I came to Joan Didion’s writing late in her career. That said, Didion has had a writing career since 1956, securing a job at Vogue magazine after writing a prize-winning essay in a contest for the job. She published her first novel Run, River in 1963, and continued to write non-fiction and prose-like journalism from then on.

Didion was born in Sacramento to a Army father who was always relocating the family to various cities in the United States. When Didion was a child, her family settled permanently, and Didion graduated from the University of California-Berkley with a degree in English in 1956.

Didion has worked in a number of mediums, including non-fiction essays, plays and novels. She worked for much of her life with her husband, John Gregory Dunne, in the same room, and the pair often influenced each other’s work, sharing suggestions while they worked. They lived together in Los Angeles for nearly twenty years. They even collaborated several times, including a biography of journalist Jessica Savitch and a screenplay adaptation of her book, Play It As It Lays.

The first and only book of Didion’s I have read so far is her fabulously-praised work of non-fiction The Year of Magical Thinking. The work details Didion’s life and reaction to the sudden death of her husband of nearly forty years and the illness of her daughter, Quintana Roo Dunne, of septic shock from pneumonia. Didion had to postpone her husband’s surgery for nearly a month so their daughter could recover from her surgery. Soon after the funeral, a hematoma struck Quintana, and she required massive brain surgery. She died immediately before her mother’s book was published of pancreatitis in 2005. Quintana was 39.

Since the book was published, Didion adapted it into a one-woman Broadway show that was performed by Vanessa Redgrave. In 2006, much of her work was compiled into a library collection called We Tell Ourselves Stories in Which to Live. Didion also moved permanently from Los Angeles to New York in 2005.  

Didion has recently published a new memoir companion to The Year of Magical Thinking called Blue Nights that focuses on her own aging and her relationship with her daughter. The book is supposed to address the questions of a mother whose child has died, questions of if her relationship with her daughter was strong enough. As usual, it will focus on the complicated questions and grief implicit in dealing with extreme grief.

Will you be reading Didion’s new memoir?