Joan Didion
| Joan Didion | |
|---|---|
Didion at the 2008 Brooklyn Book Festival
|
|
| Born |
December 5, 1934 Sacramento, California, US |
| Occupation | Novelist, memoirist, essayist |
| Nationality | American |
| Alma mater | University of California, Berkeley |
| Period | 1963–present |
| Subject | Memoir, drama |
| Notable works |
Slouching Towards Bethlehem (1968) Play It As It Lays (1970) The Year of Magical Thinking (2005) |
| Spouse |
John Gregory Dunne (m. 1964–2003; his death) |
| Children | 1 |
| Relatives | Dominick Dunne (brother-in-law) |
Joan Didion (born December 5, 1934) is an American author best known for her novels and her literary journalism. Her novels and essays explore the disintegration of American morals and cultural chaos, where the overriding theme is individual and social fragmentation. A sense of anxiety or dread permeates much of her work.
Joan Didion was born and raised in Sacramento, California, to parents Frank Reese and Eduene (née Jerrett) Didion. Didion recalls writing things down as early as age five, though she claims that she never saw herself as a writer until after being published. She read everything she could get her hands on after learning how to read and even needed written permission from her mother to borrow adult books, biographies especially, from the library at a young age. With this, she identified herself as being a "shy, bookish child", who pushed herself to overcome her social anxiety through acting and public speaking.
As a child, Didion attended kindergarten and first grade, although, because her father was in the Army Air Corps during World War II and her family was constantly being relocated, she did not attend school on a regular basis. Then, in 1943 or early 1944, her family settled back in Sacramento, and her father went to Detroit to settle defense contracts for World War I and II. Didion wrote in her 2003 memoir Where I Was From that moving so often made her feel like a perpetual outsider.
In 1956, Didion graduated from the University of California, Berkeley with a Bachelor of Arts degree in English. During her senior year, she won first place in an essay contest sponsored by Vogue, and was awarded a job as a research assistant at the magazine.
In two years at Vogue, Didion worked her way up from promotional copywriter to associate feature editor. While there, she wrote her first novel, Run, River, which was published in 1963. She returned to California with her new husband, writer John Gregory Dunne, and in 1968, published Slouching Towards Bethlehem, her first work of nonfiction, a collection of magazine pieces about her experiences in California.
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