Remembering Joan Didion: David Ulin, Caitlin Flanagan and more celebrate the late writer

It’s not excessively overmuch to accidental Joan Didion was an icon. Her mode of seeing and penning astir California was transformative.

With the opening enactment of the effort “Some Dreamers of the Golden Dream” – “This is simply a communicative astir emotion and decease successful the aureate land, and begins with the country” – Didion made mythic the scenery of San Bernardino County. As she did with San Francisco and the hippie question of the ’60s with “Slouching Toward Bethlehem.” As she did with her hometown of Sacramento successful “Where I Was From.” As she did with Los Angeles – successful truthful galore pieces, really, but foremost successful the slim, brutal novel, “Play It arsenic It Lays.”

Didion, whose decease Thursday astatine property 87 inspired appreciations from writers the satellite over, whitethorn person made New York City her location for decades, but this fifth-generation Californian wrote her authorities into the literate canon, and successful the aftermath of her endowment came generations of writers who yearned to explicit themselves with her aforesaid chill precision and unsparing insight.

FILE Ñ The writer Joan Didion successful New York, Jan. 5, 2007. Didion, whose mordant dispatches connected California civilization and the chaos of the 1960s established her arsenic a starring exponent of the New Journalism, died astatine location successful Manhattan connected Dec. 23, 2021. She was 87. (Sara Krulwich/The New York Times)

Author and USC prof David Ulin edited 2 caller anthologies of Didion’s work. As a kid increasing up successful New York, helium said helium fell successful emotion with her prose. He notes that 1 of the criticisms of her enactment successful literate circles was that she wrote astir California not for Californians but arsenic a mode to explicate the spot to New Yorkers.

“I don’t deliberation that is simply a downside,” said Ulin. “She was penning this arsenic a spot of involvement and worth for radical each implicit the world. She was a determination writer but she was penning for the assemblage larger than the region, a spot misunderstood and vilified. [Her writing] was a indispensable task successful presumption of illustrating California’s complexity. One of the astir important things was that she wrote against the sunshine story of California, the perceived superficiality here.”

Pasadena-based writer and taste professional for The Atlantic Caitlin Flanagan remembered, “She walked into my parents’ Berkeley surviving country erstwhile I was successful ninth grade, and by the extremity of the night, my beingness was connected its mode to changing.

“She wasn’t adjacent ‘Joan Didion’ yet. She had published conscionable the slender archetypal caller and the postulation ‘Slouching Toward Bethlehem.’ But she would ne'er person needed to constitute different connection aft that archetypal postulation to alteration a procreation of women,” Flanagan continues. “With Pauline Kael, Susan Sontag and Nora Ephron, she taught america that you could beryllium from California, you could beryllium pistillate and you could travel banging successful done the saloon doors and bash what you wanted. She took her territory and held it for implicit fractional a century. She was exquisitely feminine, she was smarter than anyone other and she was strong.”

It is intolerable to speech astir Didion without framing her beingness successful narration to her matrimony to larger-than-life writer John Gregory Dunne – the grief of losing him inspired her bestselling memoir, “The Year of Magical Thinking.” Another captious touchstone successful her beingness was being parent to her girl Quintana Roo, whose somewhat tragic beingness and decease Didion memorialized successful “Blue Nights.”

Explains Flanagan of Didion, “Her beingness was successful galore ways defined by being a woman and mother, and she was bored by second-wave feminism due to the fact that its intelligence products were the state of the 2nd rate. She was scary, pitiless, beautiful, aloof and she looked bully successful a Stingray. She was extravagantly benignant and generous to the radical she cared about, and she was a tender, observant idiosyncratic who knew conscionable what idiosyncratic needed during a debased infinitesimal oregon a infinitesimal of triumph. After Julian Wasser took those celebrated photographs of her successful her Corvette, idiosyncratic asked him wherefore helium had fto her beryllium successful her car for the photographs: ‘You don’t archer that benignant of pistillate what to do.’ There volition ne'er beryllium anyone other similar her.”

Her estimation was gargantuan but successful person, her carnal signifier was frail, bird-like, adjacent earlier precocious property – and grief – had taken her strength. She was celebrated for wearing huge, acheronian sunglasses that hid fractional of her tiny look adjacent aft acheronian – a item Andrea Grossman, laminitis of the prestigious writers’ bid successful Beverly Hills, Writers Bloc, remembers well. Grossman besides remembers Didion’s fierce emotion of Dunne.

“Twenty-six years ago, I needed to acceptable the barroom precocious with the motorboat of my caller literate series, Writers Bloc. And erstwhile I saw that Knopf would people her caller novel, I called the publicist, Pam Henstell. Joan Didion would beryllium the cleanable writer to inaugurate a Los Angeles series,” said Grossman successful an email. “Pam fto maine down gently, saying that the Skirball Center got to her archetypal due to the fact that they were opening arsenic well. Uri Herscher, the visionary down the Skirball, asked her earlier I did.

“Somehow that acceptable maine off. I said to mediocre Pam, ‘I stake Uri Herscher didn’t work each of John Gregory Dunne’s books. I stake helium didn’t admit John Gregory Dunne arsenic 1 of the astir important and underappreciated Catholic American writers of our clip – his books were truthful transcendent that helium could person been penning for immoderate taste group. I stake Uri Herscher couldn’t recite the archetypal leafage of ‘Vegas’ by heart. I stake Uri Herscher didn’t commercialized 2 first-edition Joan Didion books for a first-edition of Dunne’s ‘The Red, White, and Blue.’ Who knows what other I said successful my rant astir the unfairness of it all, astir my emotion for John Gregory Dunne, arsenic if that had thing whatsoever to bash with Joan Didion and Writers Bloc.”

That heartfelt entreaty did the trick: Twenty minutes aboriginal the publicist called Grossman backmost to accidental Didion had decided to look astatine Writers Bloc.

“And 2 days later, FedEx delivered a signed transcript of ‘The Red White and Blue,’ from the Didion-Dunnes. That was her generosity of spirit. I loved her.”