Picture of author.

Joan Didion (1934–2021)

Autor(a) de The Year of Magical Thinking

45+ Works 30,217 Membros 668 Críticas 138 Favorited

About the Author

Born in Sacramento, California, on December 5, 1934, Joan Didion received a B.A. from the University of California, Berkeley in 1956. She wrote for Vogue from 1956 to 1963, and was visiting regent's lecturer in English at the University of California, Berkeley in 1976. Didion also published novels, mostrar mais short stories, social commentary, and essays. Her work often comments on social disorder. Didion wrote for years on her native California; from there her perspective broadened and turned to the countries of Central America and Southeast Asia. Her novels include Democracy (1984) and The Last Thing He Wanted (1996). Well known nonfiction titles include Slouching Towards Bethlehem (1968), The White Album (1979), The Year of Magical Thinking (2005) and Blue Nights (2011). In 1971 Joan Didion was nominated for the National Book Award in fiction for Play It As It Lays. In 1981 she received the American Book Award in nonfiction, and was nominated for a National Book Critics Circle Prize in nonfiction for The White Album. Didion has received a great deal of recognition for The Year of Magical Thinking, which was awarded the National Book Award for Nonfiction in 2005. In 2007, Didion received the National Book Foundation's annual Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters. In 2009, Didion was awarded an honorary Doctor of Letters degree by Harvard University. On July 3, 2013 the White House announced Didion was one of the recipients of the National Medals of Arts and Humanities presented by President Barack Obama. (Bowker Author Biography) mostrar menos
Image credit: Photo © 2003 Colleen Guaitolini

Obras por Joan Didion

The Year of Magical Thinking (2005) 10,272 exemplares
Slouching Towards Bethlehem: Essays (1968) 4,119 exemplares
Play It As It Lays (1970) 2,918 exemplares
The White Album (1979) 2,424 exemplares
Blue Nights (2011) 1,580 exemplares
A Book of Common Prayer (1977) 1,055 exemplares
Where I Was From (2003) 821 exemplares
Democracy (1984) 730 exemplares
Salvador (1983) 688 exemplares
The Last Thing He Wanted (1996) 638 exemplares
After Henry: Essays (1992) 537 exemplares
Miami (1987) 529 exemplares
South and West (2017) 528 exemplares
Let Me Tell You What I Mean (2021) — Autor — 455 exemplares
Political Fictions (2001) 443 exemplares
Run River (1963) 423 exemplares
Cars (Picture Puffin) (1984) 329 exemplares
Vintage Didion (2004) 162 exemplares
Fixed Ideas: America Since 9.11 (2003) 150 exemplares
Joan Didion: The 1960s & 70s (2019) 143 exemplares
Joan Didion: The 1980s & 90s (2021) 68 exemplares
Live and Learn (2005) 54 exemplares
A Star Is Born [1976 film] (1976) — Screenwriter — 53 exemplares
Joan Didion: Collected Essays (2018) 51 exemplares
Up Close & Personal [1996 film] (1996) — Writer — 32 exemplares
Ed Ruscha: Course of Empire (2005) 20 exemplares
Joan Didion: What She Means (2022) 17 exemplares
True Confessions [1981 film] (1981) — Screenwriter — 13 exemplares
The Panic in Needle Park [1971 film] (2014) — Screenwriter — 11 exemplares
After Henry {essay} 6 exemplares
Goodbye to All That 4 exemplares
On Self-Respect 2 exemplares
Didion, Joan Archive 2 exemplares
White Album 1 exemplar

Associated Works

The Art of the Personal Essay (1994) — Contribuidor — 1,371 exemplares
The Best American Essays of the Century (2000) — Contribuidor — 774 exemplares
The Norton Book of Women's Lives (1993) — Contribuidor — 409 exemplares
The New Journalism (1973) — Contribuidor — 334 exemplares
Writing New York: A Literary Anthology (1998) — Contribuidor — 275 exemplares
Writing Los Angeles: A Literary Anthology (2002) — Contribuidor — 229 exemplares
Reporting Civil Rights, Part 2: American Journalism 1963-1973 (2003) — Contribuidor — 217 exemplares
The Art of Fact: A Historical Anthology of Literary Journalism (1997) — Contribuidor — 214 exemplares
Maiden Voyages: Writings of Women Travelers (1993) — Contribuidor — 191 exemplares
The Best American Essays 1999 (1999) — Contribuidor — 184 exemplares
The Best American Travel Writing 2004 (2004) — Contribuidor — 182 exemplares
Eight Modern Essayists (1980)algumas edições177 exemplares
Some Women (1989) — Introdução — 153 exemplares
The Norton Book of Personal Essays (1997) — Contribuidor — 142 exemplares
The Best American Essays 1992 (1992) — Contribuidor — 138 exemplares
The Best American Essays 1989 (1989) — Contribuidor — 100 exemplares
Women's Magazines, 1940-1960: Gender Roles and the Popular Press (1998) — Contribuidor — 89 exemplares
American Christmas Stories (2021) — Contribuidor — 59 exemplares
The Seasons of Women: An Anthology (1995) — Contribuidor — 46 exemplares
California Uncovered: Stories For The 21st Century (2005) — Contribuidor — 31 exemplares
On the Contrary: Essays by Men and Women (1984) — Contribuidor — 15 exemplares
Open Secrets (1972) — Contribuidor — 8 exemplares
The Analog Sea Review: Number Four (2022) — Contribuidor — 2 exemplares
Perfectly Candid (1994) — Photographed Subject — 1 exemplar

Etiquetado

a ler (2,061) Americano (323) antologia (531) Autobiografia (302) Biografia (383) biography-memoir (81) Califórnia (421) Casamento (124) Derrota (121) Didion (123) Década de 1960 (225) e-livro (108) Ensaio (164) ensaios (2,450) Escrita (209) Estados Unidos (177) Família (103) Ficção (1,187) história (345) Joan Didion (157) Jornalismo (364) Kindle (111) Library of America (102) lido (298) Literatura (338) Literatura dos Estados Unidos (405) Los Angeles (96) Luto (540) Memórias (1,735) Morte (467) mulheres (173) National Book Award (79) Nova Iorque (108) Não ficção (2,426) own (156) Política (240) por ler (192) Romance (211) Século XX (210) Viagem (167)

Conhecimento Comum

Membros

Discussions

Joan Didion? em Legacy Libraries (Novembro 2022)
Which Joan Didion book should I read first? em Book talk (Novembro 2019)

Críticas

I've been meaning to read this for a number of years now and finally it found its way into my hands on a recent bookshop visit. A Waterstones bookshop opened a year or two back in the out of town shopping centre closest to me for popping in for some groceries on Saturdays, and although most welcome it's making my quick shopping trips for yoghurt and bananas considerably more expensive than before.

Didion chronicles in this memoir twelve months from the moment her husband drops dead at their kitchen table (whilst their only child was, incidentally, also lying critically ill in hospital battling sepsis). Although it's not a book I'd recommend to someone in the throes of grief, despite the circumstances Didion writes about I didn't find it a maudlin read.

Didion writes with utter honesty but never with self-pity, and her brisk matter-of-factness as she describes the most difficult of times feels insightful, brave and clear-eyed rather than sentimental (although it is a heartbreaking story). As a born story-teller who moved in some interesting circles with her writer husband, Didion's life at that time (and earlier in their marriage, which she recounts when unexpected things or places trigger memories) provided an unexpectedly interesting backdrop to this memoir on bereavement, a snapshot of a certain era in American history.

4.5 stars - I really enjoyed Didion's writing in this book, despite the difficult subject matter, and will definitely be seeking out some of her other essays and novels.
… (mais)
½
 
Assinalado
AlisonY | 3 outras críticas | Mar 16, 2024 |
The essay about migraines was kind of amazing.
 
Assinalado
caedocyon | 85 outras críticas | Mar 11, 2024 |
Summary: A collection of essays, most originally published as Saturday Evening Post articles describing Didion’s first years back in California, during the height of the hippie movement.

I never read Joan Didion’s work while she was alive. Only in recent years have I developed a taste for essays, and as I read essayists, Didion’s name comes up repeatedly as a master of the craft. This work is her first non-fiction (she published a novel, Run, River, in 1963). This set of essays, most of which first appeared in The Saturday Evening Post, were mostly written between 1964-1967. These were her first years back in her home state of California after eight years of working for Vogue in New York City, to which she eventually returned.

The essays capture the ethos of California in the mid-1960s, the mix of sunny optimism, the agricultural belt of the Sacramento Valley, where she grew up, the nervous lassitude of Los Angeles when the Santa Ana winds rise, and the outlaw fighter John Wayne after he “licked the Big C” the outlaw cells that had threatened his life when she was on set covering the making of The Sons of Katie Elder, Wayne’s 165th film. In stark contrast, she profiles Joan Baez and her Institute for the Study of Nonviolence. She describes Baez as “a personality before she was entirely a person, and, like anyone to whom that happens, she is in a sense the hapless victim of what others have seen in her, written about her, wanted her to be and not to be.”

Her title essay, Slouching Towards Bethlehem, recounts her time in 1967 in Haight-Asbury during the “summer of love” where youth from all over the country flocked to San Francisco signaling an unraveling in the social fabric of the country, an inchoate longing. She describes the people she met, the flophouses like The Warehouse they lived, the prodigious use of drugs, and the do-gooders like Arthur Lisch with utopian visions who ended up caring for kids when they crashed, and the Zen alternatives to trips. Already, the demise of Haight was apparent to some.

“Personals,” the second section collects articles with a more interior focus: her notebook keeping, thoughts on morality and self-respect (“Without it, one eventually discovers the final turn of the screw: one runs away to find oneself, and finds no one at home”). She reminds us of 1960’s monster movies and what is like to go home when it is no longer home.

The final part, “Seven Places of the Mind” take us from Hawaii to Alcatraz to Newport and to her eight years in New York. The essay on Newport, “The Seacoast of Despair” gave voice to my own experience of the lavish mansions of a bygone age, sterile and sad. In New York, she describes the point at which she stopped believing in “new faces” and felt herself becoming increasingly estranged from the whole scene, rescued by her husband who took a six-month leave that turned into a long-term residence in California.

There is so much of interest here. Didion masterfully crafts sentences and tells non-fiction stories. She is a keen observer of herself, the places where she visits or lives, and the times through which she was living. Whether profiling the famous or the unknown, like Comrade Laski of the Communist Party of the United States of America, she opens our eyes to both their individuality and the ways they serve larger than life roles as types.

Some of us are at a point of reflecting back over our lives, and summing up what they’ve meant. These essays were a lens to consider at least a part of that life. I’m intrigued enough to read more of her insights on the times we have both traversed and how she made sense of them. It strikes me that we had so many dreams of changing the world and indeed, the world has changed, but not as we expected. I wonder if Didion was as surprised and unsettled as I find myself in looking at the the world sixty years later. Or did she indeed foresee the center that cannot hold and the beast slouching toward Bethlehem?
… (mais)
 
Assinalado
BobonBooks | 85 outras críticas | Mar 7, 2024 |
My own failing but there were times in some of these pieces that I had no idea what Joan Didion was writing about. The writing is so reliant on American popular cultural references that with the passage of time they have become opaque to non-American readers. Nevertheless, I enjoyed Joan Didion's insights, feistiness and her turn of phrase. This collection is a book I could and should re-read because there is treasure to be found and some of the pieces set me off into deep reflections on how to live. Perhaps the most memorable for me (because I read it yesterday) was in Seven Place of the Mind: The Seacoast of Despair. When the hopes and dreams of a mercantile culture come to fruition:

Who could think that the building of a railroad could guarantee salvation, when there on the lawns of the men who built the railroad nothing is left but the shadows of migrainous women, and the pony carts waiting for the long-dead children?
… (mais)
 
Assinalado
simonpockley | 85 outras críticas | Feb 25, 2024 |

Listas

1970s (1)
Cooper (1)
My TBR (2)
1960s (1)

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Estatísticas

Obras
45
Also by
30
Membros
30,217
Popularidade
#663
Avaliação
3.9
Críticas
668
ISBN
439
Línguas
16
Marcado como favorito
138

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