Vogue During her seven years at
Vogue, from 1956 to 1964, Didion worked her way up from promotional
copywriter to associate feature editor. While at
Vogue, and homesick for California, she wrote her first novel,
Run, River (1963), about a Sacramento family as it comes apart. The couple wrote many newsstand-magazine assignments. "She and Dunne started doing that work with an eye to covering the bills, and then a little more," Nathan Heller reported in
The New Yorker. "Their The Saturday Evening Post|
[Saturday Evening] Post rates allowed them to rent a tumbledown Hollywood mansion, buy a banana-colored
Corvette Stingray, raise a child, and dine well." In Los Angeles, they settled in
Los Feliz from 1963 to 1971, and then, after living in
Malibu for eight years, she and Dunne moved to
Brentwood Park, a quiet, affluent residential neighborhood.
Slouching Towards Bethlehem In 1968, Didion published her first nonfiction book,
Slouching Towards Bethlehem, a collection of magazine pieces about her experiences in California. She wrote from a personal perspective, adding her own feelings and memories to situations, inventing details and quotes to make the stories more vivid, and using metaphors to give the reader a better understanding of the disordered subjects of her essays: politicians, artists, or just people living an American life.
The New York Times characterized the "grace, sophistication, nuance, [and] irony" of her writing.
1970s Didion's novel
Play It as It Lays, set in Hollywood, was published in 1970, and
A Book of Common Prayer appeared in 1977. In 1979, she published
The White Album, another collection of her magazine pieces from
Life,
Esquire,
The Saturday Evening Post,
The New York Times, and
The New York Review of Books. In her essay entitled "In Bed", Didion explained that she experienced chronic
migraines. Dunne and Didion worked closely for most of their careers. Much of their writing is therefore intertwined. They co-wrote a number of screenplays, including a
1972 film adaptation of her novel
Play It as It Lays that starred
Anthony Perkins and
Tuesday Weld and the screenplay for the 1976 film of
A Star is Born. They also spent several years adapting the biography of journalist
Jessica Savitch into the 1996
Robert Redford and
Michelle Pfeiffer film,
Up Close & Personal. a year after the various trials of the
Central Park Five, Didion dissected serious flaws in the prosecution's case, making her the earliest mainstream writer to view the guilty verdicts as miscarriages of justice. She suggested the defendants were found guilty because of a sociopolitical narrative with racial overtones that clouded the judgment of the court. In 1992, Didion published
After Henry, a collection of twelve geographical essays and a personal memorial for Henry Robbins, who was Didion's friend and editor until his death in 1979. She published
The Last Thing He Wanted, a romantic thriller, in 1996.
The Year of Magical Thinking In 2003, Didion's daughter Quintana Roo Dunne developed
pneumonia that progressed to
septic shock and she was comatose in an intensive-care unit when Didion's husband suddenly died of a heart attack on December 30. This was her first nonfiction book that was not a collection of magazine assignments. The book was called a "masterpiece of two genres: memoir and investigative journalism" and won several awards. Didion began working with English playwright and director
David Hare on a one-woman stage adaptation of
The Year of Magical Thinking in 2007. Produced by
Scott Rudin, the Broadway play featured
Vanessa Redgrave. Although Didion was hesitant to write for the theater, she eventually found the genre, which was new to her, exciting.
Later works In 2011,
Knopf published
Blue Nights, a memoir about aging that also focused on Didion's relationship with her late daughter. More generally, the book deals with the anxieties Didion experienced about adopting and raising a child, as well as the aging process. In 2012,
New York magazine announced that Didion and
Todd Field were "co-writing a screenplay". The project titled
As it Happens was a political thriller that never came to fruition, as they couldn't find a studio to properly back it. Ultimately Field was to become the only writer, other than Dunne, with whom Didion would ever collaborate. He paid tribute to her in a scene for his movie
Tár wherein the title character returns to her childhood bedroom and peers at "little boxes" labeled precisely the way Didion describes Quintana's in
Blue Nights A photograph of Didion shot by
Juergen Teller was used as part of the 2015 spring-summer campaign of the luxury French fashion brand
Céline, while previously the clothing company
Gap had featured her in a 1989 campaign. Didion's nephew
Griffin Dunne directed a 2017
Netflix documentary about her,
Joan Didion: The Center Will Not Hold. In it, Didion discusses her writing and personal life, including the deaths of her husband and daughter, adding context to her books
The Year of Magical Thinking and
Blue Nights. In 2021, Didion published
Let Me Tell You What I Mean, a collection of 12 essays she wrote between 1968 and 2000. == Death ==