Joan Didion, the revered author and essayist whose precise social and personal commentary in such classics as "The White Album" and "The Year of Magical Thinking" made her a uniquely clear-eyed critic of turbulent times, has died. She was old.
Didion died on Thursday, according to his publisher. The company said she died from Parkinson's disease.
One of the country's most trenchant writers was Didion. Her best-selling works of fiction, commentary, and memoir have received numerous honors and are considered modern classics.
The New Journalists of the 1960s included Didion, Tom Wolfe, Gay Talese, and others. She was a novelist, playwright and essayist who once observed that she was so small, so neurotically inarticulate, and that she was so frail that she hid her large, sad eyes.
She said that writers are always selling out.
Didion received a National Humanities Medal in 2012 for her dedication to noticing things other people don't see. For decades, she had engaged in a cool and ruthless dissection of politics and culture, from hippie to presidential campaigns, the kidnapping of Patty Hearst, and her distrust of official stories.
Her writings include her take on Hollywood politics in "Good Citizens" and her dissent against the consensus that five young Black and Latino men had raped a white jogger in 1989.
Didion was not sparing about her own struggles. She was diagnosed with multiplesclerosis in her 30s and then suffered a breakdown around the same time that she was checked into a mental health clinic in Santa Monica, California. In 2005, she reported on personal tragedy in a heartbreaking work, "The Year of Magical Thinking," a narrative formed out of the chaos of grief that followed the death of her husband and writing partner. She adapted it as a one-woman Broadway play that starred Redgrave.
Dunne died of a heart attack at their table in 2003 while their daughter was in the hospital. The kind of work people would instinctively reach for after losing a loved one was the kind of memoir that was a best-seller. Didion said that she thought of the work as a testament to a specific time, and tragically, it was dated shortly after it was published. In the summer of 2005 he died of acute pancreatitis. Didion wrote about her daughter's death in a book.
We have kind of evolved into a society where grieving is completely hidden. It doesn't happen in our family. She told The Associated Press in 2005 that it doesn't happen. Didion spent her later years in New York, but she was most strongly identified with her native state of California. It was where she wrote her best known novel, the despairing "Play It As It Lays", as well as many of her essays.
Michiko Kakutani wrote that California belonged to Joan Didion. Not the California where everyone wears sunglasses, has a Jacuzzi and buys clothes on Rodeo Drive. California is in the sense of the West. The old West was a place where the land and the climate were tied to one's own family.
The need to impose order where order doesn't exist, the way people deceive themselves, and the way the world can be explained are all themes in Didion's subjects. Her 2006 book "We Tell Ourselves Stories in Order to Live" was named after the opening sentence of her famous title essay from "The White Album", a testament to one woman's search for the truth behind the truth.
She wrote that they look for the sermon in the suicide for a social or moral lesson. If we are writers, we live entirely by the idea of a narrative line upon disparate images, which we have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience.
She was a lifelong explorer and wrote about a trip to war torn El Salvador in the nonfiction "Salvador" and a disastrous trip to a film festival in the early 1970s in "A Book of Common Prayer." The film "South and West: From a Notebook" was released in the year of "Joan Didion: The Center Will Not Hold" The Library of America began putting her work in volumes.
Didion was more comfortable with gas station attendants than with celebrities. She and her husband were well placed in high society. They socialized with Warren Beatty and Steven Spielberg in California and a young Harrison Ford worked as a carpenter at their house. They lived in a large apartment on Manhattan's Upper East Side and were successful as screenwriters, working on a remake of "A Star Is Born" and "Play It As It Lays".
Didion was descended from pioneers who traveled with the notorious Donner Party and was fascinated by books from an early age. She was encouraged to write by her mother, and was especially impressed by the prose of Ernest Hemingway, whose terse rhythms anticipated her own. She was both shy and ambitious, but also determined to express herself through writing and public speaking. She moved to New York for a job at Vogue after winning a writing contest and graduating from the University of California at Berkeley.
In her early years, Didion was a conservative, voting for Barry Goldwater in 1964 and contributing essays to William F. Buckley's National Review, but later became more liberal, attacking the role of religion in politics and the establishment's "increasingly histrionic insistence" that She ridiculed the journalism of presidential campaigns and the books of Bob Woodward, calling them vapid and voyeuristic.
Didion and Dunne were married in 1964. They adopted a baby girl two years later. The drunken brawl of Lillian Hellman and Dashiell Hammett, the infidelity and suicidal demons of Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath, and the other author couples are all examples of how volatile they can be. Didion says she and Dunne grew and persevered despite their own conflicts.
She told the AP that the troubles they had were not derived from being writers. What was good for one was bad for the other.
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Hillel Italie is a writer for the Associated Press.
Joan Didion, Author and Essayist Dies, at 87, can be reached at letters@time.com.
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