Joan Didion
Joan Didion was an American writer and journalist. She was born on December 5, 1934 on Manhattan Island and died on December 23, 2021. She became famous for her reporting, journalistic work and essays. Her most famous novel was “The Year of Magical Thinking”.
THE NOT SO RANDOM LIFE OF DIDION
She started writing lyrics at the age of five. At first, she didn’t consider herself a writer until the day her works started to be published. She was a lover of reading. A characteristic event of his childhood was when she asked her mother to borrow a special permit to be able to buy books for adults in the library.
During her childhood she moved several times because her father was in the US Army Air Corps during World War II, and this meant that she had to move frequently. This fact made her not attend school regularly. When she was 9, her family settled in Sacramento indefinitely.
In 1956 she graduated from the University of California with a degree in English. Here she won a prize in an essay contest, the essay was sponsored by Vogue magazine. The prize for this contest was a job in the magazine.
THE OUTSTANDING CAREER OF DIDION
She started working for Vogue and in the short span of two years she went from copywriter to associate editor. Around the same time she was working for the magazine, she began writing her first novel titled Run, River, which was published in 1963. While working for the magazine, she met her husband, John Gregory Dunne, who worked for Times magazine .
After marrying in 1964, they moved to California, leaving their jobs at the magazine.
While living in California, she wrote a book chronicling all of her experiences in the state called Slouching Towards Bethlehem. In 1979, she released what would become her best-regarded work, The White Album. She also wrote notes in magazines like Life, Esquire, The New York Times etc. In 1984, while traveling with her husband in the city of El Salvador, she wrote the book Democracy. This essay addresses concern about the loss of traditional values in society.
Didion has worked alongside her husband throughout their professional career and you can really see how they intertwine.
On December 30, 2003, her husband died of a heart attack. Her daughter was very ill at the time. In that moment she started writing The Year of Magical Thinking. A narrative in which she responded to her husband’s death and the serious illness her daughter was suffering. Her daughter died on August 26, 2005 at the age of 39.
In 2007 she began working on the Broadway adaptation of her book The Year of Magical Thinking.
At the age of 70, she was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. Didion died of complications from Parkinson’s, at her Manhattan home on December 23, 2021 at the age of 87.
“THE YEAR OF MAGICAL THINKING”
One night, while Didion was returning from the hospital where her daughter Quintana was hospitalized for a serious illness, her husband died in the middle of dinner. John Gregory Dunne, her husband, was Didion’s pillar, he adored her. Didion and John grew up together, wrote and traveled together. Above all, marriage was supported in all aspects of life.
Due to this traumatic event, Didion began writing about the horrific loss she suffered in October 2004. The book was completed on New Year’s Eve.
The Year of Magical Thinking was his first non-fiction book, in which she tried to convey her pain in such a cerebral and controlled way that he managed to shock all her readers in a comprehensive manner. Each of her sentences tried to tell in a linear and explanatory way, with an exquisite grammar, the pain she felt. Didion tried to avoid sentimentality in order to realize what was happening in her life. The book is considered a child in the literature of loss. The book was brought to Broadway. The continuation of the novel was Blue Nights, a work she dedicated to her daughter, who died after her husband.
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