joan didion leaving new york essay

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Joan Didion, 'Goodbye to All That' and the struggle to see yourself clearly

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Anyone who's completed the climb out of their early twenties hopefully has the wits to remember when life was as vivid as Kodachrome and the experience to recognize that perhaps all those new colors were duller than they seemed. Perspective, after all, is one of the great pleasures of getting older. But at the date of her death Thursday at the age of 87, Joan Didion's 1967 essay "Goodbye to All That" remains the permanent sunspot obscuring the center-vision of many maturing writers even contemplating leaving a place like New York and telling other people about it. Only a great artist creates and ruins a genre at the same time. For millennial writers who grew into the body of essays, novels and literary journalism Didion already had waiting for them, it was like sitting down to grainy footage of a party that ended long before they would ever arrive.

Re-reading "Goodbye to All That" today — in the era of online, shortform oversharing — it's striking to a contemporary reader how those 1967 sentences trail on and curl over themselves, like smoke lifting off a cigarette in a breezeless room. "When I first saw New York I was twenty, and it was summertime, and I got off a DC-7 at the old Idlewild temporary terminal in a new dress which had seemed very smart in Sacramento but seemed less smart already, even in the old Idlewild temporary terminal, and the warm air smelled of mildew and some instinct, programmed by all the movies I had ever seen and all the songs I had ever sung and all the stories I had ever read about New York, informed me that it would never quite be the same again," Didion writes in an opening sentence of the piece. "In fact it never was." That first sentence has six commas and six and s. It then lands with the kind of five-word Didionism that marked her career's dehumidified approach to writing and evaluating her own experiences.

A certain degree of ruthlessness with yourself conveys honesty, and it's true that some naivete comes with being young. But not everybody might be so hard on themselves when it comes time to take stock of getting older. "Was anyone ever so young?" Didion wonders, recalling how she was afraid to call a hotel front desk to turn down the air conditioning when she was frigid, feverish and alone. "I am here to tell you that someone was. All I could do during those three days was talk long-distance to the boy I already knew I would never marry in the spring." A husband shows up, along with some furniture, after Didion film-dissolves through a couple pages of life in minimally furnished apartments and all-night parties with strange piano salesmen and various failed writers and self-promoters of her acquaintance.

The essay is so classically a New York story, a journal entry about an outlander's temporary harmonic alignment with a place that most Americans only recognize from their televisions. But the most universal appeal of "Goodbye to All That" is less about New York than its depiction of youth itself, the only city we've all lived in. "I had a friend who could not sleep, and he knew a few other people who had the same trouble, and we would watch the sky lighten and have a last drink with no ice and then go home in the early morning light, when the streets were clean and wet (had it rained in the night? we never knew) and the few cruising taxis still had their headlights on and the only color was the red and green of traffic signals." Think about the last time you really admired the violence of how a stoplight red looks against wet pavement on an empty street. After a while, you realize that's just how the world looks when you're alone.

Looking back, Didion seems frustrated that she couldn't see herself clearly, couldn't more sharply perceive at the time that being wowed has a natural expiration date that was rapidly approaching. "You see I was in a curious position in New York: it never occurred to me that I was living a real life there," she writes. "In my imagination I was always there for just another few months, just until Christmas or Easter or the first warm day in May." She stayed eight years.

Eventually she got tired. Many do. Finally, Didion left for Los Angeles, where the essay wraps up so suddenly that the white space arrives with the stopping power you'd meet in an electric fence. "The golden rhythm was broken," she shrugs. After her essay appeared in the Saturday Evening Post and her book "Slouching Towards Bethlehem," Didion went on to have a distinguished career, which included a lot of formidable books, including 2005's classic "The Year of Magical Thinking," a painful memoir about grieving the sudden death of her husband, John Gregory Dunne. "It was in fact the ordinary nature of everything preceding the event that prevented me from truly believing it had happened, absorbing it, incorporating it, getting past it," she writes of his death. Almost 40 years later, there she was, still struggling to perceive herself clearly, while offering herself to readers to be seen.

It takes time to see clearly after a departure. She knew that.

This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times .

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Goodbye to All That: Writers on Loving and Leaving New York

By maria popova.

The magnificent Cheryl “Sugar” Strayed — one of the finest hearts, minds, and keyboards of our time, whose Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life from Dear Sugar is an existential must and was among the best psychology and philosophy books of 2012 — had a rude awakening to NYC. On the warm September afternoon of her twenty-fourth birthday, she saw a man get stabbed in the West Village. He didn’t die, but the shock of it — and the shock of the general bystander-indifference as a waiter assuringly said to her, “I wouldn’t worry about it,” while pouring her another cup of coffee on the sunny sidelines — planted the seed of slow-growing, poisonous worry about the greater It of it. Strayed writes:

I couldn’t keep myself from thinking everything in New York was superior to every other place I’d ever been, which hadn’t been all that many places. I was stunned by New York. Its grand parks and museums. Its cozy cobbled streets and dazzlingly bright thoroughfares. Its alternately efficient and appalling subway system. Its endlessly gorgeous women clad in slim pants and killer shoes and interesting coats. And yet something happened on my way to falling head over heels in love with the place. Maybe it was the man getting stabbed that no one worried about. Or maybe it was bigger than that. The abruptness, the gruffness, the avoid-eye-contact indifference of the crowded subways and streets felt as foreign to me as Japan or Cameroon, as alien to me as Mars. Even the couple who owned the bodega below our apartment greeted my husband and me each day as if we were complete strangers, which is to say they didn’t greet us at all, no matter how many times we came in to buy toilet paper or soup, cat food or pasta. They merely took our money and returned our change with gestures so automatic and faces so expressionless they might as well have been robots. … This tiny thing … grew to feel like the greatest New York City crime of all, to be denied the universal silent acknowledgment of familiarity, the faintest smile, the hint of a nod.

That realization was the beginning of the end. On a cold February afternoon, Strayed and her husband began packing their New York lives into a double-parked pickup truck. They were done after dark, long after they had anticipated — for living in New York is the art of transmuting a shoebox into a bottomless pit of stuff, only to have it unravel into a black hole of time-space that swallows you whole each time you move shoeboxes — and all that remained was that odd morning-after emptiness of feeling, which Strayed captures with her characteristic blunt elegance:

I’d entered the city the way one enters any grand love affair: with no exit plan. I went willing to live there forever, to become one of the women clad in slim pants and killer shoes and interesting coats. I was ready for the city to sweep me into its arms, but instead it held me at a cool distance. And so I left New York the way one leaves a love affair too: because, much as I loved it, I wasn’t truly in love. I had no compelling reason to stay.

Dani Shapiro , author of the freshly released and wonderful Still Writing: The Pleasures and Perils of a Creative Life — had a rather different experience:

The city, was what people from New Jersey called it. The city, as if there were no other. If you were a suburban Jewish girl in the late 1970s, aching to burst out of the tepid swamp of your adolescence (synagogue! field hockey! cigarettes!), the magnetic pull of the city from across the water was irresistible. Between you and the city were the smokestacks of Newark, the stench of oil refineries, the soaring Budweiser eagle, its lit-up wings flapping high above the manufacturing plant. That eagle — if you were a certain kind of girl, you wanted to leap on its neon back and be carried away. On weekend trips into the city, you’d watch from the backseat of your parents’ car for the line in the Lincoln Tunnel that divided New Jersey from New York, because you felt dead on one side, and alive on the other.

She moved to the alive side at nineteen, to live with a boyfriend she soon married, only to find herself divorced at twenty. (“How many people can claim that?,” Shapiro asks clearly rhetorically — and, clearly, she’d be surprised.) Now, thirty years later, she has a Dear Me moment as she looks back:

I wish I could reach back through time and shake some sense into that lost little girl. I wish I could tell her to wait, to hold on. That becoming a grown-up is not something that happens overnight, or on paper. That rings and certificates and apartments and meals have nothing to do with it. That everything we do matters. Wait , I want to say — but she is impatient, racing ahead of me.

And though she became a writer — a Writer in the City — Shapiro found herself strangely, subtly, yet palpably unfitted for the kind of life the city required:

I could lecture on metaphor; I could teach graduate students; I could locate and deconstruct the animal imagery in Madame Bovary . But I could not squash a water bug by myself. The practicalities of life eluded me. The city — which I knew with the intimacy of a lover — made it very possible to continue like this, carried along on a stream of light, motion, energy, noise. The city was a bracing wind that never stopped blowing, and I was a lone leaf slapped up against the side of a building, a hydrant, a tree.

Writing now from her small study in scenic Connecticut, two hours north of the city, she reflects on her choice to leave after — and despite — having attained her teenage dream:

My city broke its promise to me, and I to it. I fell out of love, and then I fell back in — with my small town, its winding country roads, and the ladies at the post office who know my name. I did my best to become the airbrushed girl on its billboards, but even airbrushed girls grow up. We soften over time, or maybe harden. One way or another, life will have its way with us.

Roxane Gay , author of the beautiful Ayiti , recalls her first impressions of New York as a child in Queens — its city-street grit, its Broadway glitter, its daily human tragedies and triumphs unfolding on every corner. Above all, however, the city sang its siren song of unlimited diversity and unconditional acceptance to her — a young black girl with an artistic bend — as she became obsessed with attending college there:

If I went to school in New York, surely all my problems would be solved. I would learn how to be chic and glamorous. I would learn how to walk fast and wear all black without looking like I was attending a funeral. In adolescence, I was becoming a different kind of stranger in a strange land. I was a theater geek and troubled and angry and hell-bent on forgetting the worst parts of myself. In New York, I told myself, I would no longer be the only freak in the room because the city was full of freaks.

But despite being admitted into NYU — her most dreamsome fulfillment of idyllic fantasy — her parents had their doubts about the city’s dangers and distractions, so they sent her to a prestigious school a few hours away. And yet Gay continued to fuel the fantasy of New York’s make-or-break magic wand of success — a fantasy especially entertained by aspiring writers:

New York City is the center of the writing world, or so we’re told. New York is where all the action happens because the city is where the most important publishers and agents and writers are. New York is where the fancy book parties happen and where the literati rub elbows and everyone knows (or pretends to know) everything about everyone else’s writing career. At some point, New York stopped being the city of my dreams because it stopped being merely an idea I longed to be a part of. New York was very real and very complicated. New York had become an intimidating giant of a place, but still I worried. If I wasn’t there as a writer, was I a writer anywhere?

And yet she did became a writer — a great one — even though she left the fairy Gotham godmother for a tiny Midwestern town, where she now teaches, writes, and revels in the unconditional unfanciness and comforting underwhelmingness of it all. After a recent visit to the city to meet with her agent — for though a Real Writer may live anywhere, a Real Writer’s agent invariably lives in New York — she reflects:

New York was a strange land, and I was still a stranger and would always be one. Overall, that visit was fun. The city was good to me and I looked forward to returning and soon. But. There was nothing for me to say goodbye to in New York because I never truly said hello. I became a writer without all the glamorous or anti-glamorous trappings of New York life I thought I needed.

Goodbye to All That: Writers on Loving and Leaving New York is an exquisite read in its entirety and a wonderful addition to these 10 favorite nonfiction reads on NYC . For an antidote, complement it with some cartographic love letters to the city from those who decided to stay and the mixed experiences of those who came and went.

— Published October 9, 2013 — https://www.themarginalian.org/2013/10/09/goodbye-to-all-that-book/ —

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Goodbye to All That: Writers on Loving and Leaving New York Paperback – October 8, 2013

• Print length 288 pages
• Language English
• Publisher Seal Press
• Publication date October 8, 2013
• Dimensions 6.1 x 1.1 x 9 inches
• ISBN-10 1580054943
• ISBN-13 978-1580054942
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• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Seal Press (October 8, 2013)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• Paperback ‏ : ‎ 288 pages
• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1580054943
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1580054942
• Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 10.4 ounces
• Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6.1 x 1.1 x 9 inches
• #2,124 in Essays (Books)
• #2,788 in Traveler & Explorer Biographies
• #18,923 in Memoirs (Books)

About the author

Sari botton.

Sari Botton is a writer, editor, and teacher living in Kingston, NY. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times and many other publications. She edited the award-winning anthology "Goodbye to All That: Writers on Loving & Leaving NY" and its New York Times bestselling follow-up, "Never Can Say Goodbye: Writers on Their Unshakable Love for NY" and for five years served as Essays Editor at Longreads. She teaches creative nonfiction courses at Catapult and in the MFA program at Bay Path University.

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Joan Didion, New York, and Me

Jaime Herndon

Jaime Herndon finished her MFA in nonfiction writing at Columbia, after leaving a life of psychosocial oncology and maternal-child health work. She is a writer, editor, and book reviewer who drinks way too much coffee. She is a new-ish mom, so the coffee comes in extra handy. Twitter:  @IvyTarHeelJaime

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“I can remember now, with a clarity that makes the nerves in the back of my neck constrict, when New York began for me, but I cannot lay my finger upon the moment it ended…” I know, I know. Despite how iconic and amazing Didion is, that quote is pretty hackneyed. But the thing is, it’s representative of my relationship with NYC, including NYC-centric literature. I’ve lived in NYC at three different points in my life and each time, it was very different. Different, I expected. What I didn’t expect was to ever fall out of love with it, or at the very least, be ambivalent. Interestingly, my relationship with NYC-centric literature has been the same way.  

The first time I lived in NYC, I was 22 and there for grad school. My move-in day was delayed a day or two because of the 2003 blackout — it wasn’t the most auspicious start. My first weekend there, I had dinner at the communal table at Angelica Kitchen, had a late night book browsing session at St. Mark’s, and went to the Guggenheim for the first time. My neighborhood was dotted with Tasti D-Lite (Pinkberry had not yet arrived), Kim’s Video and Music, Ollie’s, and Labyrinth Books. On weekends, I would pick a neighborhood to explore and leave my apartment early, the day wide open for me. The grad program wasn’t a good fit and I left after a year, but I had fallen in love with the city and was already planning my return.

After a summer-long practicum in the city for school in 2008, I knew I would come back one day. In 2011, I moved back — somewhat begrudgingly, though I wasn’t sure why — for grad school, shortly before Hurricane Irene. Again, not a great start. After living down south for four years, the differences were shocking. I had gotten used to walking down the sidewalk, smiling and making eye contact with people, and having conversations with cashiers, clerks, and fellow customers in line — and suddenly all of that was gone. Not just gone, it was purposely avoided. My first day of classes, it rained. When I got to the building, I was one of the last people to get into the elevator, and I made some sort of joke about something, which was met with absolute silence. Clearly I wasn’t in Carolina anymore.

In 2010, Chad Harbach wrote an article titled “MFA vs. NYC,” in the lit mag n+1 (excerpted on Slate ). In it, he examined what he felt were the two American literary scenes: the NYC writing culture and the MFA program writing culture. He wrote about the ways they overlap and do not, the things they value, the status symbols in both, the writer and their behaviors in both, and cultural habits of the communities. I had read his article when in my own writing program, and found it entertaining and mostly true. His 2014 book by the same name, which included essays by writers with and without MFAs, commenting on programs, teaching, and the larger game of writing and publishing, was one I read in nearly one sitting, appreciating all of the questions brought up and ideas put forth.

I had loved Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking , and when I read her essay “Goodbye to All That” in late 2011 several months into my writing program, I thought yes, exactly. Living in Manhattan at nearly 31 was very different than living in Manhattan at 22. I was living one street over from where I’d lived nine years prior, but the neighborhood had changed a bit. It was an odd sort of déjà vu, with a side of gentrification.

I stayed for four years, leaving in order to live near family when I became pregnant with my son. In that time, I did find pockets of solace — I often spent hours and hours at Strand and then working at a table at The Bean, sipping a dirty chai; I walked in new neighborhoods and explored all the falafel places I could. I had my favorite blocks, a favorite candy store, my favorite museums. Thinking about my time working at Bank Street Books still makes me nostalgic. But either the city had changed, or I had. Maybe both.

The two books Goodbye To All That (yes, a nod to Didion’s essay) and Never Can Say Goodbye came out when I was living in the city, and I tore through both of them. The former is a collection of essays about “loving and leaving” New York, and the latter is a book of essays about love for New York. But those descriptions are too pat, too dismissive, of what’s in these essays, which is probably why I love and relate to them. Feelings of isolation, financial struggles, real estate envy, finally making it your home — it all reminds me of what I loved about living there, and what I don’t miss; the inexplicable urge to defend the city while also being fed up with it at the same time. Wanting to leave, but at the same time, having the contradictory thought of maybe trying to find some sort of way to hold on.

Writing well about place can be tricky. Southern literature has a knack for establishing place as a sort of character in itself. I think writing well about cities is especially hard, particularly in fiction. Too overpowering and it just feels fake and overwhelming; too mild and it can feel blah. The worst is when it just doesn’t feel authentic. But when authors do it well, it transports us. Not just into the story, but into places like Maycomb, Alabama (Harper Lee); or late at night after closing time at the Met (E.L. Konigsburg); or Eatonville, Florida (Zora Neale Hurston).

When I lived in the city, I rarely read novels set there. When I left, at first I couldn’t get enough. It was like I wanted to remind myself of what I left, but only in an abstract sort of way. Now, I don’t miss it so much, but I also don’t read as many books set in NYC. I used to love the city, be at home in it; that slowly morphed into unease with it, and eventually, the need to leave. Now, I just feel wistful at times, and look forward to my next visit, whenever that may be.

I know some writers like to scoff at Didion’s popularity among writers, as if that diminishes her prose or intellect. While her essays and various observations about New York may be overly quoted or have become a shorthand of sorts, it doesn’t make them disposable. And just as her writing has meant different things to me at different times, so has New York and its literature — and all of these will stay with me in some way for the rest of my life.

If you’re interested in reading more books about New York City, check out this list of must-read NYC novels , and if you want to read more Joan Didion but aren’t sure where to start, this post about which book to read depending on what adventure you want is a good place to start!

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Joan Didion’s Magic Trick

What was it that gave her such power?

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“T hink of this as a travel piece,” she might have written. “Imagine it in Sunset magazine: ‘Five Great California Stops Along the Joan Didion Trail.’ ”

Or think of this as what it really is: a road trip of magical thinking.

I had known that Didion’s Parkinson’s was advancing; seven or eight months earlier, someone had told me that she was vanishing; someone else had told me that for the past two years, she hadn’t been able to speak.

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I didn’t want her to die. My sense of myself is in many ways wrapped up in the 40 essays in Slouching Towards Bethlehem and The White Album . I don’t know how many times I’ve read Democracy .

“Call me the author,” she writes in that novel. “Let the reader be introduced to Joan Didion.”

There are people who admire Joan Didion, and people who enjoy reading Joan Didion, and people who think Joan Didion is overrated. But then there are the rest of us. People who can’t really explain how those first two collections hit us, or why we can never let them go.

I picked up Slouching Towards Bethlehem in 1975, the year I was 14. I had met Didion that spring, although she wasn’t famous yet, outside of certain small but powerful circles. She’d been a visiting professor in the Berkeley English department, and my father was the department chair. But I didn’t read her until that summer. I was in Ireland, as I always was in the summer, and I was bored out of my mind, as I always was in the summer, and I happened to see a copy of Slouching Towards Bethlehem in a Dublin living room. I read that book and something changed inside me, and it has stayed that way for the rest of my life.

Over the previous two years people kept contacting me with reports of her decline. I didn’t want to hear reports of her decline. I wanted to hear about the high-ceilinged rooms of the Royal Hawaiian Hotel, and about all the people who came to parties at her house on Franklin Avenue. I wanted to go with her to pick out a dress for Linda Kasabian, the Manson girl who drove the getaway car the night of the murders. I wanted to spend my days in the house out in Malibu, where the fever broke.

In 1969, Didion wanted to go to Vietnam, but her editor told her that “the guys are going out,” and she didn’t get to go. When her husband had been at Time and asked to go, he was sent at once, and he later wrote about spending five weeks in the whorehouses of Saigon.

Being denied the trip to Vietnam is the only instance I know of that her work was limited by her gender. She fought against the strictures of the time—and the ridiculous fact of being from California, which in the 1950s was like being from Mars, but with surfboards.

She fought all of that not by changing herself, or by developing some ball-breaking personality. She did it by staying exactly as she was—unsentimental, strong, deeply feminine, and a bit of a seductress—and writing sentence after sentence that cut the great men of New Journalism off at the knees. Those sentences, those first two collections—who could ever compete with them?

Slouching Towards Bethlehem and The White Album created a new vocabulary of essay writing, one whose influence is on display every day of the week in the tide of personal essays published online by young writers. Those collections changed the way many people thought about nonfiction, and even the way they thought about themselves.

A thousand critics have addressed the worthy task of locating the errors of logic in those essays and calling out the various engines that turn the wheels: narcissism, whiteness, wealth. Frustrated by the entire cult of Didion, they’ve tried to crash it down by making a reasonable case against its foundational texts. God knows, none of that is heavy lifting. Joan Didion: guilty as charged.

From the September 2015 issue: The elitist allure of Joan Didion

But what no one has ever located is what makes so many people feel possessive not just of the stories, but also of their connection to the writer. What is it about these essays that takes so many people hostage?

At a certain point in her decline, I was gingerly asked if I would write an obituary. No, I would not. I was not on that particular train. I was on the train of trying to keep her alive.

I wanted to feel close to her—not to the mega-celebrity, very rich, New York Joan Didion. I wanted to feel close to the girl who came from Nowhere, California (have you ever been to Sacramento?), and blasted herself into the center of everything. I wanted to feel close to the young woman who’d gone to Berkeley, and studied with professors I knew, and relied on them—as I had once relied on them—to show her a path.

The thing to do was get in the car and drive. I would go and find her in the places where she’d lived.

The trip began in my own house in Los Angeles, with me doing something that had never occurred to me before: I Googled the phrase Joan Didion’s house Sacramento . Even as I did, I felt that it was a mistake, that something as solid and irrefutable as a particular house on a particular street might put a rent in what she would have called “the enchantment under which I’ve lived my life.” What if it was the wrong kind of house? Too late: A color photograph was already blooming on the screen.

2000 22nd Street is a 5,000-square-foot home in a prosperous neighborhood with a wraparound porch and two staircases . The Didions had moved there when Joan was in 11th grade. It was a beautiful house. But it was the wrong kind of house.

The Joan Didion of my imagination didn’t come from a wealthy family. How did I miss the fact that what her family loved to talk about most was property—specifically, “land, price per acre and C-2 zoning and assessments and freeway access”? Why didn’t I understand the implications of her coming across an aerial photograph of some land her father had once thought of turning into a shopping mall, or of the remark “Later I drive with my father to a ranch he has in the foothills” to talk with “the man who runs his cattle”?

Perhaps because they came after this beautiful line:

When we talk about sale-leasebacks and right-of-way condemnations we are talking in code about things we like best, the yellow fields and the cottonwoods and the rivers rising and falling and the mountain roads closing when the heavy snow comes in.

On my first morning in Sacramento, there was a cold, spitting rain, and my husband drove me to the grand house on 22nd Street , where people are always dropping by asking to look at “Joan Didion’s home.” It was the largest house on the block, and it was on a corner lot. (“ No magical thinking required ,” the headline on Realtor.com had said when it was listed for sale in 2018.)

I stood in the rain looking up at the house, and I realized that something was wrong. She had described going home to her parents’ house to finish each of her first four novels, working in her old bedroom, which was painted carnation pink and where vines covered the window . But it was hard to imagine vines growing over the upstairs windows of this house; they would have had to climb up two very tall stories and occlude the light in the downstairs rooms as well.

Later, I spoke with one of Didion’s relatives, who explained that the family left the house on 22nd Street not long after Joan graduated from high school. The house where she finished her novels, and where she brought her daughter for her first birthday, was in the similarly expensive area of Arden Oaks, but it has been so thoroughly renovated as to be almost unrecognizable to the family members who knew it. In fact, the Didions had owned a series of Sacramento houses. But myths take hold in a powerful and permanent way, and the big house on 22nd Street is the one readers want to see.

The neighborhood was very pretty, and the gardens were well tended. But Joan Didion wasn’t there.

In some ways, Sacramento seemed to me like a Joan Didion theme park. In less time than it takes to walk from Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride to the Pirates of the Caribbean, you could get from the Didions’ house on 22nd Street to a house they had lived in earlier, on U Street.

We drove around looking at places that I had read about almost all my life. Nothing seemed real, and there was almost no sign that Joan Didion had grown up there. If I lived in Sacramento, I would rename the capitol building for her. I would turn a park into the Joan Didion Garden, with wide pathways covered in pea gravel, as in the Tuileries.

I never imagined that I would see the two governor’s mansions she describes in “Many Mansions.” The essay contrasts the old governor’s mansion—a “large white Victorian gothic”—with the new, 12,000-square-foot one that was to be the Reagans’ home, but that was left unfinished after his second term. During this period she loathed the Reagans, but not for political reasons. She hated their taste.

The size of the house was an affront to Didion, as was the fact that it had “no clear view of the river.” But above all, she hated the features built into the mansion, things representative of the new, easy “California living” she abhorred. The house had a wet bar in the formal living room, a “refreshment center” in the “recreation room,” only enough bookcases “for a set of the World Book and some Books of the Month,” and one of those kitchens that seems designed exclusively for microwaving and trash compacting.

She didn’t just hate the house; she feared it: “I have seldom seen a house so evocative of the unspeakable,” she wrote. (This is why some people hate Joan Didion, and I get it. I get it.)

Then there’s the old mansion, which she used to visit “once in a while” during the term of Governor Earl Warren, because she was friends with his daughter Nina. “The old Governor’s Mansion was at that time my favorite house in the world,” she wrote, “and probably still is.”

In the essay, she describes taking a public tour of the old mansion, which was filled with the ghosts of her own past and also the crude realities of the present. The tourists complained about “all those stairs” and “all that wasted space,” and apparently they could not imagine why a bathroom might be big enough to have a chair (“to read a story to a child in the bathtub,” of course) or why the kitchen would have a table with a marble top (to roll out pastry).

It is one of those essays where Didion instructs you on the right kind of taste to have, and I desperately wanted to agree. But in my teenage heart of hearts, I had to admit that I wanted the house with the rec room. I kept this thought to myself.

When my husband and I arrived at the old governor’s mansion, I started laughing. Nobody would want to live there, and certainly nobody in the boundless Googie, car-culture future of 1960s California. (It looked like the Psycho house, but with a fresh coat of paint.) That said, we drove over to the house that was originally built for the Reagans and that the state had since sold, and it was a grim site : It looked like the world’s largest Taco Bell.

The funny thing about all of this is that at the time Didion wrote that essay, Jerry Brown was the governor of California, and he had no intention of living in any kind of mansion. Instead he rented an apartment and slept on a mattress on the floor, sometimes with his girlfriend, Linda Ronstadt. And—like every California woman with a pulse—Didion adored him.

This is Joan Didion’s magic trick: She gets us on the side of “the past” and then reveals that she’s fully a creature of the present. The Reagans’ trash compactor is unspeakable, but Jerry Brown’s mattress is irresistible.

Before we left Sacramento we made a final stop, at C. K. McClatchy Senior High School, Didion’s alma mater. There was one thing I wanted to see: a bronze plaque set into cement at the top of a flight of stairs. I couldn’t believe that it hadn’t been jackhammered out, but there it was.

This building is dedicated to truth liberty toleration by the native sons of the golden west. September 19, 1937

These plaques were once all over the state at different civic institutions, and especially in schools. The Native Sons of the Golden West is a still-extant fraternal organization founded to honor the pioneers and prospectors who arrived in California in the middle of the 19th century. The group’s president proclaimed in 1920 that “California was given by God to a white people.” The organization has since modernized, but you cannot look at the pioneers’ achievements without taking into account the genocide of California’s actual Native peoples. “Clearing the land” was always a settler’s first mission, and it didn’t refer to cutting down trees.

People from the East often say that Joan Didion explained California to them. Essays have described her as the state’s prophet, its bard, its chronicler. But Didion was a chronicler of white California. Her essays are preoccupied with the social distinctions among three waves of white immigration: the pioneers who arrived in the second half of the 19th century; the Okies, who came in the 1930s; and the engineers and businessmen of the postwar aerospace years, who blighted the state with their fast food and their tract housing and their cultural blank slate.

In Slouching Towards Bethlehem , there’s an essay called “Notes From a Native Daughter”—which is how Joan Didion saw herself. It’s generally assumed that she began to grapple with her simplistic view of California histor y only much later in life, in Where I Was From . But in this first collection, she’s beginning to wonder how much of her sense of California is shaped by history or legend— by stories, not necessarily accurate , that are passed down through the generations.

“I remember running a boxer dog of my brother’s over the same flat fields that our great-great-grandfather had found virgin and had planted,” she writes. And she describes swimming in the same rivers her family had swum in for generations: “The Sacramento, so rich with silt that we could barely see our hands a few inches beneath the surface; the American, running clean and fast with melted Sierra snow until July, when it would slow down.”

She’s writing about a feeling of deep rootedness not just to the land but to the generations of her own family who lived on it. But she already knows that it won’t last. “All that is constant about the California of my childhood is the rate at which it disappears,” she writes.

When my husband and I had arrived in town, we’d stopped for a cup of coffee at the McDonald’s at Old Auburn Road and Sunrise Boulevard. You could see how flat the terrain was and how obviously it had once been ranchland. Who had sold that beautiful land to the McDonald’s Corporation? The Didions. Then we went to a clutch of small, unlovely tract houses, and found the street sign I was looking for: Didion Court. The tract houses were there because, according to the author Michelle Chihara , Joan and her family had once again sold a parcel of land.

What happened to the yellow fields and the cottonwoods and the rivers rising and falling? None of my business, I guess.

Sacramento was a bust. I had the feeling that I could stay on the road forever and not understand Joan Didion. But as soon as we got on the freeway, it stopped raining, and after a while there were actual patches of sunshine and dry cement.

In Berkeley, things would begin to look familiar.

I was sitting on the floor of the “television room” in the Tri Delta sorority house on Warring Street in Berkeley. I hadn’t been in a sorority house in 40 years, but it all came back to me: the sleepy, underwater feel of the house at midday; the muffled sounds of a meal being prepared in the kitchen; the constant effort to keep a mild depression from growing; and the endless interest in candies and snacks.

The house was large and attractive, dove gray and—like all sorority houses—fortified. A gate, a locked door, a security camera, and a housemother, busy on the phone. The chapter’s president, Grace Naylor, gave me a tour and we chatted with a few girls sitting in the TV room. There was a wide staircase with a landing, perfect for making a dramatic entrance in a new dress or storming upstairs in a fit of anger. The rooms on one side looked out onto pretty Warring Street; the ones on the other side were filled with the view burned into the retinas of everyone who has ever lived in Berkeley: the beautiful campus and campanile, the flatlands, and beyond them the Golden Gate and the bay, the alluring city on the other side.

Naylor told me that until she’d gotten my email, no one had known that Joan Didion had lived in the house, although several members were fans of her writing. How could they possibly not know that, I wondered, and then was faced with the obvious answer: Didion had lived there 70 years ago.

When we sat down in the television room, I suddenly realized that I didn’t have a single question I could ask. What is it like to live in a sorority house that you recently discovered Joan Didion once lived in? I was at a loss. But Naylor was the chapter president of a top-tier sorority, and she certainly knew how to organize a house visit.

“All our old scrapbooks are in here,” she said, gesturing toward some cupboards, and I glanced at them, suddenly on high alert. Would I like to look through them to see if we could find one from Didion’s years in the house?

I thought two things simultaneously: Eureka! (which is the California state motto) and This is the most exciting thing that has ever happened to me .

The scrapbooks were piled in the cupboards and weren’t necessarily in the best condition—what were the chances of finding one from 70 years ago? They were at once just some old scrapbooks of minor sociological interest, and also a slice of Didion’s life that the other vultures hadn’t yet picked over. Regarding Joan Didion, Tri Delt, I was vulture No. 1.

We started shuffling through the crumbling scrapbooks, and then suddenly the 1954 volume appeared. Because Joan Didion is cool, and because UC Berkeley is cool, many people assume she was in some way part of the revolution. But she arrived at Berkeley a decade too early.

The 1954 scrapbook was a testament to the Tri Delt house being the next right place for a rich girl from Sacramento who had gone to ballet class and Sunday school. It contained a photograph of the winners of a father/daughter look-alike contest, and a press clipping describing “one of the Gayest Parties for the young set,” which had taken place “in the Pebble Beach home of Dr. and Mrs. A. Carol McKenny.” It also contained so many engagement announcements that marriage seemed to be not just one tacit aim of ballet class, Sunday school, and Tri Delt but the entire point.

Toward the end of the scrapbook and with the vague suggestion that even our tiny, troubled Joan Didion had something of her own to look forward to: a Daily Cal clipping announcing that two Berkeley undergrads were headed to New York to take part in the Mademoiselle magazine program. Didion’s selection for the program revealed, if nothing else, that the people who chose the winners had an uncanny ability to spot early talent, all the way from Sylvia Plath in the ’50s to Mona Simpson in the late ’70s. The famous era was the 1950s. Girls from around the country were brought to the city of dreams, housed in the Barbizon Hotel, taught about layouts and martinis, and—should the worst happen—given the names of certain Park Avenue doctors.

Didion’s editorship took place between her junior and senior years of college; when she returned to Berkeley, she moved out of the Tri Delt house and into an apartment. I didn’t have much hope for the little brown-shingled apartment building she had lived in after the Tri Delt house. The house on 22nd Street in Sacramento had been interesting, but cold. The sorority house had presented me with a historically accurate picture, but a remote one.

Yet I pulled open the wooden gate of 2520 Ridge Road and stepped into a little garden that was shaded and filled with dark-green plants—and just like that, her living ghost rushed past me. She lingered for a few moments, and then she left, stepping into the vivid past, wearing her dirty raincoat and heading to the seminar that most freighted and engaged her: the writing class of the great Mark Schorer, whom I knew very well when I was growing up. He was a very kind person and also a peerless literary critic, and he found in Didion’s early work evidence not just of a great writer. “One thinks of the great performers —in ballet, opera, circuses,” he said. “Miss Didion, it seems to me, is blessed with everything.”

And then Berkeley was over, and she headed back to New York because she had won the really big prize in the world of women’s magazines: the Prix de Paris at Vogue , which led to a job at the magazine. This was a marker of being the right kind of young woman—of having the right family, or the right schools, or the right wardrobe—in New York in the glamorous 1950s.

It had begun.

Joan Didion’s greatest essay is “Goodbye to All That.” It’s about the excitement and intoxication of being young in New York, from the moment she got off the plane “and some instinct, programmed by all the movies I had ever seen and all the songs I had ever heard sung and all the stories I had ever read about New York, informed me that it would never be quite the same again. In fact it never was.”

She had “come out of the West and reached the mirage,” and the epigraph to the essay is part of an old nursery rhyme:

How many miles to Babylon? Three score miles and ten— Can I get there by candlelight? Yes, and back again.

For years it was known as the greatest leaving–New York essay of all time. It’s about the revolving door, the way you can arrive there young, innocent, and new, but the very process of adapting to the city will coarsen and age you.

In 1996, a writer for New York magazine revealed something that had been carefully protected from the press, and that gives the essay a completely different meaning: What’s tearing her apart is a love affair that has ended with a man named Noel Parmentel. With that reading, you understand the essay’s insistently romantic tones: She can no longer bear to look at blue-and-white-striped sheets, to smell certain perfumes or Henri Bendel jasmine soap. “I cut myself off from the one person who was closer to me than any other,” she wrote.

Soon after coming to the city, she had fallen for Parmentel, a figure on the New York literary scene. A southerner who attended several parties a night, Parmentel was famous for getting drunk, insulting hostesses and guests, and letting loose with ethnic slurs. The heart wants what it wants.

Read: The things I would never do

In 2014, Parmentel agreed to be interviewed about the relationship by Tracy Daugherty, who wrote the indispensable biography of Didion, The Last Love Song . “She was better than all of them,” Parmentel said of the Vogue editors. “Far above those people in every way.” A lot of her colleagues at Vogue were jealous of her, he said: “This little nobody from Sacramento shows up in her little dresses and outshines them all. She’s smarter. Mannered. Better-bred.”

He helped her sell her first novel, which was in part dedicated to him, and which has an epigraph from the Robert Lowell poem “Man and Wife.” He would call her service and leave long messages; he would insult her, forget about her, reappear—but he wouldn’t marry her.

“This is the guy you ought to marry,” he famously told her about his mentee John Gregory Dunne. And—after visiting Dunne’s family home and noting the orderliness of its routines and the impeccable way that his mother kept house—she did.

The marriage “was a very good thing to do but badly timed,” Didion wrote. She was emotionally devastated, she didn’t know what to do with herself, and one night she and John ended up getting ferociously drunk at a party. They went to a diner for breakfast, and she cried. Later that day, he called her from his office at Time and asked her, “Do you mind if I quit?” She said no, and soon they were in California for a six-month trial that lasted 24 years.

Franklin Avenue

How many miles to Babylon? One and a half, as it turned out, but I didn’t know it yet.

I moved to Los Angeles in 1988 with a new job, a first husband, my Joan Didion books, and the gray-and-pink jersey dress I’d worn to my rehearsal dinner. Every day I drove through Hollywood on my way to the Valley, and I’d cross Franklin and think to myself, That must be the same Franklin Avenue that Joan Didion lived on .

I never went looking for the house, because Didion had explained in The White Album that it had been slated for demolition: “The owners were only waiting for a zoning change to tear the house down and build a high-rise apartment building.”

Once, it had been the most happening place in a certain world, the absolute crossroads of thrilling, louche Hollywood and the crackling world of ideas that were pouring in from the East.

Franklin Avenue Joan Didion is the one we all fell in love with. In that house she became the woman who walked barefoot on hardwood floors and onto airplanes, and went to the supermarket wearing a bikini. She’s the reason so many readers misunderstood the obvious fact of her conservatism—because she was cool. (How conservative? Throughout the ’60s she was famous for telling Hollywood friends that if she could she would vote for Barry Goldwater over and over again.)

She’s the one who paid the babysitter who told her she had death in her aura, then opened the French doors and went to sleep in the dark of a “senseless-killing neighborhood.” This is the Joan Didion who invented Los Angeles in the ’60s as an expression of paranoia, danger, drugs, and the movie business. The Joan Didion who took amphetamines to work and bourbon to relax, the tiny girl who was entirely in command of the helpless ardor she inspired.

The parties. How to account for what a huge hit the couple were almost as soon as they got to Hollywood? And also, how to account for Joan Didion, one of the century’s greatest prose stylists, doing all of that cooking, while being pestered by Nora Ephron for her Mexican-chicken recipe, keeping in mind the eccentric drinks orders of various rock-and-roll people (brandy and Benedictine for Janis Joplin), and clearing the drug takers from the landing outside her daughter’s bedroom?

Read: We sell ourselves stories in order to live

Those parties were something to see. But in 1979, Didion published The White Album and revealed that this period had been the hardest time in her life. In the opening pages of that collection, she reproduces part of her psychiatrist’s report, which caused a sensation; it was an advertisement for whichever idea you had of Joan Didion, either that she was bravely exposing what others might work hard to conceal, or that she was an exhibitionist.

In the report, she is said to have an “increasing inability of the ego to mediate the world of reality and to cope with normal stress,” and a “fundamentally pessimistic, fatalistic, and depressive view of the world around her. It is as though she feels deeply that all human effort is foredoomed to failure.” She is, the report reveals, being pushed “further into a dependent, passive withdrawal.”

Didion writes that things she had been taught all her life no longer seemed to apply, that the script for how she had been raised to lead her life was never meant to be improvised on. “It was hard to even get my attention,” she says; her mind was on other things.

It was also in this place—and in this heavy weather—that she raised her only child, Quintana, from infancy through age 5. The couple had adopted the little girl a few days after her birth at Saint John’s Hospital in Santa Monica, and she appears throughout these essays as a dream, a perfect child, almost as an abstraction. Her name alone—Quintana Roo, the name of a Mexican state—seemed to me, at 14, the perfect name for a baby: unique, mysterious, feminine. The kind of name a girl would give to a doll.

What really happened during those years? There is no reason, now, not to ask.

“We are here on this island in the middle of the Pacific in lieu of filing for divorce.”

Everyone who loves Joan Didion remembers that sentence—the shock of it, the need to race back up to the top of the essay to see if you’d missed something. “I had better tell you where I am, and why,” that essay, “In the Islands,” begins. She’s at the Royal Hawaiian Hotel in a high-ceilinged room, the trade winds making the long, translucent curtains billow. She’s with her husband and 3-year-old Quintana, “blond and barefoot, a child of paradise in a frangipani lei.”

But Didion hasn’t gone to Honolulu merely for the flowers or the trade winds. She is there “trying to put my life back together.”

When I first read The White Album , I was in my bedroom in my parents’ house and it was the deep middle of the night, and there it was, this flaming arrow. What could I do? Reach for my cellphone and type Did Joan Didion get divorced? There were no cellphones then. Reading, in those days, was just you and the writer, and all she had to reel you in with was a line of words. When I fell in love with Joan Didion, it was just the two of us and all of those electric sentences, and that was enough.

Everyone remembers that line about divorce, but no one seems to remember a different and perhaps more consequential line that appears later. She reports that during that week in Honolulu, husband and wife were considerate of each other, and no mention was made of “kicked-down doors, hospitalized psychotics, any chronic anxieties or packed suitcases.”

Kicked-down doors?

We all know about the famous and in many ways marvelous (in the sense of the miraculous, the supernatural) marriage of Joan Didion and John Gregory Dunne. We know about it from The Year of Magical Thinking and from countless interviews and profiles and perhaps from personal experience. We know that their lives and writing careers were so deeply intertwined that they were rarely apart. They kept to a daily schedule that was like a dream writing life, each writing in the morning, then breaking for lunch; each returning to work until the early evening, when they had drinks and dinner together. If Joan went to get her teeth cleaned, John read the newspapers in the waiting room.

Dunne was fantastic company; he loved gossip and he always had A-plus intel. Calvin Trillin wrote a novel, Floater , in which a character is based on Dunne. When they both worked at Time , Dunne was forever coming into Trillin’s office, dramatically holding up his hand, and saying, “ This you will not believe.” The Didion-Dunnes’ marriage was one long conversation between two writers completely in sync about their beliefs on writing and always interested in what the other had to say.

But Dunne also had a legendary and vicious temper, and he was an incredibly mean drunk. Even his pals reported as much, because it would be impossible to assess the man without admitting to these central facts of his nature. They had read about the kicked-down doors, and many who were close to the couple had witnessed more examples of his rage.

Susanna Moore, who was the couple’s close friend and lived with them for a while on Franklin Avenue, writes in her memoir, Miss Aluminum , that there was “love between them, and respect.” But she adds that Joan “was also afraid of him, given the violence of his temper.”

Moore recounts a time when she was out to dinner with the couple, and she mentioned a bit of gossip she’d heard: There was talk in town that Jann Wenner was gay. Dunne exploded in rage, and took after her in such a manner that he had to excuse himself from the table. As he walked away, Moore started to get out of her chair. “Joan grabbed my arm and begged me to stay, making me promise that I would not leave her alone with him.”

There weren’t words in those days for how a man’s rage could shape the life of a woman who lived with him, but we have one now: abuse .

Didion never spoke openly about Dunne’s rage until near the end of her life. In 2017 her nephew, Griffin Dunne, made a documentary about his aunt, The Center Will Not Hold , which is full of photographs and family memories. As far as I know, the interviews she gave him are, poignantly, her last statements to the public.

At one point, she’s talking about marrying Dunne and the idea of falling in love, and she almost flinches. “I don’t know what falling in love means. It’s not part of my world.”

Later, she adds: “He had a temper. A horrible temper.”

What would set him off? Griffin asks.

“Everything would set him off.”

Someone recently told me that the house on Franklin was, in fact, still there—and when I thought about it, I remembered that at the very end of the street, the apartments give way to rambling 1920s houses. That’s where she lived.

I drove west on Franklin until I got to Camino Palmero, where the zoning changes. I parked down the street from the house, realizing I’d been walking right past it for 30 years. With each step closer, I felt more emotional. And there it was, in better shape than when Didion had lived in it, the cracked front path now covered in smooth pavement, the house freshly painted white, the lawn in perfect condition. It’s a healing center now, for a new-age spiritual group.

I stood looking at it as though I had found the way to Manderley, as though it were possible to take something out of the dream of reading and into the bricks and mortar of the other thing. Life. The tall French doors looked into the living room where there had been so many parties, the doors Joan had opened before going to sleep.

The house on Franklin was the only one that brought tears to my eyes. But of course they were tears for myself, not her. When she was in New York, there was a song on all the jukeboxes: “But where is the schoolgirl who used to be me?”

Gone, gone, gone.

When Joan Didion was living in Malibu, she learned that in one of the canyons there was a nursery that grew only orchids, and she began to visit it. Even as a child she had loved greenhouses; once she was informed that the purchase of a five-cent pansy did not entitle her to “spend the day.”

The orchid nursery was owned by the Hollywood producer Arthur Freed and his brother Hugo, but it was in the care of Amado Vazquez, a gentle and courtly person, transmitting, “in his every movement, a kind of ‘different’ propriety, a correctness, a cultural reserve.” She spent hours in those greenhouses filled with “the most aqueous filtered light, the softest tropical air, the most silent clouds of flowers.” Vazquez seemed to assume she had her own reasons for being there, and he would speak only to offer her “a nut he had just cracked, or a flower cut from a plant he was pruning.”

This was before orchids were widely cloned, imported by the millions, and sold in Walmart and Trader Joe’s. This was when orchids were rare, expensive, often propagated by hand . And, as Didion eventually realized, Vazquez was “one of a handful of truly great orchid breeders in the world.”

Didion learned how to read the labels of the hybrids he was growing, two orchids cross-pollinated and resulting—with luck, and after four years—in a new variety: Amabilis x Rimestadiana = Elisabethae . Eventually, she learned that the orchids there were worth “ten thousand to more than three-quarters of a million dollars,” and occasionally she would watch “serious men in dark suits” come to talk with Hugo, their voices hushed, “as if they had come to inspect medieval enamels, or uncut diamonds.”

The passage about the nursery comprises some of the final pages of The White Album , and I have thought about it so many times. From the tumult of Slouching Towards Bethlehem and the near divorce to the danger of living in the “senseless-killing neighborhood” in a rented house slated for destruction—after all of that, she wants us to know, she had gotten to safety.

After seven years in Malibu, and very much against her own desires, she and Dunne moved to Brentwood—carefully groomed, hugely expensive, and with easy access to the best private schools—which was the beginning of the end of my great interest in her.

But in Malibu there was the house, and the crashing ocean, and Quintana was a little girl in elementary school, whose troubles had yet to emerge. Of all the things receding from Didion, Quintana was always the most urgent. Didion wrote two novels— A Book of Common Prayer and Democracy —about a daughter leaving her mother.

A few months after Didion and her family moved away, the notorious Agoura-Malibu firestorm roared through the canyons. Birds exploded in midair; more than 200 houses were destroyed; people waited on the beach to be rescued, because nowhere else was safe.

Shortly before the fire, Amado Vazquez had saved enough money to buy out the Freed brothers, and now the greenhouses were destroyed. He and Didion stood in the ruins, almost in tears. Years of his work destroyed, a fortune in stud plants.

One winter day, my husband and I made good time up the Pacific Coast Highway to Joan’s house. It had 132 private stairs down to the beach, and a long driveway. From the street, all you could see was the house number, 33428, on a simple, weathered sign. It wasn’t the kind of sign you associate with Malibu; it was the kind you associate with Stinson Beach or any of the other Northern California beaches where underplaying your hand is the thing to do, and putting your house number on a piece of driftwood nailed to the fence is the right way to do it. The setting was perfect. But the old house that she loved so much was gone, replaced with the modern one that’s there now.

The Didion-Dunnes would sometimes drive over the Ventura County line to eat fried fish. We did the same, eating in the huge open-air dining room at Neptune’s Net—established in 1956—and feeling very cheerful. That’s the thing about marriage: You can go for two whole weeks thinking, That’s it, we’ve gotten to the very bottom of things to talk about , but then you go for a drive on a sunny day and there you are, same as you ever were.

I hadn’t looked up the house on Franklin Avenue, because I thought it had been destroyed, and I had never looked up Vazquez’s nursery, because how could he have ever rebuilt it? But a few days before heading up the coast, I looked up the name— Zuma Orchids —and found it, about a mile up Zuma Canyon from the beach.

When I was young, I was so troubled for so long. My mind would rage beyond my control, and many times I would think of those trembling clouds of blossoms and that soft tropical air and wish I could go there, and now here I was, driving down a canyon road, all but deserted—and there it was.

I almost wanted to turn around. I realized—perhaps the lesson of the whole excursion—that I didn’t want these places to be real, because they lived so vividly in my mind. But I stepped through the greenhouse door and landed in Oz: more color and beauty than I could take in. An extremely kind man—Oliverio Alvarado—chatted with us. He had worked with Vazquez, who had died about a decade ago, and he welcomed us to look at the flowers. There were some of the common moth orchids, but there were other orchids, some so delicate and unusual that they lifted the flowers entirely out of the realm of Walmart and Trader Joe’s and once again elevated them to something precious and rare.

My husband picked out a few plants, and I worried that they would cost $10,000, but they didn’t. They were beautiful orchids, not stud plants. At one point Alvarado asked us how we had heard of the nursery—he must have seen something of the reverence I had for the plants, my sense of wonder.

I said that I had read about the nursery in a book by Joan Didion.

“Oh yes,” he said, brightening. “Amado made a hybrid for her.”

For a moment everyone was alive—Amado and also Joan and John and Quintana. But they’re all gone, of course. The difficult husband she adored, the difficult daughter she shaped her life around, and then Joan herself.

When I looked for the Joan Didion orchid, I couldn’t find it. But then I realized that I’d been looking for the wrong name.

Phal. James McPherson x Phal. Stuartiana = Phalaenopsis Quintana Roo Dunne

“When John Wayne rode through my childhood, and perhaps through yours,” Joan Didion wrote in Slouching Towards Bethlehem , “he determined forever the shape of certain of our dreams.”

The only John Wayne movie I’ve ever seen all the way through is The Searchers . But when Didion walked through the front door of my parents’ house when I was 14 years old, that’s what she did for me. She was a hot stock rising and I was a young girl falling, and she broke my fall.

From the January/February 2012 issue: Caitlin Flanagan on the autumn of Joan Didion

She was in Berkeley as a Regents’ Lecturer, and because my father was then the chair of the English department, he was sort of serving as her host. She came to our house for dinner, and she hardly said a word. But a week or so later, when my father said, “There’s something weird going on with Joan Didion and women,” that got my attention . Apparently, her office hours—usually the most monastic of an academic’s life—were being mobbed. Not just by students; by women from the Bay Area who had heard she was there and just wanted to see her. All of these women felt that Slouching Towards Bethlehem had changed them.

It wasn’t a book that was supposed to change anyone. Not only because that was by no means Joan Didion’s intent, but also because—look at the subjects. How can an essay about Alcatraz (as an attractive, mostly deserted place, not as a statement on either incarceration or the land theft perpetrated against California’s Indian tribes); an essay about a baby’s first birthday party; a forensic investigation of the marital tensions that led Lucille Miller to kill her husband—how can all of those add up to something life-changing?

Because in 1968, here was a book that said that even a troubled woman, or a heartbroken woman, or a frightened woman could be a very powerful person. In “Why I Write”—which was, in fact, the Regents’ Lecture—she famously described writing as an act of aggression , in which a writer takes control of a reader and imposes her own opinions, beliefs, and attitudes on that reader. A woman could be a hostage-taker, and what she held you hostage to were both shocking public events and some of the most interior and delicate thoughts a woman can have. This woman with the vanda orchid in her hair and her frequent states of incapacitation could put almost anyone under her power.

I had no power growing up, but I did have books and ideas, and I could be funny. I know I could have ended up being a magazine writer without ever having that chance experience. But what Joan Didion taught me was that it didn’t matter that I had such a messy, unenviable life—I could sit down, all alone, and write enough drafts to figure out what I thought about something and then punch it out into the culture.

Two years after her lecture, Mark Schorer died, and the year after that, my parents sold the house we lived in on Bret Harte Road. For reasons I don’t know, the current owner has allowed the house to return to nature. My mother’s flower beds are gone, and the lemon and lime trees, and the two glazed ceramic pots on either side of the front door that were always filled with flowers. Over the years, it’s been returning to the ground at the same rate I seem to be. When I was in Berkeley this fall, I only slowed down when I drove past it, because everyone was inside—Mark and my parents and so many of the professors who were in many ways my own professors. The only people who weren’t in there were my sister and me. The Flanagan girls—somehow the point of the whole thing.

I didn’t cry the day in December I learned Joan Didion had died , because I’d been told by so many people that it was going to happen soon. But I realized that in some part of my mind, I thought she’d pull it off, that she’d show illness and death a thing or two.

Read: Joan Didion was our bard of disenchantment

A couple of months later, during one of my endless Google searches, I came across one of those companies that track down addresses and phone numbers and public records. “We found Joan Didion!” it said, and offered to provide access to her cellphone number, address, email, and even “more!”

And for some reason, that was when I finally cut my losses.

I hadn’t gone looking for the actual Joan Didion or your Joan Didion or even “the reader’s” Joan Didion. I went looking for the Joan Didion who was partly a historical figure, and partly a great writer, and partly a fiction of my own design. And she lives right where she always has.

This article appears in the June 2022 print edition with the headline “Chasing Joan Didion.” It has been updated to reflect that New York magazine was the first publication to name and interview Noel Parmentel about his romantic relationship with Didion. The New York Times had previously reported that Didion was in a relationship in New York, but did not name Parmentel.

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The essential Joan Didion: An L.A. Times reading list for newcomers and fans alike

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Joan Didion, who died Thursday at 87 , produced decades’ worth of memorable work across genres and subjects: personal essays, reporting and criticism on pop culture, political dispatches from at home and abroad and, near the end of her career, a bestselling memoir and a follow-up. Whether you’re a newcomer looking for a place to start or a reader looking to dive deeper, here’s a guide to Didion’s writing, start to finish:

The ‘personals’

If any subset of her work made Didion’s reputation for “inevitable” sentences, it is the personal essays collected in “Slouching Towards Bethlehem” (1968) and “The White Album” (1979). These pieces, starting with “On Self-Respect” in 1961, and originally published in magazines such as Vogue, the American Scholar and the Saturday Evening Post, have come to be appreciated as models of the form, elliptical, poetic, punctuated with the author’s eye for telling detail and lacerating self-awareness. Didion’s essays carefully revealed, and concealed, the correspondent’s inner life: As she once wrote of husband John Gregory Dunne — in a piece he edited — “We are here on this island in the middle of the Pacific in lieu of filing for divorce.”

Didion later described these essays as having been written under “crash circumstances” — “On Self-Respect” was improvised in “two sittings,” she reflected in 2007 , and written “not just to a word count or a line count but a character count” — yet they produced an astonishing number of unforgettable phrases: “I’ve already lost touch with a couple people I used to be” ( “On Keeping a Notebook,” a personal favorite); “That was the year, my twenty-eighth, when I was discovering that not all of the promises would be kept” ( “Goodbye to All That,” which invented the modern “leaving New York” essay); “We tell ourselves stories in order to live” (“The White Album,” possibly the definitive rendering of the end of the ‘60s).

Joan Didion, masterful essayist, novelist and screenwriter, dies at 87

Didion bridged the world of Hollywood, journalism and literature in a career that arced most brilliantly in the realms of social criticism and memoir.

Dec. 23, 2021

A number of additional magazine pieces from her early career are collected in her final published work , “Let Me Tell You What I Mean ” (2021), and her observations of self and culture from the 1970s are central to her travelogue “South and West” (2017).

The counterculture reporting

In and among the “personals” of “Slouching” and “The White Album” are Didion’s cucumber-cool lacerations of the late ‘60s, casting twin gimlet eyes on the delusions of both the rock-ribbed squares and the child revolutionaries. From the gaudy populism of the Getty and the Sacramento Reagans to a requiem for John Wayne, the marriage of bad taste and bad money fills in where the center fails to hold. The title essay of “The White Album” swirls with Jim Morrison, the Manson “family,” Linda Kasabian’s famous dress, Huey P. Newton and all the rest as Didion bravely declines to make sense of it all. The title essay in “Slouching” culminates, likewise, in the senseless final image of a 3-year-old boy, neglected and imperiled in a hippie squat. “On Morality” and “The Women’s Movement” exude the skeptical libertarianism that distanced her from the madness.

To see not just where the nation moved but where Didion did, it’s worth reading the early California pieces, including “Notes from a Native Daughter,” followed by “Where I Was From” (2003), which utterly demolishes California’s disastrous myth of self-reliance step by step, anatomizing its dependence on government largesse from the days of the Gold Rush — the water, the power, the military-industrial muscle. And finally she goes in on herself: the pioneer woman who never was.

Throughout her career, Didion was best known for her nonfiction, but her five novels conjure an equally pungent sense of place and time. Her first book, “Run River ” (1963) — inspired, she later wrote, by profound homesickness — is a family melodrama about the descendants of pioneers that draws heavily on Didion’s Sacramento upbringing. Perhaps her most famous novel, “Play It As It Lays” (1970), is set in a very different California: the Hollywood of the late ‘60s and early ‘70s, suffused with the anomie of its dissolute heroine, Maria Wyeth. (Her opening monologue famously begins with an ice-cold allusion to Othello: “What makes Iago evil? Some people ask. I never ask.”)

But Didion’s most underrated writing may be found in three novels that reflected her growing interest in — and suspicion of — America’s empire abroad. Set in the fictional Central American nation of Boca Grande, “A Book of Common Prayer” (1977) features both acid satire of corrupt U.S.-backed regimes and a tragic riff on the tale of Patty Hearst, as protagonist Charlotte Douglas searches for her daughter Marin, who is on the lam with a Marxist terrorist organization. Her interest in U.S. interference in the region and the absurdities of the late Cold War reappears in her final work of fiction, “The Last Thing He Wanted ” (1996), about a reporter and a government official who fall in love amid a secret arms-dealing operation reminiscent of Iran-Contra.

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Photos: Joan Didion, masterful essayist, novelist and screenwriter, dies at 87

Photos from the life of Joan Didion, who chronicled California, politics and sorrow in ‘Slouching Towards Bethlehem’ and ‘Year of Magical Thinking.’

It is “Democracy” (1984), though, that gathers these personal and political themes into the most extraordinary whole, tracing a history of violence and exploitation from the colonization of Hawaii through the dawn of the atomic age to produce Didion’s answer to the Vietnam War novel. She even casts herself as narrator: “Democracy,” set in the early 1970s, is told from the perspective of “Joan Didion,” whose focused repetitions and circular logic as she attempts to piece together the tale of a U.S. senator, his wife and her lover presage those of her blockbuster memoir, “The Year of Magical Thinking” (2005).

The political commentary

Though most Joan Didion primers begin, as this one does, with the personal essays, my introduction to Didion — and one I recommend if you would like to become as obsessed with her writing as I am — came through “Democracy” and the essays in “Political Fictions” (2001). Beginning in the 1980s, when she forged a close working relationship with legendary New York Review of Books editor Robert Silvers, Didion shifted the focus of her reporting away from culture: She relayed searing descriptions of war-torn El Salvador in “Salvador” (1983), captured the the conspiratorial fever surrounding much of U.S.-Cuba politics in “Miami” (1987) and detailed the ways in which Sept. 11 became a jingoistic cudgel in “Fixed Ideas” (2003).

But for their exceedingly thorough and ultimately devastating authority, there may be no better place to go to understand our current political disaster, and the media’s role in it, than Didion’s dispatches from the presidential campaigns of 1988 (“Insider Baseball”) and 1992 (“Eyes on the Prize”), her exasperated reflections on the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal (“Clinton Agonistes”) or her poisonously funny takedown of Bob Woodward (“The Deferential Spirit,” 1996), author of books “in which measurable cerebral activity is virtually absent.”

She also applied the technique in the damning “Sentimental Journeys” (collected in 1992’s “After Henry ”), detailing the process by which politicians and the press railroaded the Central Park Five in the hothouse atmosphere of late-’80s New York.

The late memoirs

Despite a career in which she befriended celebrities like Natalie Wood and Tony Richardson — and employed Harrison Ford as a carpenter — Didion reached the height of her prominence with her bestselling memoir, “The Year of Magical Thinking, ” published in 2005. While she had experimented with the form two years prior in “Where I Was From,” it was her heartbreakingly lucid dissection of grief that captured the imagination of the broader public, earning her wide acclaim and the National Book Award. “Magical Thinking” recounts a year in Didion’s life in which she grappled with Dunne’s 2003 death from cardiac arrest and daughter Quintana Roo’s serious illness, combining her readings of Sigmund Freud and Emily Post with vivid memories from one of 20th century literature’s most intimate marriages. Her follow-up , “Blue Nights” (2011), which looked back on Quintana’s untimely death in 2005, offered a more caustic vision, searching her relationship with her daughter for moments she wrong-footed herself while revealing her own declining health. In the process she developed a late style all her own — incantatory and poetic but never (God forbid) sentimental.

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Matt Brennan is a Los Angeles Times’ deputy editor for entertainment and arts. Born in the Boston area, educated at USC and an adoptive New Orleanian for nearly 10 years, he returned to Los Angeles in 2019 as the newsroom’s television editor. He previously served as TV editor at Paste Magazine, and his writing has also appeared in Indiewire, Slate, Deadspin and numerous other publications.

Boris Kachka is the former books editor of the Los Angeles Times and the author, most recently, of “Becoming a Producer.”

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Joan Didion Says ‘Goodbye to All That’: Literary Icon Dead at 87

By Jon Blistein

Jon Blistein

Joan Didion , the storied author and New Journalism icon best known for books like Play It as It Lays , The White Album, and The Year of Magical Thinking , died Thursday, The New York Times reports. She was 87.

Didion died at her home in Manhattan after a battle with Parkinson’s disease, a spokesperson for her publisher, Knopf, confirmed. “Didion was one of the country’s most trenchant writers and astute observers,” the statement read. “Her best-selling works of fiction, commentary, and memoir have received numerous honors and are considered modern classics.”  

Didion was a prolific and multifaceted writer, as well regarded for her novels, memoirs, and screenplays as her essays, cultural criticism, and investigative reporting. Early in her career, she was the go-to chronicler of California at its countercultural peak, and managed to create a new genre of essay — the “I’m Leaving New York City” essay — with her celebrated 1967 piece, “Goodbye to All That.” With her husband, John Gregory Dunne, Didion wrote screenplays for films like The Panic in Needle Park , the 1976 adaptation of A Star Is Born , and an adaptation of her own novel, Play It as It Lays. 

In her extensive political reporting, she covered everything from the civil war in El Salvador to U.S. political campaigns; and as a critic she investigated the way media shaped perceptions of major events (she published one of the earliest challenges to the guilty verdict in the Central Park Five case, which was later overturned). In 2005, Didion won the National Book Award for Nonfiction and was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize for The Year of Magical Thinking , her memoir chronicling her life and grief after Dunne’s sudden death in 2003, as well as her daughter Quintana’s eventually fatal illness.  

Didion was born on Dec. 5, 1934 in Sacramento, California. Her family had lived in the state for five generations, descended from settlers who’d abandoned the doomed Donner party and took a safer route — a fitting biographical detail for a writer who would go on to expertly capture the never-ending allure, promise, and underlying chaos of the Golden State.  

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“I grew up in a dangerous landscape,” Didion told The Paris Review in 1978. “I think people are more affected than they know by landscapes and weather. Sacramento was a very extreme place. It was very flat, flatter than most people can imagine, and I still favor flat horizons. The weather in Sacramento was as extreme as the landscape. There were two rivers, and these rivers would flood in the winter and run dry in the summer. Winter was cold rain and tulle fog. Summer was 100 degrees, 105 degrees, 110 degrees. Those extremes affect the way you deal with the world. It so happens that if you’re a writer the extremes show up. They don’t if you sell insurance.”

Didion studied English at the University of California, Berkeley, and in her senior year she won an essay contest sponsored by Vogue . Rather than take the prize trip to Paris, she went to New York to take a job at the magazine instead and quickly moved from a promotional copywriter to an associate features editor. Along with her work for Vogue , Didion contributed to several other magazines and published her first novel, Run, River , in 1963. After her stint in New York — during which she met and married Dunne — Didion returned to California, and started garnering attention for her pieces in Life and The Saturday Evening Post .

Part of the New Journalism movement, Didion’s reporting incorporated literary elements, balancing her meticulous observations about the world with deeply personal anecdotes. Her dispatches on the glitz, idealism, and sordid edges of 1960s California were eventually collected into her acclaimed 1968 collection, Slouching Towards Bethlehem.

In 1970, Didion published her second novel, Play It as It Lays , about a struggling young actress trying to make it in Hollywood while grappling with a host of personal demons. Maybe not-so-coincidentally, the new decade also found Didion and Dunne making their own forays into Hollywood with screenwriting: The Panic in Needle Park — about a group of heroin addicts in New York City — was an early starring turn for Al Pacino, while their adaptation of A Star Is Born , starring Barbra Streisand and Kris Kristofferson, was a box-office smash.

Didion’s reporting and fiction grew increasingly political over the decade as well. Her 1977 novel, A Book of Common Prayer , was set in a Central American country in the midst of a revolutionary upheaval; a few years later, she was reporting from El Salvador on the country’s civil war. Her 1984 novel, Democracy , told the story of a senator and a CIA agent at the end of the Vietnam war, while her work about the Cuban exile community in Miami became her 1987 book, Miami. Though she eventually moved away from more traditional political reporting, politics — and the way they were disseminated and interpreted via mass media   — remained central to the criticism and essays she wrote that later appeared in books like After Henry and Political Fictions .  

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In the new millennium, Didion remained ever fascinated with the history and present of California, which she returned to again 2003’s Where I Was From . In 2017’s South and West , she paired more observations about her childhood in California with pieces based on old notes she took during a trip with Dunne through the Deep South in the Seventies.

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But one of her most acclaimed works was The Year of Magical Thinking , which was adapted into a play in 2007. In 2011, Didion published a companion book, Blue Nights , in which she discussed the death of her daughter, as well as parenting and aging. Both works were immensely personal, and in a 2012 conversation with the author Sloane Crosley at the New York Public Library , Didion reflected on how the memoirs echoed some of the earliest, personal writing she did for Vogue .  

“[A] lot of people read these pieces and for the first time people would come to me for life advice, and I hated it,” she said. “I mean, I had — I quit writing those pieces because I couldn’t take this Miss Lonelyhearts role, and I hadn’t written anything that got that kind of response until Magical Thinking in between all these years; and [with] Magical Thinking suddenly people were speaking to me in airports, and usually they had some really terrible thing that had happened, and I learned simply to — that I didn’t have to take it so personally. You know, I learned that I could talk to them without taking it personally, so I didn’t have to stop writing.”

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Joan didion’s guide to leaving new york gets the ultimate homage with “goodbye to all that: writers on loving and leaving new york”.

There is a feeling you get when you move to New York that can never be recaptured by any other experience in your life. It is a combination of excitement, panic and endless reserves of hopefulness. The seminal 1967 essay by Joan Didion, “Goodbye to All That,” which appeared in Slouching Towards Bethlehem , tells of the prototypical love affair one has (particularly if that one is a writer) with the city before the relationship begins to curdle. In the short story collection of the same name, twenty-eight female writers tell their own tale of falling out of love with or being unable to truly forget their love affair with NYC.

New York is a place for dreamers, but, more importantly, a place for dreamers to be sobered and made to feel inadequate. As Didion (once a fresh off the boater from Sacramento), noted of her arrival, “I got off a DC-7 at the old Idlewild terminal in a new dress which had seemed very smart in Sacramento but seemed less smart already.” Everything you wear and everything you think somehow seems less sophisticated once you arrive from another city. Though, Goodbye to All That also covers that rare anomaly of being from New York, and the disillusionment that can occur with other out-of-towners and their vexatious wide-eyed wonder over “the city.”

For instance, in Rebecca Wolff’s (a proud and grudging native New Yorker) essay, “So Long, Suckers,” she asserts, “Anyone who’s anyone will at some point move to New York. Or die in obscurity with failed dreams.” This all or nothing stance that New York takes with all who inhabit it is the ultimate measure of Lady Fortuna. The native New Yorkers featured in  Goodbye to All That are admittedly arrogant over and protective of their city. And, for the most part, they have every right to be. After all, very few people with the humbleness of Joan Didion move here anymore. Now, it’s generally those who are overly haughty without reason to back it up. And while a certain amount of bravado is needed to “make it” in New York (see: Madonna), most would do well to remember that they are mere visitors in a city largely unimpressed with anything. Except itself.

Another distinct anomaly about New York is the specific way that time passes–which is to say, quickly. Across the board, every writer of Goodbye to All That seems to mirror Didion’s sentiment, “Part of what I want to tell you is what it is like to be young in New York, how six months can become eight years with the deceptive ease of a film dissolve…” And this is resoundingly true. For whatever reason, time in New York is more abstract because of how fast it moves, how rapidly everything changes and events transpire. I suppose that’s why it’s easy to feel old here by the age of twenty-five.

Still, you can’t help but cling to your dreams. You worked so hard to fulfill them by moving here, and then discover that you’re too busy making money to pay much attention to your dreams or “feeling inspired” by anything other than making ends meet. But, as Didion also mentions, “I am not sure that it is possible for anyone who grew up in the East to appreciate entirely what New York, the idea of New York, means to us who came out of the West and the South. To an Eastern child, New York is just a city, albeit, the city, a plausible place for people to live.” To the rest of us, the thought of not succeeding is too rife with disappointment. Even though we know we don’t really belong here, that this isn’t a place you live in the long-term, the act of leaving somehow sounds impossible–as impossible as failure.

Taking into account the fact that Didion wrote her essay from the vantage point of 1967, when New York was categorically unique and unburdened by the sameness of a corporate chain on every block, it is pertinent to see it as it is now. To quote Wolff, “New York City manifests itself now shame-facedly as a chump-factory, a chump-house. It’s Chumptown. Artists who live there are living dangerously, close to extinction, dangerously close to the source of their art’s diminishment, an ouroboros of economic exigency.” Wolff convincingly tells us that New York holds no magic at all anymore, not even if you’ve just freshly arrived. She goes on to say,

“There’s this thing that happens, where I speak to a twenty-something or thirty-something sweetheart, a Joan Didion who’s moved to New York recently, and I realize at a certain point that their expectations are very low, compared to my own, because they cannot possibly imagine what it used to be like, the New York of the recent past, of the late 1970s, 1980s, 1990s.”

In another essay by Eva Tenuto, called “Crash and Burn,” the pains of having to rely on a “backup plan” instead of what you came to New York setting out to do are explored. With this revelation comes the inevitable onset of alcoholism, or what in NYC should be dubbed “acceptable drinking practices.” Before you even move here, you should have money saved up for your impending drinking habit. Tenuto states, “As I moved away from my dream and became more invested in my backup plan, I became depressed and started drinking more.” It is a simultaneous salvation and damnation to be able to have access to the bar scene in the city. Ultimately, it is what inspires you to stay or propels you to go.

Affording not just the ability to drink, but the ability to “live the lifestyle” also comes up in a reprinted essay from Meghan Daum that appeared in The New Yorker in 1999. Recounting the ease with which one can rack up a certain amount of credit card debt to enjoy all the city has to offer (or even just for basic tools of survival like health care), Daum makes the distinction, “I have not made a life for myself in New York City. I have purchased a life for myself.” This very real statement is indicative of how New York is–especially of late–a city not for the young and ambitious, but for the middle-aged and rich. Of course, this will never stop ingenues from moving here. But  no matter how much you think you’re immune to the pitfalls and emotional landmines of New York City, beware “things in this fast-paced, mile-a-minute city could go from thrilling to dismal faster than you knew.”

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Genna Rivieccio writes for myriad blogs, mainly this one, burningbushwick.com, missingadick.com, airshipdaily.com and behindthehype.com. Feel free to e-mail [email protected].

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What We Get Wrong About Joan Didion

By Nathan Heller

In the spring of 1967, Joan Didion and John Gregory Dunne, freelance writers married to each other and living in Los Angeles, were engaged to write a regular column for the Saturday Evening Post . This was a good gig. The space they had to fill was neither long nor short—about twelve hundred words, a gallop larger than the Comment that opens this magazine. The Post paid them well, and Didion and Dunne each had to file one piece a month. The column, called “Points West,” entailed their visiting a place of West Coast interest, interviewing a few people or no people, and composing a dispatch. Didion wrote one column about touring Alcatraz, another on the general secretary of a small Marxist-Leninist group. The Post was struggling to stay afloat (it went under two years later), and that chaos let the new columnists shimmy unorthodox ideas past their desperate editors. Didion’s first effort was a dispatch from her parents’ house. A few weeks later, her “Points West” was about wandering Newport, Rhode Island. (“Newport is curiously Western,” she announced in the piece, sounding awfully like a writer trying to get away with something.) The column work left time for other projects, and Didion spent the spring through September of 1967 on a ten-thousand-word assignment about the hippie movement, the rest on a novel she’d been struggling with. At some point, an editor suggested that she had the makings of a collection, so she stacked her columns with past articles she liked (a report from Hawaii, the best of some self-help columns she’d churned out while a junior editor at Vogue ), set them in a canny order with a three-paragraph introduction, and sent them off. This was “ Slouching Towards Bethlehem ,” her first nonfiction book. It has claims to being the most influential essay collection of the past sixty years.

Didion, now eighty-six, has been an object of fascination ever since, boosted by the black-lace renaissance she experienced after publishing “ The Year of Magical Thinking ” (2005), her raw and ruminative account of the months following Dunne’s sudden death. Generally, writers who hold readers’ imaginations across decades do so because there’s something unsolved in their project, something that doesn’t square and thus seems subject to the realm of magic. In Didion’s case, a disconnect appears between the jobber-like shape of her writing life—a shape she often emphasizes in descriptions of her working habits—and the forms that emerged as the work accrued. For all her success, Didion was seventy before she finished a nonfiction book that was not drawn from newsstand-magazine assignments. She and Dunne started doing that work with an eye to covering the bills, and then a little more. (Their Post rates allowed them to rent a tumbledown Hollywood mansion, buy a banana-colored Corvette Stingray, raise a child, and dine well.) And yet the mosaic-like nonfiction books that Didion produced are the opposite of jobber books, or market-pitched books, or even useful, fibrous, admirably executed books. These are strange books, unusually shaped. They changed the way that journalistic storytelling and analysis were done.

Because a sentence of Didion is unmistakable, people often presume that her advances were in prose style. The opening of the “Slouching Towards Bethlehem” collection announced her voice:

The San Bernardino Valley lies only an hour east of Los Angeles by the San Bernardino Freeway but is in certain ways an alien place: not the coastal California of the subtropical twilights and the soft westerlies off the Pacific but a harsher California, haunted by the Mojave just beyond the mountains, devastated by the hot dry Santa Ana wind that comes down through the passes at 100 miles an hour and whines through the eucalyptus windbreaks and works on the nerves.

There’s the entwining of sensuous and ominous images. And there’s the fine, tight verbal detail work: the vowel suspensions (“ways an alien place”), the ricocheting consonants (“harsher . . . haunted . . . Mojave”), the softly anagrammatic games of sound (“subtropical twilights and the soft westerlies”). Didion worked hard at her sentences, and no magazine journalist has done better than her best. But style is just the baseline of good writing. Didion’s innovation was something else.

Most writers of nonfiction operate in the sphere of high craft: like a silversmith producing teapots, they work to create elevated and distinctive versions of known objects. A master will produce a range of creative variations, yet the teapots always remain teapots, and the marks of individuation rise from a shared language of form and technique. Didion’s nonfiction was produced in that craftwork tradition, but it operates more in the sphere of art: it declares its own terms and vernacular, and, if successful, conveys meaning in a way that transcends its parts.

The title essay of her second collection, “ The White Album ” (1979), offers the clearest glimpse of how that reimagination happens. The heart of the essay is a cluster of “Points West” columns: brief reports on protests at San Francisco State, a Huey Newton press conference, a studio visit with the Doors—her normal craftwork as a working writer. When composing the “White Album” essay, Didion lined those pieces up like flagstones in a path. Together, she knew, they had to tell a bigger story, because they came from the same place (coastal California) in the same time (1968) and from the same vantage (hers). But what was the story?

To figure it out, Didion started adding stones from elsewhere in the quarry: circumstances surrounding the production of the newsstand columns, details from her home life. She included an extract from a psychological evaluation she’d had that summer. (“The Rorschach record is interpreted as describing a personality in process of deterioration with abundant signs of failing defenses.”) She wrote about remembering a line by Ezra Pound on the drive to report at San Francisco State. She threaded these bits with what she called flash cuts, scene changes separated by space breaks; in other words, she started with the craft part—the polished sentences, the tidy magazine page—and built outward, collaging what was already published with what wasn’t, reframing and rejuxtaposing what had been previously pinned in pristine prose. This process of redigesting published craftwork into art is how Didion shaped her nonfiction books for fifty years. It made her farseeing, and a thorny voice about the way public stories were told.

The prickliness of Didion’s project was on my mind as I read her new collection, “ Let Me Tell You What I Mean ” (Knopf). “New” here refers mostly to the state of the binding, because the newest thing that Didion contributed is twenty years old. The foreword, very fruitful, is by Hilton Als . The volume’s keystone is a few “Points West” columns from 1968 which she in some cases had collaged into previous books but which have not been reprinted in their original, stand-alone form until now. In that sense, “Let Me Tell You What I Mean” is less a selected essays than a rejected essays, a director’s un-cut of her older work. Traditionally, this is the sort of collection squeezed out by itchy heirs after an author’s death.

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It’s happy news, then, that the book still offers some familiar pleasures. The earliest columns, from the late sixties, remain crisp and engaging on the page (not a given for late-sixties writing). Other essays, such as a piece on the photographer Robert Mapplethorpe, from 1989, are, if not exactly urgent, nice to have around. Didion stopped publishing new material in 2011, a silence that’s well earned but bittersweet in light of recent events, and “Let Me Tell You What I Mean” is meant to summon the old feelings. Yet the book ends up a study in the limits of Didion’s prose, because its parts, for all their elegance, don’t make a whole. Devoted readers will find the book unrecognizable as a Didion collection in any real sense.

To understand why, it is useful to go back to the summer of 1967, when Didion was writing her report on the hippies—the title essay of “Slouching Towards Bethlehem.” The late-sixties youth movements purported to be about community and coming together, but Didion saw them as a symptom of a shared society unravelling and public communication breaking down. (The title comes from a Yeats poem that begins, “Turning and turning in the widening gyre / The falcon cannot hear the falconer.”) “It was the first time I had dealt directly and flatly with the evidence of atomization,” she later explained. Struggling to describe this dissolution, she decided to express the problem structurally. The hippie essay, written as a series of pruned scenes from the Haight-Ashbury separated by breaks, marked her first true use of flash cuts.

The piece “failed to suggest that I was talking about something more general than a handful of children wearing mandalas on their foreheads,” Didion later wrote. But the concept of atomization, and the collage technique, stuck. When Didion was gathering essays for her first collection, she did something notable with a piece she called “Los Angeles Notebook.” She took one of her “Points West” columns, about the Santa Ana wind, and put a flash cut after it. She lopped off the opening to a critics piece she’d written on books by Helen Gurley Brown and dropped that in, followed by another cut. In this way, she built a new essay from the wholes and bits of old material, tracing out flares of life around Los Angeles in the mid-sixties. They were part of one story, but, crucially, they did not connect.

Didion had spent four years failing to write a novel called “ Play It as It Lays .” What she disliked in the work in progress, about an actress in Los Angeles, was that it smelled of “novel”; everything seemed formed and directed in a way that was untrue to life. In 1969, after reworking the “Los Angeles Notebook” essay, Didion saw how to make the novel work. “Play It as It Lays” (1970) is commonly said to be about anomie, but more specifically it’s about a world in insular pieces, of characters trapped in their Hollywood realms. (Didion envisioned a novel of tight scenes, consumed in a single sitting—a book written as a movie, in other words, and thus caged within the storytelling rhythms of the industry.) The novel’s short chapters, some of them less than a page, change vantage and jump characters among disparate spheres using freeways and white space. “I played and replayed these scenes and others like them, composed them as if for the camera, trying to find some order, a pattern. I found none,” one of her characters says. “Play It as It Lays” was Didion’s first fiction of atomization.

Didion went on to use the collage technique to assemble the long pieces in “The White Album” and the books that followed, reconsidering her own published craftwork and later bringing that scrutiny to texts produced by other people. Where she saw evidence of atomization in American society, she made efforts to push back.

“The only American newspapers that do not leave me in the grip of a profound physical conviction that the oxygen has been cut off from my brain tissue, very probably by an Associated Press wire, are the Wall Street Journal , the Los Angeles Free Press , the Los Angeles Open City , and the East Village Other ,” Didion wrote in a “Points West” column from 1968 which opens the new collection. She likes the alternative press not because it’s good or useful (“I have never read anything I needed to know in an underground paper”) but because it breaks past a communication barrier. These papers assume that the reader “will understand if they talk to him straight; this assumption of a shared language and a common ethic lends their reports a considerable cogency of style.”

Shared language and a common ethic are precisely what Didion had noticed coming apart in the supposedly liberated togetherness of the late sixties. And the problem, in her view, did not fade when the love beads went away. In “ Insider Baseball ,” her influential piece for The New York Review of Books , born of tagging along with the Presidential campaigns of 1988, she argued that the so-called “democratic process” had become unlinked from the people it was supposed to speak to and for:

Access to it is correctly limited to its own professionals, to those who manage policy and those who report on it, to those who run the polls and those who quote them, to those who ask and those who answer the questions on the Sunday shows, to the media consultants, to the columnists, to the issues advisers, to those who give off-the-record breakfasts and to those who attend them; to that handful of insiders who invent, year in and year out, the narrative of public life.

Politics had come to be programming produced for élites, by élites, in a bubble disconnected from others. If this warning seemed eccentric on the eve of electing an institutional Vice-President and, four years later, the Man from Hope, it does not seem so today. The problem Didion first identified in 1967 has been treated as a revelation in recent years.

Her position as a disaffected insider—hanging out with the Doors but crying foul on the Summer of Love, writing for the newsstand but declaiming its idiocy—made her an aggressive contrarian. In fact, her recent canonization notwithstanding, Didion spent most of her career as a magnet for daggers in the letters columns. “Between Joan Didion and me it is still a missed connection,” a reader complained in 1969, responding to a Life column she wrote for a while (abortively, owing to its unpopularity with editors). In The New York Review of Books a decade later: “Evidently where Joan Didion lives problems of love and psyche evaporate in a haze of margaritas by age twenty-one and folks can get down to the real business of living.”

That was in response to a searing broadside against the films of Woody Allen which Didion published in 1979. Allen had recently released “Annie Hall” and “Manhattan,” reaching his peak of appeal among people likely to read essays by Joan Didion in The New York Review of Books . She objected to the films’ urbane-sounding references (“the false and desperate knowingness of the smartest kid in the class”), and she was annoyed by characters’ superficial-seeming efforts to be deep (“They share sodas, and wonder ‘what love is’ ”). In Didion’s view, Allen’s movies were a simpleminded person’s idea of a smart person’s picture. She was needling her readers, naturally, but the objection also shows a lot about her narrative intelligence and about the way she should be read.

If atomization is one of the key concepts in Didion’s work, another is what she came to call “sentimentality”: belief in a story with a preordained shape and an emotional logic. That kind of storytelling was everywhere in America, she thought. And it was insidious, because it allowed destructive ideas to sneak in underneath the petticoats of right-thinking endeavors. One of the columns in the new collection picks apart a meeting of Gamblers Anonymous. What irked Didion was that although the meeting seemed to be about taking responsibility, it actually refracted blame. “I thought that it was simply the predilection of many of the members to dwell upon how ‘powerless’ they were, how buffeted by forces beyond their control,” she wrote. “There was a great deal of talk about miracles, and Higher Presences, and a Power Greater Than Ourselves”—prefab sentimental stories that let gamblers avoid seeing things squarely. Done well, contrarianism is based on the idea that what matters isn’t which team colors you wear but which goal the ball lands in when you kick it. Didion did it well and, as with the hippies , traced how a moment of supposed healing spun toward delusion and drove people farther apart.

Atomization and sentimentality exacerbate each other, after all: you break the bridges of connection across society, and then give each island a fairy tale about its uniqueness. Didion was interested in how that happens. One of her most frequently read essays is a late-sixties account of loving and leaving New York, “Goodbye to All That.” It tends to be remembered as a half-trite paean to a white-collar New York youth, a kind of classed-up precursor to the “ Emily in Paris ” Weltanschauung. Yet the essay’s actual point is astringent. New Yorkers’ mythology about their city’s sophistication and specialness, Didion suggested, was another sentimental narrative. She had found her place in town by embracing that view, but outgrew it in time—“at some point the golden rhythm was broken, and I am not that young any more,” she wrote. And so she moved to Los Angeles, where the grownups live.

This claim for California as a stronghold of urbanity and groundedness was contrary, even petulant. Didion had grown up in Sacramento and began her reporting from California at a moment when the national narrative of the West Coast—what went on there, what it meant—was shaped by editors and emissaries from New York. (That hasn’t changed.) But, where the Eastern press had decided that California stood for futurism, beaches, lush life, and togetherness, Didion insisted on a California of dusty houses, dry inland landscapes, fires and snakes, and social alienation. Like her contemporary the Bay Area poet Robert Hass, she was obsessed with the motions of mind but shy of abstractions; both realized that what is often called “the world of ideas” is vulnerable to tendentious manipulation. And so they pinned their ideas to details of landscape: this realization fixed to this tree, or the sight of the Bevatron at night, that one to a jasmine-covered porch—the Northern California style of intellection. What this meant was that thinking was an experiential process that emerged in movement from place to place—in the flash cuts—and you didn’t need a sentimental narrative in order to give it sense, as you did in New York.

Didion left the city in 1964, but this remained her perception when she returned twenty-four years later:

The insistent sentimentalization of experience . . . is not new in New York. A preference for broad strokes, for the distortion and flattening of character, and for the reduction of events to narrative, has been for well over a hundred years the heart of the way the city presents itself: Lady Liberty, huddled masses, ticker-tape parades, heroes, gutters, bright lights, broken hearts, eight million stories in the naked city; eight million stories and all the same story, each devised to obscure not only the city’s actual tensions of race and class but also, more significantly, the civic and commercial arrangements that rendered those tensions irreconcilable.

This description of “distortion and flattening,” of reducing life to recognizable story lines, is from “ New York: Sentimental Journeys ,” a study of the Central Park jogger case that Didion wrote, in 1991, for The New York Review of Books . The case—in which a twenty-eight-year-old female banker was brutalized and raped and five youths of color were convicted, and then, decades later, exonerated—became a Rorschach blot, with some people (largely white) seeing a city “systematically ruined, violated, raped by its underclass” and others (largely of color) seeing a city “in which the powerless had been systematically ruined, violated, raped by the powerful.”

Didion saw something else: a city victimized by decades of fatuous thinking and poor planning. New York, she thought, had clung to sentimental narratives about melting pots and special opportunities—“the assurance that the world is knowable, even flat, and New York its center, its motor, its dangerous but vital ‘energy’ ”—to the extent of being blind to the fraying of its civic and economic fibre. In crisis, New Yorkers simply doubled down, appointing heroes or villains in the jogger case, trying to keep the fairy tale aloft. “Sentimental Journeys” was a controversial piece when it appeared, yet it offered a frame for New York’s dramas over the next three decades. Even more important, it insisted on a link between the fate of a society and the way that its stories were told.

What it meant to be a writer—imaginatively and morally—had interested Didion since she spent her teen-age years retyping Hemingway sentences, trying to understand the way they worked. Fifty years later, she wrote about his afterlives in “ Last Words ,” an essay for this magazine condemning the publication of books that Hemingway had deemed incomplete. To edit a dead author’s near-finished work for publication, Didion thought, was to assume that he or she was playing by the usual rules. But it was precisely not working in this consensus realm that made great artists great.

A common criticism of Didion suggests that the peppering of her prose with proper nouns (the Bendel’s black wool challis dress, the Grès perfume) is somehow unserious. (For whatever reason, these complaints usually come from men.) But the correct way to understand this impulse is in the lineage of front writing. As Adam Gopnik has noted in these pages, it is Hemingway who’s forever telling you which wines to enjoy while fighting in Spain, how to take your brasserie coffee—how to make his particular yours. Didion feminized that way of writing, pushing against the postwar idea that women writers were obliged to be either mini Virginia Woolfs, mincing abstractions from the parlor, or Shulamith Firestones, raging for liberation. Part of what Didion took from Hemingway, by her account, was a mind-set of “romantic individualism,” “looking but not joining,” and a commitment to the details that gave distinctiveness and precision to that outside view. A trip to the Royal Hawaiian in the midst of a rocky marriage, the right soap to pack for a reporting trip while your husband stays with the baby: in Didion’s work, these were as important in their hard details as Hemingway’s crabe mexicaine and Sancerre at Prunier. Hemingway mythologized his authorial life style so well that generations of writers longed to live and work his way. Didion saw what he was doing, and appropriated the technique.

Yet what made the modernists daring was sometimes a weak point of their endeavor: the writing doesn’t always let readers know how it wants to be read. Hemingway’s theory was that if you, the writer, could reduce what you saw in your imagination to the igniting gestures and images—don’t elaborate why you feel sad about your marriage ending; just nail the image of the burning farmhouse that launched you on that train of thought—then you could get readers’ minds to make the same turns at the same intersections, and convey the world more immersively than through exposition. He explained his theory rarely and badly (hence the endless rancid chestnuts about lean prose, laconic dialogue, and crossing important things out), but Didion didn’t miss the point. “When I talk about pictures in my mind I am talking, quite specifically, about images that shimmer around the edges. . . . The picture tells you how to arrange the words and the arrangement of the words tells you, or tells me, what’s going on in the picture,” she noted, in “Why I Write.” And yet she added in signposts Hemingway left out. A first-rate Didion piece explains its terms as it goes, as if the manual were part of the main text. She is perpetually on guard about saying stuff either not clearly enough (the title “Let Me Tell You What I Mean” emerges from her work) or so clearly as to be subject to “distortion and flattening,” and thus untrue to what she means.

“I wanted not a window on the world but the world itself. I wanted everything in the picture” is how she puts it in “Telling Stories,” an essay from 1978 included in the new collection. She is explaining why she lost, or maybe never had, a desire to write salable short stories—tightly constructed pieces hung on a “little epiphany.” For her, the key to capturing life on the page without the usual sort of reduction, she says in the same essay, was figuring out how to use the first person across time.

Didion’s “I” ended up nearly as known as Hemingway’s “and,” and carries the same mixed blessing of being caricatured more than characterized. The caricature has Didion as a histrionic oversharer—a kind of literary Tori Spelling. Yet her reasons for embracing the “I” were mostly technical. You had to let readers know who you were and where your camera stood, she thought. It meant that Didion was always in her own crosshairs, and eventually turned the contrarian impulse on herself.

One of the commonest motifs in Didion’s writing is, bizarrely, Oregon Trail-type survivalism. She had been taught that those who colonized California were “the adventurous, the restless, and the daring.” She had been raised to believe that, as her mother put it, California was now “too regulated, too taxed, too expensive.” In “ Where I Was From ” (2003), she finally put this origin story of heroic, contrary individualism under the glass.

Didion built the book in her usual way, setting down reported articles and weaving in flashes of personal context. What created California economically and politically, she showed, was actually constant support from the East-reaching web of American society, industry, and, especially, the federal government. “The sheer geographical isolation of different parts of the state tended to obscure the elementary fact of its interrelatedness,” she wrote. The refusal to acknowledge this public interrelatedness, to insist on the determining value of the personal, the private, and the exceptional, had been California’s fragmenting delusion, and her own. I suspect that “Where I Was From” is among the least read of Didion’s nonfiction books, which is unfortunate, because it’s her “Gatsby”: the book in which she scrutinized her most basic ideas of heroic particularism and found that she had not escaped “the blinkering effect of the local dreamtime.” That’s a moving thing for a writer to acknowledge, and a hard one. The final sentences of the book are Didion’s suggestion that she’s not quite ready, in her life, to give the sentimental story up.

The intense burst of mythologizing that attended Didion’s books about the deaths of her husband (“The Year of Magical Thinking”) and her daughter (“ Blue Nights ,” from 2011) arrived, then, with a certain weirdness. One can now order something called a “Didion dress,” modelled on her late-sixties wardrobe. Not long ago, in a bookshop, I came across a Picador Modern Classics edition of “Slouching Towards Bethlehem” shrunk down to pocket size, presumably to be carried in the way that certain people carry miniature versions of the Bible or the Constitution. I tried and failed to think of a writer who’d treat such a thing more mercilessly than the author of that book.

An artist who has spent years doing the work on her own terms should not look fashionability in the mouth. But it is odd to find Didion embraced by the world of mainstream sentimental thinking which she charged against for decades. One wonders whether the fans for whom she’s now an Instagram totem, or the many journalists who claim her, realize that she cast her career toward challenging precepts and paragons like theirs.

It matters only because everything matters. Didion once wrote, “Style is character,” and, because the phrase has seemed to apply to her life and work, it often gets quoted to mean that character comes down to nothing more than style. But the line, which appears in an essay about Georgia O’Keeffe, is actually about the burden of creative choice. “Every choice one made alone—every word chosen or rejected, every brush stroke laid or not laid down—betrayed one’s character,” Didion wrote. Reducing the world, as on the canvas or the page, is a process of foreclosing on its fullness, choosing this way and not that one, and how you make those choices reveals everything about the person that you are. Didion praised O’Keeffe for “hardness” in trying to render in art what sensible people told her was unrenderable. “ ‘The men’ believed it was impossible to paint New York, so Georgia O’Keeffe painted New York,” she wrote. She was impressed by O’Keeffe’s snubbing of those who received her work devotedly but unseriously: “This is a woman who in 1939 could advise her admirers that they were missing her point, that their appreciation of her famous flowers was merely sentimental.” And she lauded O’Keeffe’s frank engagement with her time. “She is simply hard, a straight shooter, a woman clean of received wisdom and open to what she sees,” Didion wrote, and she meant it, too. ♦

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By Inkoo Kang

By Ronan Farrow

The New York Public Library Acquires Archive of Joan Didion and John Gregory Dunne

Joan Didion and John Gregory Dunne, 1970s

The New York Public Library has acquired the archives of Joan Didion and John Gregory Dunne . The dual collection comprises the couple’s literary and personal papers and stands as a rich testament to two of the most successful and important writers in postwar America.

The collection offers a substantial account of their life and work, including personal and professional documents that illustrate their careers and intellectual legacies. Noteworthy pieces in the collection include:

• Correspondence spanning six decades, including letters to and from Margaret Atwood, Richard Avedon, Candice Bergen, Helen Gurley Brown, Michael Crichton, Nora Ephron, Allen Ginsberg, Lillian Hellman, Diane Keaton, Justice Anthony Kennedy, Norman Lear, Jacqueline Onassis, Philip Roth, Charles Schulz, Tennessee Williams, and many others;
• Several hundred photographs, many of them candid images taken throughout the couple’s life, including photographs from their 1964 marriage and of the family at home and on travels;  
• Screenplay drafts—26 in total—that the couple worked on together that reveal the iterative nature of their collaborations. 

The collection, once processed, will be available to researchers at the Stephen A. Schwarzman Building on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan, one of the Library’s world-renowned research centers, a fitting final home for the bicoastal couple’s papers. Although a California native, Didion considered both New York and California as home. The pair met in New York and spent significant periods living in the city. In Didion’s final interview with Time magazine in January 2021, she was asked: "Which feels more like home: New York or California?" Didion responded, "Both." 

The collection of approximately 240 linear feet provides exceptional detail into the life and work of Didion and Dunne, beginning with memorabilia from Didion’s infancy and encompassing their careers, their marriage and family, and finally their deaths. It is the most comprehensive collection of the authors' materials and includes personal and professional papers; manuscripts and typescripts for journalism, essays, books and screenplays; photographs; correspondence; art and ephemera; inscribed copies of books from Didion and Dunne’s library; and more. 

Letter and clipping from Joan Didion to her family during her early years at Vogue, 1957

The acquisition was approved by the Library’s Program & Policy Committee of the Board of Trustees at its January 26, 2023, meeting. The processing, preserving, and cataloging of the archive will begin immediately, after which the collection will be housed in the Manuscript and Archives Division at the Stephen A. Schwarzman Building. It is expected to be available to patrons in early 2025.  

“The Library is thrilled to announce that our outstanding research collections will now include the archive of Joan Didion and John Gregory Dunne, iconic voices of postwar American journalism, fiction and screenwriting,” said Declan Kiely, Director of Special Collections and Exhibitions at The New York Public Library. “We anticipate that the Didion and Dunne papers, once processed, will become one of our most heavily used collections and an essential resource for scholars, students, and those interested in their intensely collaborative life and work. Both deeply intimate and professionally significant, this collection is incomparable in its scope of materials, providing unprecedented insight into their creative process. We can’t wait to make this available to the public and inspire the next generation of thinkers and writers.”

Joan Didion, 1960s

Further highlights of the acquisition include: 

• Early journalistic writings including notes and typescripts from her interview with former Manson Family member Linda Kasabian and a file entitled “Haight Ashbury 1967” filled with autograph notes, typescripts, fragments, and a checklist of the pieces Didion wished to include in Slouching Towards Bethlehem;
• Annotated transcripts of the alleged Central Park Five “confessions” (later revealed to be false) for Didion’s ahead-of-its-time New York Review of Books essay on the case; 
• Dunne’s extensive correspondence with the murderer of Brandon Teena, which led to a New Yorker piece that was adapted into the 1999 film Boys Don’t Cry ;
• Notes and drafts related to Didion's later works The Year of Magical Thinking and Blue Nights;
• Extensive records of menus, recipes, guest lists, setup notes, and handmade cookbooks documenting the couple's dinner parties;
• Didion’s “Babyhood” book with portions filled out by her mother, with clippings and cards inserted celebrating her birth, a lock of her hair, and calendars noting early milestones—for example, 12 January 1935: “laughed aloud”;
• Over 140 letters between Didion and her family from her college and Vogue years, 1954–1957.

As agent for the sale of the archive, Marsha Malinowski of Marsha Malinowski Fine Books & Manuscripts LLC writes: “The Estate could not be more pleased with the placement of the Joan Didion/John Gregory Dunne Archive at The New York Public Library. The synergy of the archive with existing archives at NYPL is nothing short of extraordinary. Together, NYPL’s holdings now document the expansive story of American literary culture of the 20th and 21st centuries with even greater gravitas . ”

Paul Bogaards, the spokesperson for the Didion Dunne Literary Trust, the custodians of the writers’ intellectual property, confirmed the Trust’s enthusiasm for the acquisition: “Joan and John were great admirers and supporters of The New York Public Library, so this is an ideal home for their archive. The Didion Dunne collection will be populated with materials that reinforce the importance of their work as great chroniclers of American life. The archives provide detailed documentation of their writing and creative process and an intimate window into their lives. They will be a welcome and essential resource for future generations of readers, students, and scholars of Joan Didion and John Gregory Dunne.” 

The Library anticipates the Didion and Dunne papers will become one of its most heavily used collections, an essential resource for scholars, students, journalists, and writers studying Didion, Dunne, American literature and journalism, and more. The archive will join a number of collections from their contemporaries in the Library’s Manuscripts and Archives Division including correspondence from authors who were friends and fellow literary figures, such as the Camilla and Earl McGrath papers, the Tom Wolfe papers, the Jean Stein papers, the Ted Solotaroff papers, and the recently acquired Renata Adler papers (currently undergoing processing), as well as the New York Review of Books records. Didion and Dunne had a close and long-standing relationship with Bob Silvers, co-founder and long-time editor of the New York Review of Books ; Didion once said of Silvers, “I trust him more than anyone.” 

"The acquisition of the Didion and Dunne papers reflects the Library’s commitment to collecting the papers of paradigm-changing writers—and in particular, women writers,” said Julie Golia, Associate Director, Manuscripts, Archives, and Rare Books and Charles J. Liebman Curator of Manuscripts. “Didion’s literary contributions, her public persona, and her tenacity in the face of grief have shaped the work of countless intellectual successors, both known and unknown. At The New York Public Library, Didion’s papers will continue to inspire new generations of authors."

While both Didion and Dunne were prolific writers in their own right, they also worked together on screenplays including the 1976 film A Star Is Born , starring Barbra Streisand and Kris Kristofferson; the 1972 film adaptation of Didion’s novel Play It As It Lays , starring Anthony Perkins and Tuesday Weld; and the 1996 Robert Redford and Michelle Pfeiffer film Up Close and Personal (based on the biography of journalist Jessica Savitch). Each draft includes handwritten annotations from both Didion and Dunne; together, they offer in-depth documentation of their editorial partnership and their impact on American popular culture.

Dunne died at 71 in 2003. Two years later, their daughter, Quintana Roo Dunne, died at 39. 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. Didion died in December 2021 at age 87 from complications of Parkinson's disease.

• New York Public Library Acquires Joan Didion’s Papers ( The New York Times )
• Where to Start With Joan Didion and John Gregory Dunne (NYPL)
• Joan Didion in conversation with Sloane Crosley , November 21, 2011 (NYPL)

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The Essential Joan Didion

Her distinctive prose and sharp eye were tuned to an outsider’s frequency, telling us about ourselves in essays that are almost reflexively skeptical. Here’s where to start.

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By Alissa Wilkinson

Alissa Wilkinson is a movie critic at The Times. Her book “We Tell Ourselves Stories: Joan Didion and the American Dream Machine” will be published by Liveright next year.

• Published April 26, 2024 Updated April 28, 2024

The Joan Didion many people know is constructed from a few artifacts the real writer left behind when she died in 2021 . There’s her much-imitated (and sometimes parodied) 1967 essay “Goodbye to All That,” about leaving New York. There’s the packing list enumerated in her essay “The White Album,” written between 1968 and 1978, which is sometimes cited as aspirational , even instructional . There are the iconic photographs of Didion taken by Julian Wasser in 1968, commissioned for a profile in Time — particularly one in which she’s smoking while leaning against her Stingray, cooler than anyone has ever been, a vibe echoed in the 2003 ad Didion shot for the fashion brand Celine . And, of course, there’s her most famous line — “We tell ourselves stories in order to live” — which opens “The White Album” and is frequently invoked, wrongly, for inspiration.

Didion was not really out to inspire us. She was looking at us and telling us what she saw, including our compulsion to weave myths for survival. Her distinctive prose and sharp eye were always tuned to an outsider’s frequency, even when she was actually an insider (as with most of her writing on Hollywood). Her essays are almost reflexively skeptical; she wrote with authority borne not so much from experience as from a refusal to give in to dogma.

And her work, which spanned well over a half-century, reads like an account of a country careering toward a cliff. Didion may be best known as the California writer who chronicled midcentury cultural decay, but her body of work is much wider and deeper. She wrote on Hollywood and Washington, New York and Sacramento, Terri Schiavo and Martha Stewart, grief and hypocrisy and Latin American politics, and somehow it all drove toward the same point: Narratives are coping mechanisms. If we want to truly understand ourselves, we have to understand not just the stories we make up together, but the tales behind them.

In the years since her death, Didion’s star has only risen, with a museum exhibit , revivals of her play , a buzzed-about estate sale and the New York Public Library’s forthcoming unveiling of her joint archive with her husband, the writer John Gregory Dunne, who died in 2003. In the meantime, the state of the world has felt ever more confusing, and the line between reality and make-believe more blurred. So there’s never been a better time to dip your toe — or plunge your whole self — into the work of one of the finest, most perceptive writers in American letters.

I want to start with the foundational text.

“Slouching Towards Bethlehem” (1968) was Didion’s second book — her first was the 1963 novel “Run River,” written in her 20s as a Vogue staffer in New York. But even though 13 books of nonfiction and four novels followed it, “Slouching,” published when she was 33, remains fundamental to Didion’s oeuvre, and helped establish her reputation as a practitioner of the New Journalism.

Like all of her collections, the book consists of essays written on assignment for a variety of outlets: The New York Times Magazine, The American Scholar, Holiday, Vogue and The Saturday Evening Post. Taken together, they start to convey a portrait of the cultural critic as a young woman, and especially her sense, nurtured from a very young age, that the world was coming apart at the seams.

The book’s title comes from one of its essays, about the decaying vibes in late ’60s Haight-Ashbury. That’s in turn plucked from a Yeats poem, quoted as an epigraph. In the preface she writes that the essay was reported and drafted in an attempt to beat a despairing writer’s block: “If I was to work again at all,” she writes, “it would be necessary for me to come to terms with disorder.”

Didion often spoke of writing as the way she figured out what she thought, which makes the title essay a must-read for understanding the author. But “Slouching Towards Bethlehem” is a jewel chest, and the shiniest gem inside it might be “Goodbye to All That,” Didion’s classic essay about falling in and out of love with New York City.

The often-quoted “On Self-Respect,” which also appears in this collection, has a funny origin story: Didion wrote it as a Vogue staffer because the editors had put the headline on the cover without assigning a writer, and she happened to be around.

Was there a sequel?

Not exactly. But “The White Album” (1979) is kind of a follow-up to “Slouching Towards Bethlehem,” though it also works all on its own. The book’s title essay is somewhat autobiographical, an account of Didion’s life in Los Angeles during the 1960s, when she and Dunne were raising their daughter, Quintana Roo, and spending a great deal of their time with movie stars and rockers. Written as a series of vignettes, the essay floats from Didion’s psychological trouble to her encounters with familiar figures — the Black Panthers, the Doors, the Manson family. There’s a sense in which the essay is responsible for the way many of us born later “remember” the late 1960s; you could spot its DNA, for instance, in certain seasons of “Mad Men,” or in Quentin Tarantino’s film “ Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood .”

On the whole, the essays in “The White Album” feel more descriptive of Didion’s life than earlier writings, but she expertly toed a fine line that made her readers (especially women) feel they knew her, even though she never really revealed a lot about herself in her writing. Other standouts in the collection include “The Women’s Movement,” which will give you a sense for Didion’s reluctance to call herself a feminist, and “Holy Water,” which becomes a personal history by way of California history.

I want to read Didion at her most vicious.

The cattiest (and thus maybe the funniest) essay Didion ever wrote was “Pretty Nancy,” a portrait of Nancy Reagan when she was the first lady of California. Didion, part of the fifth generation of a well-off Sacramento family, had absolutely no use for either Reagan from the moment the Gipper stepped into politics. For her, the Reagans became the prevailing metaphor for everything that was wrong with the American political scene, because she believed they thought, acted, campaigned and governed like Hollywood figures. “She has told me that the governor never wore makeup even in motion pictures, and that politics is rougher than the picture business because you do not have the studio to protect you,” Didion writes near the end of the profile, when the tone of irritated disdain is practically dripping off the page.

Despite inflicting a significant sting — Nancy Reagan mentions the essay in her own memoirs — “Pretty Nancy” wasn’t collected in any of Didion’s books until the final one, “Let Me Tell You What I Mean” (2021). It’s a perfect glimpse into a young, irritated writer who knew exactly what she was doing.

Did she ever get swoony?

Words like “unsparing” and “cleareyed” are usually applied to Didion’s cultural analysis, but if you want to see her in full weak-kneed mode, read the essay “John Wayne: A Love Story.” (It’s collected in “Slouching Towards Bethlehem.”) In 1965, she finally landed a pitch she’d been longing for: The Saturday Evening Post commissioned Didion to travel to northern Mexico, where “The Sons of Katie Elder” — a western she’d later brush off in a paragraph-long review in Vogue — was shooting. The star was John Wayne, whom Didion had worshiped since watching him in a converted aircraft hangar on the Army base where her father was stationed during World War II. He became her idea of manhood, safety, strength.

Wayne-like characters pop up across Didion’s fiction, as does her longing for the kind of security this line represented to her. But Wayne as an actual person was important to her, too. When she finally met her hero on set, he was just coming off a lung cancer scare; she mentions his “bad cold and a racking cough, so tired by late afternoon that he kept an oxygen inhalator on the set.” Famously, he’d used his diagnosis, and his tough-guy stature, to encourage people in the smoke-filled era to get screened for the disease.

John Wayne is key to Didion’s story for more than just entertainment reasons. Her political views, until well into adulthood, were sternly conservative, not as right wing as Wayne’s but nearly so — she used to announce at Hollywood dinner parties, seemingly for shock value, that she had voted for Barry Goldwater. She switched affiliations after the California Republican Party embraced Richard Nixon, but as late as the 1990s she was still saying she’d have voted for Goldwater in every election since, had he run.

Didion also ended up working in the movie industry, in one way or another, for her entire life, and it’s not hard to believe she was hooked on the business by her love of Wayne.

How much of a Hollywood insider was Didion, really?

Didion and Dunne considered themselves novelists first and journalists second, but they really paid their bills by writing and doctoring scripts. Their first produced movie was the 1971 addict drama “The Panic in Needle Park,” starring Al Pacino in his first leading role, and Kitty Winn, who won Best Actress at Cannes for the role. The pair wrote a number of scripts together, including “Play It as It Lays,” “A Star Is Born” (the Barbra Streisand one), “True Confessions,” “Up Close and Personal” and the HBO short film “Hills Like White Elephants.” If you really want a great overview of Hollywood through their eyes, you can’t do better than two of Dunne’s books: “The Studio” (1969), about life on the back lot at 20th Century Fox, and “Monster” (1997), about the travails they experienced getting “Up Close and Personal” made.

But Didion wrote about Hollywood, too. One of her most astute essays, “Hollywood: Having Fun,” was first published in The New York Review of Books in 1973, then lightly revised and published as “In Hollywood” in “The White Album.”

“Hollywood: Having Fun” is a careening tour through the wheeling and dealing of the movie business, and also a way for Didion to take out-of-touch East Coast movie critics to task. (She specifically names Pauline Kael of The New Yorker, with whom Didion had briefly shared a movie review column at Vogue. By 1973, Kael was arguably the most powerful movie critic in America; Didion airily suggests she’s full of hogwash.) Didion believes that “much of what is written about pictures and about picture people approaches reality only occasionally and accidentally,” because if you don’t experience Hollywood directly then you can’t possibly understand how the sausage gets made and, thus, understand what you’re really seeing up on the screen.

What’s clear is that, having worked as a movie critic herself for a while, she’s not particularly interested in critics’ thoughts anymore, which leads to this brilliant line: “Making judgments on films is in many ways so peculiarly vaporous an occupation that the only question is why, beyond the obvious opportunities for a few lecture fees and a little careerism at a dispiritingly self-limiting level, anyone does it in the first place.” You said it, Joan.

What about Didion’s fiction?

Most people will tell you to read “Play It as It Lays” (1970), her second novel, and they’re not wrong. Like the screenplay version she and Dunne later wrote, Didion’s novel is a bleak tale of a melting-down actress in a tumultuous 1960s Hollywood.

But of her five novels, the best is “Democracy” (1984). Occasionally I think it might be the Great American Novel. Narrated by a journalist named Joan Didion, it’s mostly the story of Inez Victor, the wife of a Kennedy-style senator who ran a failed campaign for president. But Inez has been in love since she was a teenager with a man named Jack Lovett, whose occupation is unclear (C.I.A. agent? War profiteer?) but who, for her, represents safety. He is the John Wayne figure in the book. He can’t keep bad things away, but he can fix them.

“Democracy” ends tragically — all of Didion’s novels end tragically — yet with a note of romantic hope that turns the whole thing into a sweeping epic. You can almost hear the strings swelling.

I want to understand Didion’s politics.

Good luck. She did start out very conservative, and trended leftward into adulthood after getting fed up with Nixon and Reagan. Yet she remained very difficult to pin down. Her early work is full of takedowns of idealism on the right and the left, as if she is always looking at these matters through narrowed eyes.

But if you want to see, roughly, where she landed, then the place to go is her book “Political Fictions,” a collection of essays that had the misfortune to be published on Sept. 11, 2001. They’re mostly reporting from campaigns of figures like Michael Dukakis and Jesse Jackson, or the travails of an impeached Bill Clinton, and the eye she casts is clearly one that wears Hollywood-colored glasses. Everything in a campaign or a presidency, she writes, is carefully choreographed in much the same way as a movie set. This is a sign, to her, of political decline, a category error that renders politics as flat, useless and commodified. The candidate is a product being sold to the public, just like a movie star. Don’t miss the review of Newt Gingrich’s work in “Political Fictions,” which she manages to take apart by simply listing his metaphors and references.

Once you’re done with “Political Fictions,” pick up “Where I Was From,” published a few years later, in which Didion retreads her own work and life story. It’s a re-evaluation, after both her parents’ deaths, of the myths and ideas she absorbed as a young girl in California, and thus a re-evaluation more broadly of American myths and legends. (She does some of the same work in the slim book “Fixed Ideas: America Since 9/11,” which fiercely questions dogma that arose in the wake of the attacks and, in particular, ideas and articles published by The New York Times.)

What is one Didion essay that can’t be missed?

Didion’s most consequential essay may be “Sentimental Journeys, ” first published in The New York Review of Books in 1991 and later collected in “After Henry” (1992). It concerns the infamous case of the Central Park jogger and the railroaded confessions of the so-called Central Park Five, five teenagers wrongfully accused of the crime and sent to prison. In a full-page ad he personally paid to place in four local papers, Donald J. Trump, then a local businessman, called for their execution . In 2002, their convictions were vacated. (One of them, Yusef Salaam, is now a New York City councilman.)

In “Sentimental Journeys,” Didion comes at the case sideways, examining the stories that New Yorkers tell themselves about the city and its inhabitants. She writes about how racism distorts this story, and questions whether the jogger’s name should have been released to the public. And she explores how a single case such as this one, though hardly the only of its kind, can be wound up by the news media, politicians and opportunists into representing something much bigger and much less logical.

Her diagnosis has aged breathtakingly well. “In a city in which grave and disrupting problems had become general — problems of not having, problems of not making it, problems that demonstrably existed, among the mad and the ill and the underequipped and the overwhelmed, with decreasing reference to color — the case of the Central Park jogger provided more than just a safe, or structured, setting in which various and sometimes only marginally related rages could be vented,” she wrote. In typical Didion fashion, that could have been written yesterday.

What was she thinking about near the end of her life?

Didion’s final two decades were filled with loss. On Dec. 30, 2003, Dunne and Didion returned home from visiting their daughter, Quintana Roo Dunne, in the hospital, where she was in a coma. Dunne suddenly dropped dead from a heart attack. Didion told the story of her year of grief in “The Year of Magical Thinking” (2005), which won the National Book Award. Just before the book was published, Quintana died. Didion toured in the midst of her grief, then wrote a theatrical adaptation, which opened on Broadway in March 2007, starring Didion’s longtime friend Vanessa Redgrave as the author.

“The Year of Magical Thinking” is intense and cyclical, evoking the mind caught in a state of grief as much through its form as its content. Many who have read it in the middle of grief (including me) have found it profoundly cathartic. It’s representative of a writer who has turned her famously perceptive gaze upon herself, something she continued in “Blue Nights” (2011), which reflects on her daughter’s life.

It’s often overlooked, but as a supplement to reading these late Didion books, don’t miss her essay “ The Case of Theresa Schiavo ,” published several months before Quintana died. In it she wrestles fervently with the fate of Schiavo, a woman on life support who had become a source of national political debate. Once you know from her books what she went through while Quintana was on life support, the essay takes on a whole new meaning. Didion made the personal both cultural and political — a practice she’d honed over a storied career.

An earlier version of this article referred incorrectly to the woman known as the Central Park jogger. She survived the attack; she was not murdered.

An earlier version of this article misstated the title of a screenplay Joan Didion wrote with her husband. It was “The Panic in Needle Park,” not “The Panic at Needle Park.”

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Alissa Wilkinson is a Times movie critic. She’s been writing about movies since 2005. More about Alissa Wilkinson

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Joan Didion’s Longtime Upper East Side Apartment Sells for $5.4 Million

By Katie Schultz

Literary icon Joan Didion’s Upper East Side apartment has officially sold, according to the New York Post . The 1928-built co-op unit was listed in January 2023 for $7.5 million, about a year after the famed writer died inside the home at the age of 87. It underwent a couple of generous price cuts before entering into contract in January of this year. Last week, the dwelling finally changed hands in a $5.4 million deal.

Didion and her husband, the writer John Gregory Dunne, bought the four-bedroom, five-bathroom abode in 1988 and used it as their primary residence. The Slouching Towards Bethlehem author was an active member of the co-op board during her 33-year tenancy in the building. Dunne died in the roughly 3,600-square-foot home in 2003.

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The residence is located just a block from Central Park in the neighborhood of Lenox Hill. It offers picturesque window views of the nearby Gothic Revival -style St. James Church. A split-level living and dining area features herringbone floors and a wet bar. The space is warmed by a wood-burning fireplace flanked by pale blue built-in shelving.

Other highlights include a cozy library den, a home office , and an eat-in kitchen with vintage wooden cabinetry and a high-end double range. A small staff wing connects to the kitchen through a butler’s pantry.

As chef Joshua Weissman welcomes AD into his Austin home in the latest episode of Open Door, he jokes that he doesn’t actually live in a kitchen.

In 2022, an auction of Didion’s belongings grossed nearly $2 million. Among the most iconic pieces in the 224-item catalog were the writer’s Celine sunglasses, which fetched $27,000. A Victorian-style rattan peacock chair, which Didion was photographed sitting in, sold for $28,000.

Didion seated on her rattan peacock chair in her Upper East side apartment.

The buyer of the Year of Magical Thinking memoirist’s New York City pad is not publicly known. Whoever they are, they nabbed the final—and perhaps most intimate—piece of the legend’s estate.

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