“The Year of Magical Thinking” (2005) was written after the unexpected heart attack death of her husband and frequent collaborator, John Gregory Dunne. Two of her last books were her most personal.
“Didion,” Barbara Grizzuti Harrison wrote in the Nation in 1979, “makes it a point of honor not to struggle for meaning.”ĭidion wrote 19 books, including the bestselling novels “Play It as It Lays” and “A Book of Common Prayer.” Her nonfiction includes “Salvador,” “Miami,” “After Henry” and “We Tell Ourselves Stories in Order to Live.” But some critics wanted more from Didion than cool-eyed observations: They wanted to be told what it all meant. President Obama called her “one of our sharpest and most respected observers of American politics and culture” when he presented her with the National Humanities Medal in 2012. “Try to rearrange one of her sentences, and you’ve realized that the sentence was inevitable, a hologram.”
“Nobody writes better English prose than Joan Didion,” critic John Leonard once wrote. She deployed trenchant facts like surgical bombs, telling us, for example, that seemingly placid San Bernardino in the mid-1960s was the kind of place where it was “easy to Dial-A-Devotion, but hard to buy a book,” where the future always looks good “because no one remembers the past.” Readers of “Slouching Towards Bethlehem” or “The White Album,” her most acclaimed nonfiction collections, “could well follow one of her paragraphs into hell,” an admiring critic once noted. Photos from the life of Joan Didion, who chronicled California, politics and sorrow in ‘Slouching Towards Bethlehem’ and ‘Year of Magical Thinking.’ Entertainment & Arts Photos: Joan Didion, masterful essayist, novelist and screenwriter, dies at 87
0 kommentar(er)
