Joan Didion has died.

December 23, 2021 11:52 AM

Her obit can be found here. As always with something like this, I don't what to say other than she will be missed.
posted by ivanthenotsoterrible (61 comments total)

.
posted by mcbeth at 12:06 PM on December 23, 2021

.
posted by Samuel Farrow at 12:07 PM on December 23, 2021

.
posted by Faint of Butt at 12:08 PM on December 23, 2021

.
posted by hollisimo at 12:17 PM on December 23, 2021

Joan and Eve Babitz in the same week. Rough times for generations of LA literati.
posted by mykescipark at 12:19 PM on December 23, 2021 [4 favorites]

.
posted by Bella Donna at 12:20 PM on December 23, 2021

.
posted by Mr. Yuck at 12:25 PM on December 23, 2021

.
posted by Winnie the Proust at 12:26 PM on December 23, 2021

Some non-paywalled obituaries:

Vogue - where Didion worked for many years
LA Times
NPR

Perhaps best of all would be her own words: Why I Write

"Had my credentials been in order I would never have become a writer. Had I been blessed with even limited access to my own mind there would have been no reason to write. I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear. Why did the oil refineries around Carquinez Strait seem sinister to me in the summer of 1956? Why have the night lights in the Bevatron burned in my mind for twenty years? What is going on in these pictures in my mind?"

posted by theory at 12:28 PM on December 23, 2021 [19 favorites]

Thank you, Joan Didion, for writing grief. The Year of Magical Thinking showed me that words could be a lifeboat in the wake of death. That made a difference in my own grieving.

"For many, through her writing about love and loss, innocence and deception, nostalgia and memory, Didion invented a way of being in the world: an observer, judiciously above the fray, holding it all at an elegant remove." Vogue: Joan Didion Has Died at 87
posted by MonkeyToes at 12:28 PM on December 23, 2021 [11 favorites]

I remember hearing about Joan Didion when I was first living in the US. I read Slouching Towards Bethlehem and The White Album in quick succession and was blown away. She changed the way I thought about writing.

For whatever reason, she hadn’t made it across the Atlantic to my part of Europe, but it was clear to me that global domination was inevitable. When it came, it felt like I had been like one of those people that had twigged the greatness of the Beatles before they broke through.

What a glorious, wonderful writer, and how lucky we were to be alive in her time.

.
posted by Kattullus at 12:30 PM on December 23, 2021 [9 favorites]

One of the few who wrote a tolerable "why I left New York" essay.
posted by praemunire at 12:44 PM on December 23, 2021 [7 favorites]

There aren't many writers (or people) I deeply respect and generally agree with but whose work I have endless, very detailed arguments against. Didion is high on the list. The world needs more of writers like that.

.
posted by eotvos at 12:51 PM on December 23, 2021 [6 favorites]

.
posted by BlackLeotardFront at 12:54 PM on December 23, 2021

Here are the 38 pieces she wrote for the New York Review of Books between 1973 and 2017.

.
posted by box at 12:55 PM on December 23, 2021 [6 favorites]

Like others, I found Joan Dideon through her essay collections and fell in love. I drifted away when she became interested in political upheaval. But then after my father died unexpectedly, I decided to read The Year of Magical Thinking to see if it might help my mother, found it spoke to me and fell in love all over again. She endured so much personal loss and examined it with such fierce and unblinking bravery that she helped me understand my feelings and empathize with others operating through grief. Rest In Peace.
posted by carmicha at 1:12 PM on December 23, 2021 [2 favorites]

just posted on my Facebook by a friend (from Slouching Towards Bethlehem):

“They are less in rebellion against the society than ignorant of it, able only to feed back certain of its most publicized self-doubts.”

timeless and wise. I miss her already.
posted by philip-random at 1:12 PM on December 23, 2021 [7 favorites]

Here's 'The Shopping Center,' the first thing she ever published in Esquire.
posted by box at 1:13 PM on December 23, 2021 [3 favorites]

.
posted by Silvery Fish at 1:19 PM on December 23, 2021

.
posted by oulipian at 1:21 PM on December 23, 2021

.
posted by HandfulOfDust at 1:26 PM on December 23, 2021

I encountered "Play It As It Lays," and its iconic author photo featuring an unimpressed Didion looking back at the reader, cigarette in hand, as a college student, and following that there was a good stretch of time I considered her the coolest human being alive.

.
posted by HunterFelt at 1:35 PM on December 23, 2021 [5 favorites]

.
posted by homunculus at 1:37 PM on December 23, 2021

The patient to whom this psychiatric report refers to is me. The tests mentioned - the Rorschach, the Thermatic Apperception Test, the Sentence Completion Test and the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Index - were all administered privately, in the outpatient psychiatric clinic at St. John’s Hospital in Santa Monica, in the summer of 1968, shortly after I suffered the “attack of vertigo and nausea” … and shortly before I was named a Los Angeles Times “Woman of the Year.” By way of comment I offer only that an attack of vertigo and nausea does not now seem to me an inappropriate response to the summer of 1968.
— The White Album

She was one of the most perceptive writers of our time and she opened the world up for me. Rest In Peace and thank you.

.
posted by gt2 at 1:38 PM on December 23, 2021 [6 favorites]

.
posted by gauche at 1:49 PM on December 23, 2021

Some pieces from Washington Post article today:

“I am so physically small, so temperamentally unobtrusive, and so neurotically inarticulate that people tend to forget that my presence runs counter to their best interests,” she wrote in the preface to “Slouching.” “And it always does. That is one last thing to remember: writers are always selling somebody out.”

~~~~~

Shortly before graduating from the University of California at Berkeley in 1956, Ms. Didion won a Vogue magazine contest for young writers. Choosing between the contest’s two prize options, a trip to Paris or a job at Vogue, she decided she would try her luck at the magazine’s offices in New York.

~~~~~

Rocked by alcohol and their shared ambition to be great writers, their marriage was tumultuous in its early years, a fact that Ms. Didion did not hesitate to incorporate into her work. When in 1969 she was given a regular column at Life, she began her first piece this way, describing a family trip to Hawaii: “We are here on this island in the middle of the Pacific in lieu of filing for divorce.” Dunne, as he always did, edited the story.

~~~~~

“We tell ourselves stories in order to live,” Ms. Didion wrote in the title essay for “The White Album.” She added: “We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images, by the ‘ideas’ with which we have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience.

“Or at least we do for a while.”

~~~~~

What a writer. What an artist. As someone noted upthread, so lucky to have had her here while I'm here.

Parkinson's. Damnit.

Hell of a loss.

.
posted by dancestoblue at 1:49 PM on December 23, 2021 [10 favorites]

.
posted by jim in austin at 2:08 PM on December 23, 2021

Quoted in today's NYT obituary/appreciation, from her commencement address at UC Riverside in 1975:

“I’m not telling you to make the world better, because I don’t think that progress is necessarily part of the package. I’m just telling you to live in it. Not just to endure it, not just to suffer it, not just to pass through it, but to live in it. To look at it. To try to get the picture. To live recklessly. To take chances. To make your own work and take pride in it. To seize the moment. And if you ask me why you should bother to do that, I could tell you that the grave’s a fine and private place, but none I think do there embrace. Nor do they sing there, or write, or argue, or see the tidal bore on the Amazon, or touch their children. And that’s what there is to do and get it while you can and good luck at it.”

posted by PhineasGage at 2:09 PM on December 23, 2021 [13 favorites]

To this day, I've never ever found someone who conveyed that overarching feeling of pain and loss that seemed to permeate every layer of her writing. For me, she touched on depression and that omnipresent weltschmerz in a way I found eye-opening to say the least.

We lost a giant today. This one hurts more that I thought it would.

.
posted by Sphinx at 2:09 PM on December 23, 2021 [5 favorites]

.
posted by Rash at 2:19 PM on December 23, 2021

Joan was probably one of my favorite writers and from from friends of friends, a uncanny, sharp, white heat strike writer and often qoated her as many here in this thread.

"none of us know until we reach it. We anticipate (we know) that someone close to us could die, but we do not look beyond the few days or weeks that immediately follow such an imagined death. We misconstrue the nature of even those few days or weeks. We might expect if the death is sudden to feel shock. We do not expect this shock to be obliterative, dislocating to both body and mind. We might expect that we will be prostrate, inconsolable, crazy with loss. We do not expect to be literally crazy, cool customers who believe their husband is about to return and need his shoes."

🌑
posted by clavdivs at 2:42 PM on December 23, 2021 [1 favorite]

.
posted by adekllny at 3:02 PM on December 23, 2021

I hereby apologize for the non-paywalled link: archive.org wouldn't let me bring up a page there earlier today when I posted the link.
posted by ivanthenotsoterrible at 3:15 PM on December 23, 2021

.
posted by cybercoitus interruptus at 3:23 PM on December 23, 2021

.
posted by Token Meme at 3:42 PM on December 23, 2021

.
posted by snuffleupagus at 3:48 PM on December 23, 2021

°
posted by Katjusa Roquette at 4:38 PM on December 23, 2021

The New York Review of Books has removed their paywall for their entire, significant archive of Didion's works.


,
posted by Ahmad Khani at 4:38 PM on December 23, 2021 [6 favorites]

.
posted by Flock of Cynthiabirds at 5:21 PM on December 23, 2021

.
posted by of strange foe at 6:41 PM on December 23, 2021

From Play it as it Lays:

“In the first hot month of the fall after the summer she left Carter (the summer Carter left her, the summer Carter stopped living in the house in Beverly Hills), Maria drove the freeway. She dressed every morning with a greater sense of purpose than she had felt in some time, a cotton skirt, a jersey, sandals she could kick off when she wanted the touch of the accelerator, and she dressed very fast, running a brush through her hair once or twice and tying it back with a ribbon, for it was essential (to pause was to throw herself into unspeakable peril) that she be on the freeway by ten o'clock. Not somewhere on Hollywood Boulevard, not on her way to the freeway, but actually on the freeway. If she was not she lost the day's rhythm, its precariously imposed momentum. Once she was on the freeway and had maneuvered her way to a fast lane she turned on the radio at high volume and she drove. She drove the San Diego to the Harbor, the Harbor up to the Hollywood, the Hollywood to the Golden State, the Santa Monica, the Santa Ana, the Pasadena, the Ventura. She drove it as a riverman runs a river, every day more attuned to its currents, its deceptions, and just as a riverman feels the pull of the rapids in the lull between sleeping and waking, so Maria lay at night in the still of Beverly Hills and saw the great signs soar overhead at seventy miles an hour, Normandie 1/4 Vermont 3/4 Harbor Fwy 1. Again and again she returned to an intricate stretch just south of the interchange where successful passage from the Hollywood onto the Harbor required a diagonal move across four lanes of traffic. On the afternoon she finally did it without once braking or once losing the beat on the radio she was exhilarated, and that night slept dreamlessly.”

This is up there with Austen for me.
posted by anshuman at 6:56 PM on December 23, 2021 [14 favorites]

.
posted by marlys at 6:59 PM on December 23, 2021

Didion's political writing for the NYRB, esp. her work on Clinton and Cheney, is vastly under considered and under read. The misogyny of our culture made us blind to her skills as an investagative journalist. Her thorny and difficult refusal of a singular, ideological narrative, her slipperiness. and her coldness were poltiical positions. One of the things I learnt from Didion, is how power moved from the personal and the domestic to the larger crisis of nation state; but also how paower was a complex and amorphus thing--how its ambivalence or ambiguity must be considered, that not knowing was part of the process.
posted by PinkMoose at 7:16 PM on December 23, 2021 [8 favorites]

.
posted by hippybear at 7:54 PM on December 23, 2021

This is sad news indeed.
posted by y2karl at 8:00 PM on December 23, 2021

.
posted by amusebuche at 8:03 PM on December 23, 2021

So this thread has taught me that I need to read more Didion.

.
posted by Halloween Jack at 8:31 PM on December 23, 2021 [2 favorites]

.
posted by jquinby at 8:32 PM on December 23, 2021

.

So much feeling. I learned a huge amount from her writing, and from the Year of Magical Thinking, which is an extraordinary testament about grief as most of you, I am sure, know.
posted by jokeefe at 8:42 PM on December 23, 2021 [1 favorite]

.
posted by marimeko at 8:52 PM on December 23, 2021

.
posted by kneecapped at 11:03 PM on December 23, 2021

Joan Didion was a damn good journalist.

.

From Didion's 1979 essay "The White Album," published in the book of the same name:

TO PACK AND WEAR:

2 skirts
2 jerseys or leotards
1 pullover sweater
2 pair shoes
stockings
bra
nightgown, robe, slippers
cigarettes
bourbon

Bag with:
shampoo
toothbrush and paste
Basis soap
razor, deodorant
aspirin, prescriptions, Tampax
face cream, powder, baby oil

TO CARRY:

mohair throw
typewriter
2 legal pads and pens
files
house key

This is a list which was taped inside my closet door in Hollywood during those years when I was reporting more or less steadily. The list enabled me to pack, without thinking, for any piece I was likely to do. Notice the deliberate anonymity of costume: in a skirt, a leotard, and stockings, I could pass on either side of the culture. Notice the mohair throw for trunk-line flights (i.e., no blankets) and for the motel room in which the air conditioning could not be turned off. Notice the bourbon for the same motel room. Notice the typewriter for the airport, coming home: the idea was to turn in the Hertz car, check in, find an empty bench, and start typing the day’s notes.

It should be clear that this was a list made by someone who prized control, yearned after momentum, someone determined to play her role as if she had the script, heard her cues, knew the narrative. There is on this list one significant omission, one article I needed and never had: a watch. I needed a watch not during the day, when I could turn on the car radio or ask someone, but at night, in the motel. Quite often I would ask the desk for the time every half hour or so, until finally, embarrassed to ask again, I would call Los Angeles and ask my husband. In other words I had skirts, jerseys, leotards, pullover sweater, shoes, stockings, bra, nightgown, robe, slippers, cigarettes, bourbon, shampoo, toothbrush and paste, Basis soap, razor, deodorant, aspirin, prescriptions, Tampax, face cream, powder, baby oil, mohair throw, typewriter, legal pads, pens, files and a house key, but I didn’t know what time it was. This may be a parable, either of my life as a reporter during this period or of the period itself.

-30-
posted by virago at 12:39 AM on December 24, 2021 [10 favorites]

I will read (and, in some cases, reread) her writing for the New York Review of Books, keeping in mind the exceptionally on-point observation of PinkMoose that

One of the things I learnt from Didion, is how power moved from the personal and the domestic to the larger crisis of nation state; but also how paower was a complex and amorphus thing--how its ambivalence or ambiguity must be considered, that not knowing was part of the process.

Finally, I recommend Where I Was From, Didion's 2003 dissection of the myth that her native California was created by bootstrapping and self-reliant sorts who'd do anything but lean on Uncle Sam. Rather, she deftly outlines, the state “where distrust of centralized governmental authority has historically passed for an ethic” has leveraged every subsidy from the feds that it could get: railroads, water projects, oil operations, and WWII and Cold War military contracts.

Where I Was From should be required reading in these times, when the "keep the government's hands off my Medicare" crowd continues to be pandered to on a national level.
posted by virago at 1:17 AM on December 24, 2021 [2 favorites]

Aw man. "Goodbye to All That" will always hold a special place in my heart; I think it was the first thing of hers I ever read.
Hoping that it's not too soon for this, but this has reminded me of Danny Lavery's tongue-in-cheek but affectionate joan didion's enemies list.

Godspeed Joan.
posted by peakes at 2:10 AM on December 24, 2021 [1 favorite]

.

Someone in the comments of her NYT obit left this:
https://www.esquire.com/lifestyle/a38401618/joan-didion-shopping-center-essay/

I'm smiling.
posted by james33 at 4:25 AM on December 24, 2021 [2 favorites]

.
posted by gwint at 9:07 AM on December 24, 2021

.
posted by Lyme Drop at 9:35 AM on December 24, 2021

-30-
posted by virago at 9:57 AM on December 24, 2021

.
posted by newdaddy at 12:46 PM on December 24, 2021

.

for Joan and for B., who I did not text on December 23 when I read that Joan Didion had died, because she is also gone.
posted by atoxyl at 5:17 PM on December 24, 2021 [3 favorites]

She wrote perfect sentences.
Around 20 years ago, after a love affair ended in a painful way, and insomnia hit hard, I started rereading Slouching Towards Bethlehem and The White Album in the wee hours.
Over the years I have read the essays in both those books countless times, usually when afflicted by insomnia, and something about the way she wrote, perhaps her cadence, or her incisiveness, or a whole host of other things about her writing, helped get me through those hours.
Didion dying, even at the age of 87, is a huge blow, but I am grateful for what she put out into the world, especially her ability to cut to the heart of the matter while ignoring the recieved wisdom on the wide variety of subjects she wrote about.

.
posted by Phlegmco(tm) at 1:46 AM on December 25, 2021 [2 favorites]