The late great American author Joan Didion’s fiction and nonfiction works capture a time and place in history. Her precision invites the reader to travel along with her, to feel the same anxiety that life gave her through the unsettling contradictions of 20th century American life.
Didion wrote with the mission to find out what about a situation made her uncomfortable. Through the style of new journalism, she wrote detailed accounts of events, places, and people she encountered during the 1960s and ’70s in California. Born in Sacramento, Didion frequently wrote of the state and its culture, even after relocating to New York City later in life.
Her first two novels, “Run River” and “Play It As It Lays,” and her essay collections, “Slouching Toward Bethlehem,” “Where I Was From,” and “The White Album,” all take place in California. Any one of these books provides a solid introduction to Didion’s work as they offer insights into some of her main thematic preoccupations.
Some of the themes of the books mentioned above include cultural malaise, hypocrisy, and losing one’s sense of self. While these themes may seem depressing, Didion’s sharp wit and gift for writing about complex characters make her writing intellectually piquing more than anything else. You will remember an odd detail long after reading one of her books. Almost a year after reading “Slouching Towards Bethlehem,” I still occasionally remember her description of a young child sitting on a rocking horse after taking LSD.
Later works of Didion primarily deal with grief, death, and illness. Perhaps her most famous book, “My Year of Magical Thinking,” talks about the year following the death of her husband, playwright John Gregory Dunne. Only 18 months later, the death of their daughter Quintana and Didion’s worsening Multiple Sclerosis led to her writing “Blue Nights.” Didion maintained the same level of lucidity and specificity in her early writing as in these works about grief and her imminent death in these works.
No matter which of Didion’s books you read, it will give you insight into the mind of one of the most famous contemporary American authors and help you parse the uncomfortable details of familiar events.
