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Read 12 Masterful Essays by Joan Didion for Free Online, Spanning Her Career From 1965 to 2013

in Literature , Writing | January 14th, 2014 3 Comments

Image by David Shankbone, via Wiki­me­dia Com­mons

In a clas­sic essay of Joan Didion’s, “Good­bye to All That,” the nov­el­ist and writer breaks into her narrative—not for the first or last time—to prod her read­er. She rhetor­i­cal­ly asks and answers: “…was any­one ever so young? I am here to tell you that some­one was.” The wry lit­tle moment is per­fect­ly indica­tive of Didion’s unspar­ing­ly iron­ic crit­i­cal voice. Did­ion is a con­sum­mate crit­ic, from Greek kritēs , “a judge.” But she is always fore­most a judge of her­self. An account of Didion’s eight years in New York City, where she wrote her first nov­el while work­ing for Vogue , “Good­bye to All That” fre­quent­ly shifts point of view as Did­ion exam­ines the truth of each state­ment, her prose mov­ing seam­less­ly from delib­er­a­tion to com­men­tary, anno­ta­tion, aside, and apho­rism, like the below:

I want to explain to you, and in the process per­haps to myself, why I no longer live in New York. It is often said that New York is a city for only the very rich and the very poor. It is less often said that New York is also, at least for those of us who came there from some­where else, a city only for the very young.

Any­one who has ever loved and left New York—or any life-alter­ing city—will know the pangs of res­ig­na­tion Did­ion cap­tures. These eco­nom­ic times and every oth­er pro­duce many such sto­ries. But Did­ion made some­thing entire­ly new of famil­iar sen­ti­ments. Although her essay has inspired a sub-genre , and a col­lec­tion of breakup let­ters to New York with the same title, the unsen­ti­men­tal pre­ci­sion and com­pact­ness of Didion’s prose is all her own.

The essay appears in 1967’s Slouch­ing Towards Beth­le­hem , a rep­re­sen­ta­tive text of the lit­er­ary non­fic­tion of the six­ties along­side the work of John McPhee, Ter­ry South­ern, Tom Wolfe, and Hunter S. Thomp­son. In Didion’s case, the empha­sis must be decid­ed­ly on the lit­er­ary —her essays are as skill­ful­ly and imag­i­na­tive­ly writ­ten as her fic­tion and in close con­ver­sa­tion with their autho­r­i­al fore­bears. “Good­bye to All That” takes its title from an ear­li­er mem­oir, poet and crit­ic Robert Graves’ 1929 account of leav­ing his home­town in Eng­land to fight in World War I. Didion’s appro­pri­a­tion of the title shows in part an iron­ic under­cut­ting of the mem­oir as a seri­ous piece of writ­ing.

And yet she is per­haps best known for her work in the genre. Pub­lished almost fifty years after Slouch­ing Towards Beth­le­hem , her 2005 mem­oir The Year of Mag­i­cal Think­ing is, in poet Robert Pinsky’s words , a “traveler’s faith­ful account” of the stun­ning­ly sud­den and crush­ing per­son­al calami­ties that claimed the lives of her hus­band and daugh­ter sep­a­rate­ly. “Though the mate­r­i­al is lit­er­al­ly ter­ri­ble,” Pin­sky writes, “the writ­ing is exhil­a­rat­ing and what unfolds resem­bles an adven­ture nar­ra­tive: a forced expe­di­tion into those ‘cliffs of fall’ iden­ti­fied by Hop­kins.” He refers to lines by the gift­ed Jesuit poet Ger­ard Man­ley Hop­kins that Did­ion quotes in the book: “O the mind, mind has moun­tains; cliffs of fall / Fright­ful, sheer, no-man-fath­omed. Hold them cheap / May who ne’er hung there.”

The near­ly unim­peach­ably author­i­ta­tive ethos of Didion’s voice con­vinces us that she can fear­less­ly tra­verse a wild inner land­scape most of us triv­i­al­ize, “hold cheap,” or can­not fath­om. And yet, in a 1978 Paris Review inter­view , Didion—with that tech­ni­cal sleight of hand that is her casu­al mastery—called her­self “a kind of appren­tice plumber of fic­tion, a Cluny Brown at the writer’s trade.” Here she invokes a kind of arche­type of lit­er­ary mod­esty (John Locke, for exam­ple, called him­self an “under­labour­er” of knowl­edge) while also fig­ur­ing her­self as the win­some hero­ine of a 1946 Ernst Lubitsch com­e­dy about a social climber plumber’s niece played by Jen­nifer Jones, a char­ac­ter who learns to thumb her nose at pow­er and priv­i­lege.

A twist of fate—interviewer Lin­da Kuehl’s death—meant that Did­ion wrote her own intro­duc­tion to the Paris Review inter­view, a very unusu­al occur­rence that allows her to assume the role of her own inter­preter, offer­ing iron­ic prefa­to­ry remarks on her self-under­stand­ing. After the intro­duc­tion, it’s dif­fi­cult not to read the inter­view as a self-inter­ro­ga­tion. Asked about her char­ac­ter­i­za­tion of writ­ing as a “hos­tile act” against read­ers, Did­ion says, “Obvi­ous­ly I lis­ten to a read­er, but the only read­er I hear is me. I am always writ­ing to myself. So very pos­si­bly I’m com­mit­ting an aggres­sive and hos­tile act toward myself.”

It’s a curi­ous state­ment. Didion’s cut­ting wit and fear­less vul­ner­a­bil­i­ty take in seem­ing­ly all—the expans­es of her inner world and polit­i­cal scan­dals and geopo­lit­i­cal intrigues of the out­er, which she has dis­sect­ed for the bet­ter part of half a cen­tu­ry. Below, we have assem­bled a selec­tion of Didion’s best essays online. We begin with one from Vogue :

“On Self Respect” (1961)

Didion’s 1979 essay col­lec­tion The White Album brought togeth­er some of her most tren­chant and search­ing essays about her immer­sion in the coun­ter­cul­ture, and the ide­o­log­i­cal fault lines of the late six­ties and sev­en­ties. The title essay begins with a gem­like sen­tence that became the title of a col­lec­tion of her first sev­en vol­umes of non­fic­tion : “We tell our­selves sto­ries in order to live.” Read two essays from that col­lec­tion below:

“ The Women’s Move­ment ” (1972)

“ Holy Water ” (1977)

Did­ion has main­tained a vig­or­ous pres­ence at the New York Review of Books since the late sev­en­ties, writ­ing pri­mar­i­ly on pol­i­tics. Below are a few of her best known pieces for them:

“ Insid­er Base­ball ” (1988)

“ Eye on the Prize ” (1992)

“ The Teach­ings of Speak­er Gin­grich ” (1995)

“ Fixed Opin­ions, or the Hinge of His­to­ry ” (2003)

“ Pol­i­tics in the New Nor­mal Amer­i­ca ” (2004)

“ The Case of There­sa Schi­a­vo ” (2005)

“ The Def­er­en­tial Spir­it ” (2013)

“ Cal­i­for­nia Notes ” (2016)

Did­ion con­tin­ues to write with as much style and sen­si­tiv­i­ty as she did in her first col­lec­tion, her voice refined by a life­time of expe­ri­ence in self-exam­i­na­tion and pierc­ing crit­i­cal appraisal. She got her start at Vogue in the late fifties, and in 2011, she pub­lished an auto­bi­o­graph­i­cal essay there that returns to the theme of “yearn­ing for a glam­orous, grown up life” that she explored in “Good­bye to All That.” In “ Sable and Dark Glass­es ,” Didion’s gaze is stead­ier, her focus this time not on the naïve young woman tem­pered and hard­ened by New York, but on her­self as a child “deter­mined to bypass child­hood” and emerge as a poised, self-con­fi­dent 24-year old sophisticate—the per­fect New York­er she nev­er became.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Joan Did­ion Reads From New Mem­oir, Blue Nights, in Short Film Direct­ed by Grif­fin Dunne

30 Free Essays & Sto­ries by David Fos­ter Wal­lace on the Web

10 Free Sto­ries by George Saun­ders, Author of Tenth of Decem­ber , “The Best Book You’ll Read This Year”

Read 18 Short Sto­ries From Nobel Prize-Win­ning Writer Alice Munro Free Online

Josh Jones  is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at  @jdmagness

by Josh Jones | Permalink | Comments (3) |

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Comments (3), 3 comments so far.

“In a clas­sic essay of Joan Didion’s, “Good­bye to All That,” the nov­el­ist and writer breaks into her narrative—not for the first or last time,..”

Dead link to the essay

It should be “Slouch­ing Towards Beth­le­hem,” with the “s” on Towards.

Most of the Joan Did­ion Essay links have pay­walls.

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Joan Didion: A guide to five of her most influential books

An overview of the Didion books you'll revisit for the rest of your days

Joan Didion inspired countless writers and readers to put pen to paper and write about the world as they see it. Her unique style, restrained yet honest, affecting yet never sentimental, is peerless. Famed for her incisive depictions of American life and personal journalism, she never wasted a word, nor a character. Her seminal essay for Vogue , On Self-Respect first published in 1961, was written not to a word count or a line count, but to an exact character count.

Didion's work chronicled the mood of the '60s, the highs and the lows, as well as the human experience in general - few writers have explored the subject of death and loss with as much insight, control or candour. Her skill lay not only in her style of prose, but her ability to astutely observe the behaviour of others. She saw what others missed.

"I’m not telling you to make the world better, because I don’t think that progress is necessarily part of the package," she said at UC Riverside commencement address in 1975. "I’m just telling you to live in it. Not just to endure it, not just to suffer it, not just to pass through it, but to live in it. To look at it. To try to get the picture. To live recklessly. To take chances. To make your own work and take pride in it. To seize the moment. And if you ask me why you should bother to do that, I could tell you that the grave’s a fine and private place, but none I think do there embrace. Nor do they sing there, or write, or argue, or see the tidal bore on the Amazon, or touch their children. And that’s what there is to do and get it while you can and good luck at it.”

Here, we celebrate five of her most influential books.

Slouching Towards Bethlehem, 1968

Although Slouching Towards Bethlehem wasn't Didion's first book ( Run, River of 1963 was), it was the one that cemented her as a prominent writer. A collection of essays about California in the '60s, her work explores the beauty and the ugliness of the decade, from the hippy community of San Francisco's Haight Ashbury to a woman accused of murdering her husband. Considered an essential portrait of American life in the '60s, Slouching Towards Bethlehem received positive attention as soon as it was published and its fandom has only grown over the decades since.

The White Album, 1979

Another collection of essays, The White Album deals with the late '60s to late '70s and the aftermath of the former. She studies the Women's Movement, shares her psychiatric report, parties with Janis Joplin and visits Linda Kasabian, who served as a lookout while members of the Manson family murdered Sharon Tate, in prison. These diverse essays see Didion capture the anxiety of the era and try to make sense of the Manson murders, the event many believe caused the '60s to end abruptly.

Where I Was From, 2003

Didion revisits the California she grew up in, specifically Sacramento County where she lived with her family, but also the state more generally. She questions the history she was taught, debunks Californian mythology and traces her ancestors and their journey moving west. She writes candidly about her upbringing, while exploring class issues with nuance. Where I Was From is one of Didion's lesser-known books, but shouldn't be.

The Year of Magical Thinking, 2005

Written in the aftermath of her husband's sudden death, The Year of Magical Thinking is an account of loss and grief - and the ways in which it can drive us to insanity. Hers was one of the first books to talk about bereavement beyond funerals, tracking the days and months that follow with her signature detachment. She writes about her own 'magical thinking' - how she can't bring herself to get rid of her husband's shoes because she thought he might need them when he returns. It sounds like pure misery, but Didion's deadpan tone impressively stops it from being so.

Blue Nights, 2011

Just a month before The Year of Magical Thinking was published, Didion's daughter, Quintana died of acute pancreatitis, aged 39. Blue Nights - a devastating account of her daughter's life and death - challenges how much tragedy one person can take. She laments over the passage of time and worries about growing older, lonelier. This is a heartbreaking tome, but solace for anyone who has ever faced the incomparable loss of losing a child.

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Joan Didion’s best books, from essays to fiction

On Thursday, it was announced that prolific writer Joan Didion had died at the age of 87.

An executive at her publisher, Knopf, confirmed the author's death to TODAY in an email and said that Didion passed away at her home in Manhattan from Parkinson's disease.

Here, we round up seven necessary reads by the late author, who was best known for work on mourning and essays and magazine contributions that captured the American experience.

Here are the best books by Joan Didion:

'the year of magical thinking' (2005).

Probably her best known work, this gutting work of non-fiction profiles Didion's experience grieving her husband John Gregory Dunne while caring for comatose daughter Quintana Roo Dunne.

"The Year of Magical Thinking" quickly became an iconic representation of mourning, capturing the sorrow and ennui of that period. It won numerous awards, including the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Awards, and was later adapted into a play starring Vanessa Redgrave.

'Blue Nights' (2011)

A continuation of what is started in "The Year of Magical Thinking," this poignant 2011 work of non-fiction features personal and heartbreaking memories of Quintana, who passed away at the age of 39, not long after Didion's husband died.

"It is a searing inquiry into loss and a melancholy meditation on mortality and time,” wrote book critic Michiko Kakutani of the New York Times.

'Slouching Towards Bethlehem' (1968)

Didion's first collection of nonfiction writing is revered as an essential portrait of America — particularly California — in the 1960s.

It focuses on her experience growing up in the Sunshine state, icons of that time John Wayne and Howard Hughes, and the essence of Haight-Ashbury, a neighborhood in San Francisco that became the heart of the counterculture movement.

'The White Album' (1979) 

A reflective collection of essays, "The White Album" explores several of the same topics Didion touched on in "Slouching Towards Bethlehem," this time focusing on the history and politics of California in the late 1960s and early '70s. Its matter-of-fact and intimate stories give the reader a feeling of what California and the atmosphere was like during that time period.

'Play it as it Lays' (1970)

Set during a time before Roe vs. Wade, this terrifying and at times disturbing novel profiles a struggling actress living in Los Angeles whose life begins to unravel after she has a back-alley abortion.

"(Didion) writes with a razor, carving her characters out of her perceptions with strokes so swift and economical that each scene ends almost before the reader is aware of it, and yet the characters go on bleeding afterward," wrote book critic John Leonard for the New York times.

'Miami' (1987)

A great example of Didion's journalistic work, "Miami" paints a portrait of life for Cuban exiles in the south Florida city.

Didion writes a stunning and passionate page-turner set against the backdrop of Miami’s decline caused by economic and political changes with the refugee immigration from Cuba after Fidel Castro’s rise to power.

Alexander Kacala is a reporter and editor at TODAY Digital and NBC OUT. He loves writing about pop culture, trending topics, LGBTQ issues, style and all things drag. His favorite celebrity profiles include Cher — who said their interview was one of the most interesting of her career — as well as Kylie Minogue, Candice Bergen, Patti Smith and RuPaul. He is based in New York City and his favorite film is “Pretty Woman.”

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Slouching Towards Bethlehem: Essays (FSG Classics) Paperback – October 28, 2008

Celebrated, iconic, and indispensable, Joan Didion’s first work of nonfiction, Slouching Towards Bethlehem , is considered a watershed moment in American writing. First published in 1968, the collection was critically praised as one of the “best prose written in this country.” More than perhaps any other book, this collection by one of the most distinctive prose stylists of our era captures the unique time and place of Joan Didion’s focus, exploring subjects such as John Wayne and Howard Hughes, growing up in California and the nature of good and evil in a Death Valley motel room, and, especially, the essence of San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury, the heart of the counterculture. As Joyce Carol Oates remarked: “[Didion] has been an articulate witness to the most stubborn and intractable truths of our time, a memorable voice, partly eulogistic, partly despairing; always in control.”

• Print length 256 pages
• Language English
• Publisher Farrar, Straus and Giroux
• Publication date October 28, 2008
• Dimensions 5.45 x 0.65 x 8.25 inches
• ISBN-10 0374531382
• ISBN-13 978-0374531386
• Lexile measure 1270L
• See all details

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Editorial Reviews

From the back cover, about the author, product details.

• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Farrar, Straus and Giroux; First Edition (October 28, 2008)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• Paperback ‏ : ‎ 256 pages
• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0374531382
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0374531386
• Lexile measure ‏ : ‎ 1270L
• Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 2.31 pounds
• Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.45 x 0.65 x 8.25 inches
• #22 in Essays (Books)
• #33 in Cultural Anthropology (Books)
• #1,049 in Literary Fiction (Books)

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About the author

Joan didion.

Joan Didion was born in Sacramento in 1934 and graduated from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1956. After graduation, Didion moved to New York and began working for Vogue, which led to her career as a journalist and writer. Didion published her first novel, Run River, in 1963. Didion’s other novels include A Book of Common Prayer (1977), Democracy (1984), and The Last Thing He Wanted (1996).

Didion’s first volume of essays, Slouching Towards Bethlehem, was published in 1968, and her second, The White Album, was published in 1979. Her nonfiction works include Salvador (1983), Miami (1987), After Henry (1992), Political Fictions (2001), Where I Was From (2003), We Tell Ourselves Stories In Order to Live (2006), Blue Nights (2011), South and West (2017) and Let Me Tell You What I Mean (2021). Her memoir The Year of Magical Thinking won the National Book Award for Nonfiction in 2005.

In 2005, Didion was awarded the American Academy of Arts & Letters Gold Medal in Criticism and Belles Letters. In 2007, she was awarded the National Book Foundation’s Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters. A portion of National Book Foundation citation read: "An incisive observer of American politics and culture for more than forty-five years, Didion’s distinctive blend of spare, elegant prose and fierce intelligence has earned her books a place in the canon of American literature as well as the admiration of generations of writers and journalists.” In 2013, she was awarded a National Medal of Arts and Humanities by President Barack Obama, and the PEN Center USA’s Lifetime Achievement Award.

Didion said of her writing: "I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means.” She died in December 2021.

For more information, visit www.joandidion.org

Photo credit: Brigitte Lacombe

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Customers find the essays enjoyable, delightful, and beautiful. They praise the writing quality as good, perfect, and evocative. Readers also find the insights insightful, fascinating, and give them much to ponder. They describe the book as timeless, an absolute classic, and artful. They appreciate the period accuracy and author analysis.

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Customers find the essays enjoyable, delightful, and lovely. They also say the stories are beautiful and relevant even today. Readers mention the book offers a cynical and fun read that causes them to think. They say it's a great book to pick up when you need a break and have time to complete.

"...Yeah, don't let appearances fool you, Didion is brave and passionate and compelling, and it occurs to me that one of the essays, "On Self-respect,"..." Read more

"... Excellent collection of short stories !" Read more

"Now that's what I call writing! It's so good that I was always excited to read the next essay, even if it was all about the decaying, changing..." Read more

"...They are somewhat dated, but in that context also provide a non fiction , literary "time capsule" that I completely enjoyed. Thank You..." Read more

Customers find the writing quality of the book good, perfect, and deft. They also appreciate the striking imagery and evocative writing. Readers also mention the narration is smooth, exciting, and emotional.

"...Her prose can meander without losing the reader , then lead you right to a Kleenex.And you don’t know how you got there...." Read more

"...essays were snoozefests (*cough* the 'Personals'), they were always well-written , with a sardonic, neurotic, and playful voice...." Read more

"...This is the very definition of timeless writing ...." Read more

"...There are some very funny observations, and single sentences which are masterpieces . I am ready to finally read more of her." Read more

Customers find the book insightful, fascinating, and interesting. They appreciate the brilliant observations and delivery of information. Readers also say the writings are relevant to today's happenings.

"... Much of the commentary remains relevant ; even many of the details feel current -- for example, these opening lines of the long title essay, set..." Read more

"...Likewise, these essays are very mature and intelligent...." Read more

"...This book also will improve your vocabulary tenfold . Didion's use of language is preternatural in the best sense possible." Read more

"...This can be painful to read, but it is never self-indulgent and always insightful ...." Read more

Customers find the book timeless and an absolute classic. They say the essays are interesting and well-written. Readers also mention the book is relevant even today and historically important.

" Didion is a classic - reading her writing feels like a privilege. Not my favorite book or essay collection of hers, but still extraordinary." Read more

"...fundamental social tensions and personal struggles which give the essays enduring value ." Read more

"...Beautiful stories and relevant even today . I recommend these stories." Read more

"...What an interesting mind, and enthralling writing. Nice way to get a little history " Read more

Customers find the book artful, soulful, and beautiful. They appreciate the journalistic, very personalized style. Readers also appreciate the masterful insights, lucid drawings sketched on paper napkins, and satirical writing.

"...It will not appeal to every modern reader, but I found it very mature quite elegant . Likewise, these essays are very mature and intelligent...." Read more

"...Her writing is cool, clear, clean and beautiful . Read something by Joan Didion: you can start here." Read more

"... An artful , soulful collection of essays, aged and purified by a keen intellect and the captured essence of a clear eye and bare-assed truth...." Read more

"...The narration is smooth, exciting and emotional. It gave color to the classic essays ...." Read more

Customers find the book wonderful, excellent, and vibrant. They say it brings the time period to life and is a great portrait of California. Readers also mention the book is based on a definite period piece.

"...I love her style of writing. She really brings the time period to life ." Read more

"...The 3 stars are for the book dimensions, not the author. (It *is* very pretty , but not as expected.)" Read more

"Slouching Towards Bethlehem is a curious time capsule. There is no sense of nostalgia for the bygone era catalogued within, but instead an..." Read more

"...(Alcatraz, the nature of self-respect), she makes them intimate and vibrant and relevant. I want to read every word she has ever written." Read more

Customers find the essays wonderful, great for author analysis, and introspective. They appreciate the unique insight and easy-to-read, flowing writing style. Readers also appreciate the eclectic nature of the subject matter and the author's command of English.

"...Section II. is more introspective , while Section III. combines personal reflection with geographic locations...." Read more

"...Didion is a master of critical objectivity and brings these larger-than-life names into human and perspective...." Read more

"...Nonetheless, the essays in this book are important , not just because of their influence on journalism but because theywere one of the lenses through..." Read more

"Bracketed by San Bernardino and New York City stories, these essays are as wonderful as when I read them over 40 years ago...." Read more

Customers find the book very hard to follow and complicated.

"A book of short stories; some were terrific; others were tedious -- especially those examining everyday life in Sacramento, et al...." Read more

"...Perhaps it just isn’t my type of writing. I found parts difficult to understand ." Read more

" Often incomprehensible . Probably known for the scene in Haight Asbury, San Francisco. No moral compass. Largely drivel. Don’t read it." Read more

"...For me, she jumped around in the book and it was very hard to follow . She is the type of author that you love or hate though." Read more

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The essential Joan Didion: An L.A. Times reading list for newcomers and fans alike

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Joan Didion, who died Thursday at 87 , produced decades’ worth of memorable work across genres and subjects: personal essays, reporting and criticism on pop culture, political dispatches from at home and abroad and, near the end of her career, a bestselling memoir and a follow-up. Whether you’re a newcomer looking for a place to start or a reader looking to dive deeper, here’s a guide to Didion’s writing, start to finish:

The ‘personals’

If any subset of her work made Didion’s reputation for “inevitable” sentences, it is the personal essays collected in “Slouching Towards Bethlehem” (1968) and “The White Album” (1979). These pieces, starting with “On Self-Respect” in 1961, and originally published in magazines such as Vogue, the American Scholar and the Saturday Evening Post, have come to be appreciated as models of the form, elliptical, poetic, punctuated with the author’s eye for telling detail and lacerating self-awareness. Didion’s essays carefully revealed, and concealed, the correspondent’s inner life: As she once wrote of husband John Gregory Dunne — in a piece he edited — “We are here on this island in the middle of the Pacific in lieu of filing for divorce.”

Didion later described these essays as having been written under “crash circumstances” — “On Self-Respect” was improvised in “two sittings,” she reflected in 2007 , and written “not just to a word count or a line count but a character count” — yet they produced an astonishing number of unforgettable phrases: “I’ve already lost touch with a couple people I used to be” ( “On Keeping a Notebook,” a personal favorite); “That was the year, my twenty-eighth, when I was discovering that not all of the promises would be kept” ( “Goodbye to All That,” which invented the modern “leaving New York” essay); “We tell ourselves stories in order to live” (“The White Album,” possibly the definitive rendering of the end of the ‘60s).

Joan Didion, masterful essayist, novelist and screenwriter, dies at 87

Didion bridged the world of Hollywood, journalism and literature in a career that arced most brilliantly in the realms of social criticism and memoir.

Dec. 23, 2021

A number of additional magazine pieces from her early career are collected in her final published work , “Let Me Tell You What I Mean ” (2021), and her observations of self and culture from the 1970s are central to her travelogue “South and West” (2017).

The counterculture reporting

In and among the “personals” of “Slouching” and “The White Album” are Didion’s cucumber-cool lacerations of the late ‘60s, casting twin gimlet eyes on the delusions of both the rock-ribbed squares and the child revolutionaries. From the gaudy populism of the Getty and the Sacramento Reagans to a requiem for John Wayne, the marriage of bad taste and bad money fills in where the center fails to hold. The title essay of “The White Album” swirls with Jim Morrison, the Manson “family,” Linda Kasabian’s famous dress, Huey P. Newton and all the rest as Didion bravely declines to make sense of it all. The title essay in “Slouching” culminates, likewise, in the senseless final image of a 3-year-old boy, neglected and imperiled in a hippie squat. “On Morality” and “The Women’s Movement” exude the skeptical libertarianism that distanced her from the madness.

To see not just where the nation moved but where Didion did, it’s worth reading the early California pieces, including “Notes from a Native Daughter,” followed by “Where I Was From” (2003), which utterly demolishes California’s disastrous myth of self-reliance step by step, anatomizing its dependence on government largesse from the days of the Gold Rush — the water, the power, the military-industrial muscle. And finally she goes in on herself: the pioneer woman who never was.

Throughout her career, Didion was best known for her nonfiction, but her five novels conjure an equally pungent sense of place and time. Her first book, “Run River ” (1963) — inspired, she later wrote, by profound homesickness — is a family melodrama about the descendants of pioneers that draws heavily on Didion’s Sacramento upbringing. Perhaps her most famous novel, “Play It As It Lays” (1970), is set in a very different California: the Hollywood of the late ‘60s and early ‘70s, suffused with the anomie of its dissolute heroine, Maria Wyeth. (Her opening monologue famously begins with an ice-cold allusion to Othello: “What makes Iago evil? Some people ask. I never ask.”)

But Didion’s most underrated writing may be found in three novels that reflected her growing interest in — and suspicion of — America’s empire abroad. Set in the fictional Central American nation of Boca Grande, “A Book of Common Prayer” (1977) features both acid satire of corrupt U.S.-backed regimes and a tragic riff on the tale of Patty Hearst, as protagonist Charlotte Douglas searches for her daughter Marin, who is on the lam with a Marxist terrorist organization. Her interest in U.S. interference in the region and the absurdities of the late Cold War reappears in her final work of fiction, “The Last Thing He Wanted ” (1996), about a reporter and a government official who fall in love amid a secret arms-dealing operation reminiscent of Iran-Contra.

Entertainment & Arts

Photos: Joan Didion, masterful essayist, novelist and screenwriter, dies at 87

Photos from the life of Joan Didion, who chronicled California, politics and sorrow in ‘Slouching Towards Bethlehem’ and ‘Year of Magical Thinking.’

It is “Democracy” (1984), though, that gathers these personal and political themes into the most extraordinary whole, tracing a history of violence and exploitation from the colonization of Hawaii through the dawn of the atomic age to produce Didion’s answer to the Vietnam War novel. She even casts herself as narrator: “Democracy,” set in the early 1970s, is told from the perspective of “Joan Didion,” whose focused repetitions and circular logic as she attempts to piece together the tale of a U.S. senator, his wife and her lover presage those of her blockbuster memoir, “The Year of Magical Thinking” (2005).

The political commentary

Though most Joan Didion primers begin, as this one does, with the personal essays, my introduction to Didion — and one I recommend if you would like to become as obsessed with her writing as I am — came through “Democracy” and the essays in “Political Fictions” (2001). Beginning in the 1980s, when she forged a close working relationship with legendary New York Review of Books editor Robert Silvers, Didion shifted the focus of her reporting away from culture: She relayed searing descriptions of war-torn El Salvador in “Salvador” (1983), captured the the conspiratorial fever surrounding much of U.S.-Cuba politics in “Miami” (1987) and detailed the ways in which Sept. 11 became a jingoistic cudgel in “Fixed Ideas” (2003).

But for their exceedingly thorough and ultimately devastating authority, there may be no better place to go to understand our current political disaster, and the media’s role in it, than Didion’s dispatches from the presidential campaigns of 1988 (“Insider Baseball”) and 1992 (“Eyes on the Prize”), her exasperated reflections on the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal (“Clinton Agonistes”) or her poisonously funny takedown of Bob Woodward (“The Deferential Spirit,” 1996), author of books “in which measurable cerebral activity is virtually absent.”

She also applied the technique in the damning “Sentimental Journeys” (collected in 1992’s “After Henry ”), detailing the process by which politicians and the press railroaded the Central Park Five in the hothouse atmosphere of late-’80s New York.

The late memoirs

Despite a career in which she befriended celebrities like Natalie Wood and Tony Richardson — and employed Harrison Ford as a carpenter — Didion reached the height of her prominence with her bestselling memoir, “The Year of Magical Thinking, ” published in 2005. While she had experimented with the form two years prior in “Where I Was From,” it was her heartbreakingly lucid dissection of grief that captured the imagination of the broader public, earning her wide acclaim and the National Book Award. “Magical Thinking” recounts a year in Didion’s life in which she grappled with Dunne’s 2003 death from cardiac arrest and daughter Quintana Roo’s serious illness, combining her readings of Sigmund Freud and Emily Post with vivid memories from one of 20th century literature’s most intimate marriages. Her follow-up , “Blue Nights” (2011), which looked back on Quintana’s untimely death in 2005, offered a more caustic vision, searching her relationship with her daughter for moments she wrong-footed herself while revealing her own declining health. In the process she developed a late style all her own — incantatory and poetic but never (God forbid) sentimental.

More to Read

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Weaving the personal and the political during the tumultuous 1970s

May 28, 2024

Poet Victoria Chang touches on feminism, grief and art at L.A. Times Festival of Books

April 21, 2024

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Matt Brennan is a Los Angeles Times’ deputy editor for entertainment and arts. Born in the Boston area, educated at USC and an adoptive New Orleanian for nearly 10 years, he returned to Los Angeles in 2019 as the newsroom’s television editor. He previously served as TV editor at Paste Magazine, and his writing has also appeared in Indiewire, Slate, Deadspin and numerous other publications.

Boris Kachka is the former books editor of the Los Angeles Times and the author, most recently, of “Becoming a Producer.”

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Remembering essayist Joan Didion, a keen observer of American culture

Terry Gross

Didion, who died Dec. 23, was known her cool, unsentimental observations. Her books include Slouching Towards Bethlehem and The Year of Magical Thinking . Originally broadcast in 1987 and 2005.

Copyright © 2022 NPR. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use and permissions pages at www.npr.org for further information.

NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by an NPR contractor. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.

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Joan Didion : essays & conversations

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A Guide to Joan Didion’s Books

Didion was a prolific writer of stylish essays, novels, screenplays and memoirs. Here is a sample of some of her works, as reviewed in The New York Times.

‘Slouching Towards Bethlehem’ (1968)

Didion’s “first collection of nonfiction writing, ‘Slouching Towards Bethlehem,’ brings together some of the finest magazine pieces published by anyone in this country in recent years,” Dan Wakefield wrote .

‘Play It as It Lays’ (1970)

John Leonard wrote of Didion and this novel, “She writes with a razor, carving her characters out of her perceptions with strokes so swift and economical that each scene ends almost before the reader is aware of it, and yet the characters go on bleeding afterward.”

‘A Book of Common Prayer’ (1977)

“Like her narrator, she has been an articulate witness to the most stubborn and intractable truths of our time, a memorable voice, partly eulogistic, partly despairing; always in control,” Joyce Carol Oates wrote.

‘Salvador’ (1983)

“It is difficult to deny that everything she writes grows out of close observation of the social and political landscape of El Salvador. And it is quite impossible to deny the artistic brilliance of her reportage,” Christopher Lehmann-Haupt wrote.

“To Be A Writer, You Must Write”: How Joan Didion Became Joan Didion

Evelyn mcdonnell on the writing process of one of america's leading literary ladies.

Joan Didion looks straight at the camera, with her fist curled in front of her mouth—as if to indicate it is through her hands that the taciturn thinker speaks. Appropriately, a manual typewriter takes up half the frame in this iconic black-and-white photo taken by Nancy Ellison in 1976.

When she was a teenager, Didion taught herself to type and to write by pecking out stories by Ernest Hemingway and Joseph Conrad on an Olivetti Lettera 22. Her goal: “To learn how the sentences worked,” she told the Paris Review . Thus began her immersion in the physical act as well as the craft of writing. Call it a form of machine learning. “I’m only myself in front of my typewriter,” Didion once told an editor at Ms. magazine.

At some point her father, in one of his random financial schemes, bought a load of Royal 200 typewriters, one of which became Didion’s accomplice. She took it with her everywhere. A typewriter is included in the carry-on items in the packing list she published in The White Album . Her idea was not to write on the plane, but while she waited in the airport, she would sit “and start typing the day’s notes.” This is one of many instructive lessons offered by Joan Didion. She must have hauled a typewriter with her in 1955, when, at age twenty, she took a train alone from Boston back to Sacramento, after a month spent in Mademoiselle ’s guest editor program. She typed multiple letters to her Mademoiselle colleague and college friend Peggy LaViolette on hotel stationery along the way. “Never being one to throw myself wholeheartedly into Adventure, I carefully got a seat alone, barricaded myself in with wicker basket, typewriter, mangled copies of old magazines and thought I could sleep all night,” she typed in one missive.

Many writers become so attached to a physical process that changing tools with the times is not easy; some never manage it. Neil Gaiman, the futurist, has said he prefers to write his novels in longhand. I still print out my writing and edit it on paper, a routine I was chuffed to hear Didion recommend to Hilton Als in an interview late in her life. Over the decades Didion graduated from notebook to manual typewriter to electric typewriter to computer, again demonstrating her openness to progress. Still, she did complain to author Maxine Hong Kingston about the transition to electric in a 1978 letter, saying that combined with moving and quitting smoking, the “reprogramming…had caused an inordinate amount of stress.” She switched to a computer in 1987 and eventually came to love the editing capabilities of word processing programs. “It did for me what geometry was supposed to have done,” she said.

Writers are prone to obsessive interest in other writers’ processes. We write because we are readers, and we read, in part, to see how others write. Didion was a bookworm. When she wasn’t sitting on the fender of her car, she was far from the snakes at the Sacramento library on a Friday night with her friend Maurice, or maybe her gal pal Nancy Kennedy (whose brother Anthony later became a Supreme Court justice and spoke at Joan’s memorial). Photos and videos document her various homes stacked floor to ceiling with books. Among the items sold at auction by her estate in 2022 were Didion’s collections of works by George Orwell, Elizabeth Hardwick, Joyce Carol Oates, and Norman Mailer.

Joan was an avid consumer of culture in general, with broad interests that did not divide art into high and low: She named one anthology after a Yeats poem, another after a Beatles album. Writer and friend Calvin Trillin called her Brentwood home “the West Coast literary consulate,” but she and Dunne largely financed it with Hollywood hack work. She loved biker films, interviewed Jim Morrison for the Saturday Evening Post and Joan Baez for the New York Times , wrote an important essay about Georgia O’Keeffe, and was close friends with writer and artist Eve Babitz ( Slow Days, Fast Company ) and writer and screenwriter Nora Ephron ( When Harry Met Sally ).

There’s a 1971 interview with Joan on YouTube, posted by the Center for Sacramento History. Some of the audio is missing, but the footage of Didion in her office in her Franklin Avenue house is, well, pure gold. She’s wearing a brown flared miniskirt and a black V-neck shirt that fastens in the back. She has tucked her shoulder-length strawberry blond hair behind her ears, as she did, and freckles dot her cheeks. She’s talking about growing up in rural environments; her Valley accent is strong. I’m not talking San Fernando Valley here; I’m talking the almost southern twang of the Central Valley, that Didion said she picked up from the many refugees from the Oklahoma dust bowl with whom she went to school. This is how Didion spoke: not with the English accent of Vanessa Redgrave, who portrayed her in the stage version of The Year of Magical Thinking , or the crisp patrician consonants of Barbara Caruso, who reads the audiobook of that text, but like a freckle-faced country girl. The camera pans across shelves full of books and books piled on the desk, lingering on volumes written by Didion and Dunne. Joan snips an article out of a newspaper in front of a cabinet of haphazardly placed manila folders, presumably full of other clippings. She’s talking about worrying herself sick about a comma being out of place while admitting she doesn’t have the same fastidious approach to her housekeeping. (This is the secret life of women writers: We can’t be good mothers, wives, daughters, writers, cooks, and housekeepers.) She sits on a black leather couch with leopard-print pillows, smoking a cigarette and reading a paperback that’s open on her lap.

“I like words and I’m very excited by seeing what can be done with words,” she says. “ Play It a s It Lays is a very short novel. I worked on it for five years but when I finished it, I thought every word was exactly right. Now I can’t even read it because words pop out at me, or sentences that I think ought to be changed.”

Didion once told a participant in a writing seminar that to get through writer’s block, you had to write one sentence, and then another, and then another.

To be a writer, you must write.

__________________________________

Excerpted from The World According to Joan Didion by Evelyn McDonnell. Copyright © 2023. Reprinted with permission from HarperOne, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers.

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Cory Leadbeater on finding a home – and a life in letters – with iconic author Joan Didion

Writer Cory Leadbeater was hired as Joan Didion's personal assistant, and lived with her until her death in 2021. Amelia Golden/Supplied

Cory Leadbeater was a young, aspiring novelist from a troubled family when he went to work as a personal assistant to Joan Didion. The day he met the iconic American author at her Manhattan apartment, he was so nervous, he cut his hand preparing sandwiches. He could not know, then, that he would spend the rest of Didion’s life with her, until her death in 2021 at the age of 87. And that he would get to see sides of the literary luminary that were often obscured by her fame. Here, the author of The Uptown Local: Joy, Death, and Joan Didion tells The Globe about the Joan he lived with and loved.

How did you end up working for Joan Didion?

I had always known I was a writer. I graduated from undergrad into the recession and bummed around. I drove around the country in my truck and went to places that I wanted to write about – Oklahoma City, New Orleans – and came back home and was doing landscaping and substitute teaching, things that a lot of people my age were doing to get by during the recession. I ended up in graduate school. My favourite writer has always been W.H. Auden. When I got to Columbia, James Fenton was among the professors, and I knew Fenton had known Auden. I went to [him] and said, “Auden is my guiding light. If you could just tell me some stories about him, it would be so meaningful.” He took me to dinner, and we became fast friends.

Books we're reading and loving this week: Globe staffers and readers share their book picks

I was at home one day in the summer in between my first and second year in the graduate program, and he sent me this cryptic e-mail. He said that there was a writer that he knew who was very well known, and she needed some help, and was I available? I, of course, said yes instantly. At one or two in the morning, he finally sent an e-mail: “It’s Joan Didion.”

It’s extremely rare to know your life has changed in the moment. Even if I had only known Joan for a month, or a few weeks, it would have changed my life. Little did I know that it would last nine years.

You write that Joan was “incapable of accepting any orthodoxy or received idea,” and so she lived in “a state of uncertainty.” It’s how she saw the Central Park Five were innocent, you point out, but also why she couldn’t go through a single day without a wildly detailed schedule.

I think the scheduling thing is illuminating. Even as she understood that the world was fundamentally disordered, she herself, in her personal life, was raging for order. She was incredibly fastidious and meticulous. Everything was labelled, everything was in its right place, always. I think raging for order in that part of her life was really the only way she could grapple with, and allow, the profound disorder of whatever subject she was looking at …

Current orthodox thought would not necessarily allow for an accurate analysis of one side’s particular strengths and flaws if they were going to be seen as somehow validating the opposing side. I think of one of her most controversial pieces through the years, her essay about the women’s movement, which got her in a lot of trouble at the time. I just think she looked at the particulars of a situation each time and tried to talk about them as honestly as possible, even if it sometimes cost her social or political points.

The Associated Press

Living with Joan, you found yourself getting private tours of museums that opened just for her, dining with Oscar winners and Supreme Court justices. What was it like?

It was totally disorienting, very self-estranging, but completely exhilarating. I just thought, “If Joan sees something in me that is making her keep me around, then there is something in there – and I had better make sure that I preserve it at all costs.” That, at the time, to my very young mind, meant that I had better accelerate this work that I had been doing already, which was to try to eliminate or disappear the previous part of my life. I didn’t know what would happen if I said the wrong thing at dinner in front of the wrong person.

I was suddenly among the elite of the elite, and doing anything I could to get a foothold, to try to figure out the rules, to not blow it.

In the book, you write movingly about making a home with Joan, but also about the home you left behind and then rediscovered. How much of this book is about you coming to peace with where you are from?

Almost all of it. I absolutely took for granted how lucky I was to have two parents who, in the ways that they knew how, fostered the things in me that would become the most important things in my life. I know that the relationship with my father is a fraught element of the book. But when I said that I wanted to go to a private Jesuit high school because the public school in my town sucked, he got a second job. He was in his mid- to late-40s, and he was working the 5 a.m. shift as a tower operator at Port Authority, and then getting off work and going to a moving company with these 21-year-old guys. Just extraordinary.

It’s taken me a long time to understand. I think, also, having a daughter has helped me understand some of what that takes.

I grew up in a very strange place. It seems a conventional journey to start out resenting it, to think you’ve left it behind, and then to get pulled back, and think, “It wasn’t so bad.” But I still resent the hell out of it; it’s a very strange place. A lot of the people that I grew up with are on hard times, or are not with us any more, or are with us but not really with us. So, it’s not some beautiful suburban ideal that I have rediscovered. It’s more just that Joan chose to open her home to me and to love me and support me and protect me. And that allowed me to appreciate the people who did that first, my parents.

There’s a tension in the book between Joan, the human being you loved and lived with, and Joan, the icon. What do you miss most about Joan, the human being?

I don’t think we have enough time to talk about that. [Laughs] I miss how impossible it was to be with her and not be brutally truthful with yourself. If you were going to say something to her, you had better think about what you were going to say. That level of honesty with oneself, that’s religious. That is what people go to church and synagogue and mosque for. We discover that, and cultivate that, in the best relationships in our lives. And then to have that, with someone who is 60 years your senior, who is in many people’s estimations among the best writers of the past 100 years, with a brain like that? I get goosebumps just talking about it.

She could sit still for hours and say nothing. Then when she talked, suddenly you just had this long arm and hand [extending] out. It was like watching a flower bloom. You waited and waited and waited, and then suddenly right in front of you, this beautiful truth was there for you.

This interview has been edited and condensed.

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Noel Parmentel, the Man Joan Didion Left Behind

Two years ago, in her Atlantic cover story “Chasing Joan Didion,” Caitlin Flanagan claimed that, in 1996, “a writer for New York magazine revealed something that had been carefully protected from the press, and that gives [‘Goodbye to All That,’ Didion’s 1967 essay about leaving New York] a completely different meaning: What’s tearing her apart is a love affair that’s ended.”

I was that writer, and Flanagan wasn’t precisely correct. A 1979 New York Times profile of Didion noted that she had lived with another writer before marrying John Gregory Dunne and quoted what she had written in Life about their breakup: “I remember leaving [him] … one bad afternoon in New York, packing a suitcase and crying while he watched me.” Didion did not name the man, but he was Noel E. Parmentel Jr., who died on August 31 at 98.

“Anyone who knew anything about New York then knew Noel,” Dan Wakefield wrote in New York in the Fifties , where I first learned of him. “He savaged the right in the pages of The Nation , would turn around and do the same to the left in National Review , and blasted both sides in Esquire — and everyone loved it.” In the ’60s, Noel made documentaries with Richard Leacock, wrote speeches for Barry Goldwater, persuaded Norman Mailer to run for mayor of New York, and was credited with what may still be the most famous line about Richard Nixon: “Would you buy a used car from this man?”

My piece said nothing about a romantic relationship between Didion and Noel. He had yet to speak on the record about it, and since he was both a friend of mine and very private about her, I decided to quote a roommate of Didion’s who called Noel “her éminence grise, her taskmaster.” For the rest, people would have to read between the lines.

At the beginning of our interview, Noel was uneasy: “It goes without saying, so I’ll say it. I wouldn’t be doing this if I didn’t think it would help you.” Helping people was what Noel did, though I didn’t know the half of it when we met in 1993. That was the year I read his piece “The Skim Scam at Stew’s Dairy” in The Nation and was flabbergasted: Parmentel was alive! And writing! And just down the road from my parents! A glorified intern at the ailing Spy , I asked permission to assign Noel a piece, and the editor, Tony Hendra, agreed. Noel wanted to write about the recently disgraced Senator Bob Packwood, assuring me that his expenses would be low “since I don’t drink anymore.”

Spy soon folded, but Noel kept in touch, inviting me to the novelist Robert Stone’s place on the millpond in Westport, where he sometimes house-sat, and to his home in Fairfield, Connecticut, where he lived with Vivian Sorvall and her two children. As funny in person as he was on the page, Noel also made me laugh without trying to. “Nice fellow, bad influence,” he said of Allen Ginsberg, with whom he shared a cab after leaving the party where Norman Mailer stabbed his wife (they’d departed before the stabbing). Of Kiss’s Gene Simmons, he said the same. “You knew Gene Simmons ?” my boyfriend asked. No, he’d just met him during the period when Simmons was dating Cher. “We didn’t do lunch ,” Noel said. He didn’t do lunch with Roy Cohn, either, but Cohn had once offered to pay for a procedure to correct Noel’s deviated septum. Noel declined, and he sniffed so much throughout the 30 years I knew him that my father referred to him as Snuffleupagus.

Though Noel wrote (“writer’s block permitting,” as he put it) mainly about politics, he and I talked almost exclusively of literature. “You had to be well read in the ’30s and ’40s, ’cause if you weren’t, Edmund Wilson would call you out,” he once said. Noel himself did plenty of calling out, and I once appalled him by not having read H. Rider Haggard’s She. He was equally appalled when some bright young Ivy grad at Harper ’s didn’t recognize a T.S. Eliot reference. (When he and Vivian were trying to make a movie of Ole Edvart Rølvaag’s Giants in the Earth , I looked up the name of Meg Ryan’s production company at his request. “Prufrock Pictures,” I told him. “Can’t be all bad,” he chuckled.) Though he had been estranged from Didion since the late 1970s, he still thought no one wrote better, and he said so often. It wasn’t just her sentences he admired but her integrity: “What’s that line? To ride, shoot straight, and speak the truth … that’s Joan.”

In some ways, I was as uncomfortable interviewing Noel as he was about being interviewed, so on the day we finally sat down with a tape recorder, it helped that he had brought along some notes from which he read. At the top of the page, he’d written “Religion.” “Joan used to go to confession at an Episcopal church in the East 70s, and she regularly consulted the 1928 Book of Common Prayer. It was where she got ‘In the Night Season,’ one of the working titles for Run River. ” Money: “She was generous with it, though she didn’t have any.” Clothes (the obsession with Didion as a “style icon” hadn’t yet begun, but I told him she’d made a point of telling me she didn’t dress for Vogue ): “Joan didn’t dress for success, oh no.” Dunne: “A better editor of her work than I ever was.”

Didion was long associated with The New York Review of Books , but its editors did not publish her until the early 1970s. Noel tried to get her into “the paper,” as Robert Silvers called it, as either a subject or an author, shortly after her first novel, Run River , appeared in 1963. (As is well known, Noel persuaded Ivan Obolensky to publish the book after Judith Jones and almost a dozen other editors had passed.) His idea was for his friend Walker Percy to review it. “Walker said no: ‘Lily [the protagonist] is a bad girl!’ You know Walker — family man. Exemplary. I said, ‘Walker, how about Madame Bovary?’” Since Percy was a name and Joan was not, Noel’s plan B was to get her to write about him for the Review . It was then that the Review’ s Jason Epstein told Noel, “What do I want with some little nobody who writes for [William F.] Buckley?”

Neither in our interview nor at any other time did I ask about her struggle to have children with Dunne. But on more than one occasion, he talked to me about it — “entre nous.” A few years ago, he told me he’d been upset by the implication in The Last Love Song , Tracy Daugherty’s biography of Didion, that if she’d had a baby with him — Noel — she would have been on her own with it. “Why didn’t you marry Joan?” Vivian told me she’d asked Noel toward the end of his life. “I’d already failed at marriage,” he said. (That was in his 20s, a union that produced two children; he did not fail Vivian, however, with whom he spent 40 years.)

To read one recent book about Didion, one would assume Noel’s biggest failure was the way he responded to her novel A Book of Common Prayer . Her basing the character Warren Bogart on him was, he felt, a hostile act, and he had a lawyer send her a letter. “It’s a terrible thing — uncollegial and unprofessional — for a writer to threaten to sue another writer, especially with no legal grounds to stand on,” Evelyn McDonnell writes in The World According to Joan Didion. “It’s beyond despicable to attempt to harm the career of a former lover, one whose success has left you far behind, years after she escaped your control.”

Here’s another way to look at it, one that admittedly has nothing to do with literature or careers. To read a highly recognizable, deeply unflattering fictional portrait of yourself by a woman who is still your good friend, whose husband is still your good friend, and who named you a godfather of her child is beyond hurtful. Noel assured both me and Didion’s biographer that he never had the means or the serious intention to sue. But he did tell Didion at the time that he intended to piss on her grave (“’Cause we both know I’ll outlive you”). The year after the publication of A Book of Common Prayer , Dunne wrote in extravagant praise of Noel and his mentoring, but not naming him, in his collection Quintana & Friends. In 1990, this time in Esquire , Dunne again wrote of Noel without naming him, calling him “a close friend until we stopped speaking for whatever reason.” In our 1996 interview, Noel said, “I’m not sore anymore. I’m just sad.”

There is also a good deal of Noel in Didion’s other books, by no means all of it bad. Run River ’s Ryder Channing, for instance, knows how to make a shy woman feel “open and happy” (“Shyness,” Noel repeatedly said, “is an attractive quality”), and he “seemed fascinated by the most minute details of life on the river.” Noel loved to talk about the towns in Iowa where my father grew up, he loved local journalism, and he loved what he called “genuine human beings.” More often than not, they were, in the eyes of the connected, big or little nobodies. And though he must have exasperated both editors of and subscribers to The Nation with his politics and frequently obscure high-low references — “I have one question for Noel E. Parmentel, Jr. Huh?” a 1995 letter to the editor read in full — he was a great friend to all underdog institutions. Here he is, appearing before the Senate in 1962 to decry a postal-rate revision he feared would be devastating to magazines, many of which, even then, were more precarious ventures than they might have seemed:

American magazines are not glamour operations. Most of them are edited out of grubby offices no advertising man, and few inhabitants of the New Senate Office Building, would tolerate. In short, the money is somewhere else … I believe it would be a national tragedy if such magazines as The Nation , The New Republic , National Review , Commonweal , America , Harper’s , Commentary , and The Atlantic Monthly were to fold. It would be an irrevocable loss to America if such disparate independent voices as The Nation ’s Carey McWilliams and National Review ’s William F. Buckley were stilled … There is a sense in which magazines taught America how to live. Magazines inspired the desire for doing things a little better, showed their readers how to cook, how to decorate a room, how to look like a Gibson girl, or Gloria Vanderbilt, or Jacqueline Kennedy, all with a Singer sewing machine and a printed pattern … Above all, magazines have made America think.

So tireless an advocate was Noel that several of my friends wondered why he hadn’t become an agent. To know him, though, was not to wonder at all: He couldn’t handle money; he could hardly keep track of phone numbers. “I’m a little understaffed,” he’d say, calling for the thousandth time for the contact information of a son or daughter or father or mother. Somehow, though, he always got and came through.

When I did a review for Salmagundi of Didion’s South and West: From a Notebook (2017), based on her reporting for two unrealized pieces in the ’70s, I noted that a collection of her later work could be titled After Noel . (In South and West , he is “N.”) Of his decades after Joan — their rupture occurred at almost the exact midpoint of his life — hardly anything, unsurprisingly, was said in the obituaries. But these were the years when he strove to be a better man, and he succeeded. So much is made of his drinking, so little of his quitting! In the second half of his life, Vivian says, he was sober with only a handful of lapses. He was still helping people (the last manuscript he sent me in hopes I could supply publishing leads: Diana de Vegh’s 2021 memoir, “ JFK and the Radcliffe Girl ”). And he was still funny. This summer, not long before he was hospitalized for the final time, he heard the news of the prisoner exchange with Russia that brought home Evan Gershkovich, Alsu Kurmasheva, and Paul Whelan. Noel had one objection: “We shoulda swapped Trump.”

• noel e parmentel jr.
• joan didion
• in memoriam
• remembrance

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Book Review: Essays in the History of Canadian Law, Volume XII: New Essays in Women’s History

Several times each month, we are pleased to republish a recent book review from the Canadian Law Library Review ( CLLR ). CLLR is the official journal of the Canadian Association of Law Libraries (CALL/ACBD) , and its reviews cover both practice-oriented and academic publications related to the law.

Essays in the History of Canadian Law, Volume XII: New Essays in Women’s History . Lori Chambers & Joan Sangster, eds. Toronto: Osgoode Society for Canadian Legal History, 2023. xiv, 344 p. Includes illustrations, bibliographic references, and index. ISBN 9781487553906 (hardcover) $95.00; ISBN 9781487553913 (ePUB) $95.00; ISBN 9781487553920 (PDF) $95.00.

Reviewed by Sonia Smith Law Librarian, Nahum Gelber Law Library, McGill University

Essays in the History of Canadian Law, Volume XII: New Essays in Women’s History is one of the latest additions to the library of scholarship produced by the Osgoode Society for Canadian Legal History and is, perhaps surprisingly, the first devoted to women, gender, and the law. This volume has two of Canada’s leading historians on social and socio-legal history as its editors: Lori Chambers, professor of history and women’s studies at Lakehead University, and Joan Sangster, professor emerita of history at Trent University.

As stated by the editors, “this book is explicitly and unapologetically feminist, starting from the premise that women deserve material security, safety, and dignity in their lives, and have the right to equal protection of the law” (p. 8). Through the art of legal storytelling, this anthology delves into historical cases concerning women and gender dynamics to bring to light the power dynamics ingrained within the legal system.

Each chapter unfolds a specific legal dispute and analyzes its significance and outcome within the context of its era, with particular attention paid to the personal experiences of the individuals navigating the legal process. These cases shed light on the historical dynamics of power and resistance and exemplify diverse norms found within the legal system. In them, women are seen consistently playing active roles in pursuing their interests despite facing constraints or oppression.

Composed of 10 essays on women’s interaction with the legal system, this volume covers criminal, labour, family, and human rights law, both in common and civil law, from the mid-eighteenth to the late twentieth centuries. The collection features a diverse array of legal cases, ranging from the well-known to the obscure, and from individual struggles for justice to cases influenced by powerful state actors. Throughout these narratives, various themes are explored, including the gendered nature of legal institutions, the socio-economic and racial biases inherent in legal practice, the blurred distinction between public and private spheres, the pervasive influence of dominant ideologies on the law, the underlying assumptions rooted in settler colonialism, and the emergence of new legal challenges, such as sexual harassment.

Essays in the History of Canadian Law, Volume XII: New Essays in Women’s History aims to comprehend the unequal dynamics within the law alongside the social constructs of gender, class, colonialism, and ethnicity. Its compilation of essays offers an important and captivating overview of the advancements made in feminist historical research. It is strongly recommended for all law libraries across Canada.

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PW Close-Up: Gregg Hurwitz's 'Nemesis'

In Nemesis (Minotaur Books, Feb. 2025), book 10 of Gregg Hurwitz's bestselling Orphan X series, hero Evan Smoak finds himself at dangerous loggerheads with a close friend. With the title releasing this winter, PW spoke with the author about his hero's latest predicament, how the series has developed over time, and what he's learned from spending time in rural America.

Nemesis finds Evan in conflict with one of his best friends, Tommy. What is the path of their relationship that brings them to this point?

They have a gruff reliance on each other. After all, Tommy supplies Evan with all his weaponry and ordnance, even his armored Ford F-150. It takes a lot for Evan to trust someone, and Tommy is the first person he’s trusted since Jack Johns, his father figure and handler in the Orphan Program.

The fact that Evan and Tommy have wound up on a collision course with each other is devastating to them both.

And yet it can’t be stopped.

You’ve thrown a lot of twists and turns at Evan over the course of 10 books — what made you want to tell this particular story about him?

Ever since Jack took Evan out of a foster home at the age of 12 to train him to be an assassin, the most important piece of advice he’s given him is, “The hard part isn’t making you a killer. The hard part is keeping you human.”

In a lot of ways, the Orphan X series is about Evan’s process of becoming more human. Despite all the skills he is trained in, he was never taught to speak the strange language of intimacy. And yet he has found his way to human connection—through Jack, and then through Tommy, Mia, Peter, and Joey.

This story is about what happens when his humanity comes into conflict with his code. In that regard, Nemesis represents Evan’s ultimate test.

The Orphan X books are known for being action-packed thrillers, but you’ve been getting more into the characters facing interior challenges as the series goes on. What made you want to add this element to the books?

One of my favorite quotations about writing is from Joan Didion: “I write so I know what I think.”

As I, ostensibly, grow up, so too does Evan. As he grows and learns about himself, so do I.

The stories about him deal with the conflicts, challenges, and vulnerabilities that I feel, except they are writ large in fiction.

You’re known for doing a ton of research — including investigating cults and going under cover with Navy SEALs. Did you do any special research for Nemesis ?

I spent a lot of time in rural America to see firsthand the kinds of problems people are contending with there. As part of my Do You Need My Help? charity, I met with local leaders to see where we could help with funds and resources. I was struck by how much those areas have been left behind. Based on our personal backgrounds and experiences, we tend to think about either rural or urban communities that have been hit hard by unjust economic policies, but the fact of the matter is, working people across the divide have been struggling for years. I wanted to bring the perspectives of those two worlds together in Evan, a broke foster kid from East Baltimore, and Tommy, who is trying to help a crew of young men in a rural town that has little hope or promise. The clash between the two of them is a clash between different perspectives—and the only way to stop the killing is if they can remember each other’s humanity. But man, are they far gone when this novel opens.

Along those lines, how hard or easy is it to come up with new stories to tell in a long-running series like this?

I wouldn’t say it’s easy, but Orphan X stories keep laying themselves out to me as part of a larger creative pattern. I don’t always know precisely where the series is heading, but I know the shape of things, and just when I feel like I’ve completed one part of Evan’s story, the next presents itself to me. I try to stay open to what comes in, and it has been a pretty glorious process so far.

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