Joan Didion
Joan Didion was born on December 5, 1934, in Sacramento, a city in California where she spent her early years before pursuing formal education. She attended C. K. McClatchy High School and subsequently studied at the University of California, Berkeley, completing an education that preceded her entry into American literary life.
Didion worked across several forms, establishing herself as a writer, journalist, novelist, essayist, and screenwriter who wrote in the English language. She served on editing staff and became associated with the New Journalism movement. Her essay collection Slouching Towards Bethlehem and her novel Play It as It Lays stand among her notable works, both recognized as significant contributions to her body of writing.
The Year of Magical Thinking, another of her notable works, added to a body of writing that earned her substantial institutional recognition. She received the National Book Award, the National Humanities Medal, and the National Medal of Arts. Her output across journalism, essays, fiction, and screenwriting demonstrated the range of forms she worked in throughout her career as a United States citizen writing in English.
Joan Didion died on December 23, 2021, in Manhattan, at the age of eighty-seven. Her career had taken her from Sacramento through the literary institutions of the United States, and her death in Manhattan closed a working life during which she produced notable works across multiple written forms and received three of the country's significant awards for literary and cultural achievement.
Quotes by Joan Didion
Joan Didion's insights on:
California is a place where...the mind is troubled by some...suspicion that things had better work here, because here,beneath that immense bleached sky, is where we run out of continent
She had to have a telephone. There was no one to whom she wanted to talk but she had to have a telephone.
I think we are all well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not.
Novels are like paintings, specifically watercolors. Every stroke you put down you have to go with. Of course you can rewrite, but the original strokes are still there in the texture of the thing.
Quite simply, I was in love with New York. I do not mean love in any colloquial way, I mean that I was in love with the city, the way you love the first person who ever touches you and you never love anyone quite that way again.
Character - the willingness to accept responsibility for one's own life - is the source from which self respect springs.
To have that sense of one's intrinsic worth which constitutes self-respect is potentially to have everything.
I start a book and I want to make it perfect, want it to turn every color, want it to be the world. Ten pages in, I've already blown it, limited it, made it less, marred it. That's very discouraging. I hate the book at that point.