Skip to main content

Joan Didion

Biography

Joan Didion

Joan Didion was the author of five novels and 10 books of nonfiction, including THE YEAR OF MAGICAL THINKING and BLUE NIGHTS. Her collected nonfiction, WE TELL OURSELVES STORIES IN ORDER TO LIVE, was published by Everyman’s Library in 2006. Born in Sacramento, California, Didion lived in New York City. She died in 2021.

Joan Didion

Books by Joan Didion

by Joan Didion - Essays, Nonfiction

These 12 pieces from 1968 to 2000, never before gathered together, offer an illuminating glimpse into the mind and process of a legendary figure. Here, Joan Didion touches on topics ranging from newspapers ("the problem is not so much whether one trusts the news as to whether one finds it"), to the fantasy of San Simeon, to not getting into Stanford. In "Why I Write," Didion ponders the act of writing: "I write entirely to find out what I'm thinking, what I'm looking at, what I see and what it means." From her admiration for Hemingway's sentences to her acknowledgment that Martha Stewart's story is one "that has historically encouraged women in this country, even as it has threatened men," these essays are acutely and brilliantly observed.

by Joan Didion - Essays, Memoir, Nonfiction

Joan Didion has always kept notebooks --- of overheard dialogue, interviews, drafts of essays, copies of articles. SOUTH AND WEST gives us two extended excerpts from notebooks she kept in the 1970s. “Notes on the South” traces a road trip that she and her husband, John Gregory Dunne, took through Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama. Her acute observations about the small towns they pass through, her interviews with local figures, and their preoccupation with race, class and heritage suggest a South largely unchanged today. “California Notes” began as an assignment from Rolling Stone on the Patty Hearst trial. Though Didion never wrote the piece, the time she spent watching the trial in San Francisco triggered thoughts about the West and her own upbringing in Sacramento.

by Joan Didion - Nonfiction

In her first book since THE YEAR OF MAGICAL THINKING, Joan Didion has now written with stunning frankness about her daughter, Quintana Roo, as well as thoughts and fears about having children and about growing old.

by Joan Didion - Essays, Nonfiction

The first nonfiction work by one of the prose stylists of our era, SLOUCHING TOWARDS BETHELHEM remains, forty years after its first publication, the essential portrait of America— particularly California—in the sixties. It focuses on such subjects as John Wayne and Howard Hughes, growing up a girl in California, ruminating on the nature of good and evil in a Death Valley motel room, and, especially, the essence of San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury, the heart of the counterculture.