Joan Didion, ‘New Journalist’ Who Explored Culture and Chaos, Dies at 87

In her junior year at the University of California, Berkeley, where she earned a bachelor’s degree in English in 1956, Ms. Didion submitted an early draft of a short story to Mademoiselle and won a spot as guest fiction editor for the magazine. The following year she won an essay contest sponsored by Vogue. Turning down a trip to Paris, the top prize, she went straight to work at the magazine, where her prose underwent a rigorous if idiosyncratic schooling as she advanced from writing promotional copy to becoming an associate features editor. “In an eight-line caption everything had to work, every word, every comma,” she later said.

By the early 1960s Ms. Didion was writing for Vogue, Mademoiselle and National Review, often on topics like “Jealousy: Is It a Curable Illness?” At the same time, she published a well-received first novel, “Run, River” (1963), about the unraveling of a Sacramento family. Although not as lean as her subsequent fiction, it introduced the preoccupations that governed her later novels — violence, dread, the sickening sense that the world was spinning out of control — and acquainted readers with “the Didion woman,” described by Michiko Kakutani in The New York Times Magazine as the forlorn resident of “a clearly personal wasteland, wandering along highways or through countries in an effort to blot out the pain of consciousness.”

In 1964, she married John Gregory Dunne, a writer at Time with whom she had been friends for several years. They moved to California and started writing screenplays. They also adopted a daughter, Quintana Roo, taking her name from the Mexican state, which they had chanced upon while looking at a map.

In time they became a bicoastal glamour couple, with one foot in Hollywood and the other in Manhattan’s literary salons. Mr. Dunne died of a heart attack at 71 in 2003. Two years later, Quintana Roo Dunne died of pancreatitis and septic shock at 39. Ms. Didion wrote about her husband’s death and her daughter’s illness in “The Year of Magical Thinking” (2005), which won the 2005 National Book Award for nonfiction and was adapted for the Broadway stage in 2007 in a one-woman production starring Vanessa Redgrave. Ms. Didion took up the subject of her daughter’s death in her 2011 memoir, “Blue Nights.”

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/23/books/joan-didion-dead.html