all of the day’s misinformation very clearly, and I also remember this, and wish I did not: I remember that no one was surprised.

[quote]There certainly is what doctors call a “migraine personality,” and that personality tends to be ambitious, inward, intolerant of error, rather rigidly organized, perfectionist. “You don’t look like a migraine personality,” a doctor once said to me. “Your hair’s messy. But I suppose you’re a compulsive housekeeper.” Actually my house is kept even more negligently than my hair, but the doctor was right nonetheless: perfectionism can also take the form of spending most of a week writing and rewriting and not writing a single paragraph.

After this rash of high profile deaths, and I still think she's the biggest loss.