Joan Didion is a celebrated author of novels, memoirs and literary journalism. Her career spans decades and chronicles the shifts in American culture as well as her personal tragedies, anxiety and motherhood. Cool Customer.
"We tell ourselves stories in order to live...We look for the sermon in the suicide, for the social or moral lesson in the murder of five. We interpret what we see, select the most workable of the multiple choices. 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."
— Joan Didion, The White Album
ARTICLES FEATURING JOAN
Lost and Found: Reading Joan Didion in California
Scott Bradfield reviews the Library of America edition of Joan Didion’s early novels and essays....
Forgotten Accounts: Didion’s “South and West”
Didion's latest "South and West": irredeemably past, and yet speaking to the current impasse....
Joan Didion, One Week after 9/11
Didion, on the first plane out of New York after 9/11...
Paperback Writers: Joan Didion
Didion is so afraid of her own depths of feeling she can’t avoid revealing them. That’s her contradiction, her fascination....
Having, or Making, or Thinking About Making a Drink
Reading Didion’s prose has always been an aural experience as much as a literary one, as much about rhythm and intonation....
Kind of Blue
So raw on the page that it infuses you....
Where the Morning Went
This is autobiography at its most fragmented....
The Baby
Didion circles the images of her past like a wary woman who has found a basket lodged in the reeds that contains a sleeping infant....
Positions of Privilege
Joan Didion is, as we know, a cool customer....
