Joan Didion

For more information on Joan Didion, visit Britannica.com.

Although she is perhaps best known as a precise and graceful essayist, Joan Didion (born 1934) has also triumphed as a novelist and, with her husband, as a screenwriter.

Joan Didion was born December 5, 1934, in Sacramento, California, the daughter of Frank Reese and Eduene (Jerrett) Didion. As a child, Didion followed her father, an officer in the Army Air Corps and a World War II veteran, to military bases in Colorado and Michigan. The family ultimately settled in California, where Didion graduated from the University of California at Berkeley in 1956.

After college, Didion moved to New York for a job as a promotional copywriter at Vogue magazine. Her subsequent moves between the east and west coasts of the United States have colored her writing. A contributor to American Writers: A Collection of Literary Biographies, asserted, "A California native, Didion suffers the regional insecurities of those with ambitions defined by the Eastern publishing establishment. As the westward trek had weathered her ancestors, the journey back East tested her literary stamina and achievement without softening her Western perspective."

During her eight years at Vogue, Didion rose to the post of associate features editor and had begun contributing book and film reviews to National Review and Mademoiselle. She moved to California with her husband, John Gregory Dunne, to launch her career as a freelance writer. Despite a rocky start, Didion soon drew acclaim for her essays.

Reputation as Essayist

Much of Didion's most celebrated writing has been in the form of essays. Her first collection, Slouching Towards Bethlehem, was published in 1968. The book was a collection of essays that had been previously published in such periodicals as American Scholar, California Monthly, New York Times Magazine, and the Saturday Evening Post. As noted in American Writers, Didion, along with such writers as Norman Mailer, Thomas Wolfe, Truman Capote, and Gore Vidal, were hailed as "New Journalists," meaning the writers borrowed techniques from fiction to craft stylish, compelling non-fiction.

In her critical work Joan Didion, Katherine Usher Henderson observed that "in both her essays and her fiction, Didion seeks to render the moral complexity of contemporary American experience, especially the dilemmas and ambiguities resulting from the erosion of traditional values by a new social and political reality. To this end," Henderson noted, "she violates the conventions of traditional journalism whenever it suits her purpose, fusing the public and the personal, frequently placing herself in an otherwise objective essay, giving us her private and often anguished experience as a metaphor for the writer, for her generation, and sometimes for her entire society."

As Didion herself explained in an oft-quoted passage from Slouching Towards Bethlehem, "My only advantage as a reporter is that I am so physically small, so temperamentally unobtrusive, and so neurotically inarticulate that people tend to forget that my presence runs counter to their best interests. And it always does. That is one last thing to remember: writers are always selling somebody out."

A second collection of Didion essays, The White Album, was published by Simon and Schuster in 1979. Also composed of writings originally published elsewhere, The White Album is named for the legendary, untitled Beatles album, which Didion said epitomized the 1960s for her. In the book, she recalled the months she spent in a psychiatric facility in Santa Monica. "By way of comment," Didion wrote, "I offer only that an attack of vertigo and nausea does not now seem to me an inappropriate response to the summer of 1968."

Didion didn't let psychiatric troubles scare her away from writing. Published in 1983, Didion's nonfiction work Salvador chronicled personal observations of a grueling 1982 visit she took with her husband to the war-torn Latin American country of El Salvador. The book "takes us on a journey to the heart of the Salvadorean darkness," wrote David Leppard in The Listener. "This is a powerful and highly articulate indictment of the pervasive political repression which has become institutionalized in El Salvador today."

Miami, Didion's 1987 nonfiction work, explored the intricacies of a city whose population, by the late 1980s, was 56 percent Cuban. The ripples stirred by Miami's volatile mix, Didion argued, reverberated throughout the United States, especially its government. The book is among Didion's most critically discussed, and incited passionate political debate. A writer for Magill Book Reviews, argued that "by concentrating so heavily on the Cuban exiles in Miami, Didion provides only a partial portrait of a complex city."

After Henry, Didion's 1992 nonfiction collection, is named for her editor, friend, and mentor Henry Robbins, who died in 1979. Released in the United Kingdom under the title Sentimental Journeys, the book showcased 12 essays. "About half this collection deals with such Didion standbys as California's earthquakes, airheads, and the mayhem found on what she likes to call the freak-death pages of the newspapers," wrote R.Z. Sheppard in Time.

While the book garnered the usual rave reviews for Didion's sharp eye for detail, some critics blasted her for relying on newspapers for her sources. "Didion works less with firsthand impressions, more with the texts that sift up from the culture," wrote Carol Anshaw in the Village Voice, "which gives these essays an air of imposed distance, rather than self-imposed detachment from their subjects."

Fiction Forays

While at Vogue, Didion composed her first novel, Run River. Published in 1963, and set in Didion's birthplace, Sacramento, California, Run River centered around the troubled marriage of protagonist Lily Knight McClellan. While the book received attention from large numbers of critics, a contributor to American Writers noted that "reviewers on both coasts expressed boredom with characters too afflicted by ennui."

Despite sometimes nasty reviews, Didion continued to explore the dark side of human nature with her novels. The controversial Play It as It Lays, was published in 1970. It became a bestseller and was nominated for a National Book Award. An American Writers contributor found the book thematically linked with Didion's cannon: "Suffused with the neurotic tensions inspired by her nonfiction prose, Play It as It Lays unsettled even her editor, Henry Robbins, who [said]: "It was a brilliant book but cold, almost icy. A devastating book. When I finished it, I wanted to call [Didion] up and ask her if she was all right."

Didion's third novel was inspired by a disastrous 1973 trip she took with her husband to a film festival in Colombia. Ailing in her hotel room, Didion conceived A Book of Common Prayer, the story of a Californian whose daughter joins a terrorist group in a fictional Latin American nation. The book was published in 1977.

Democracy, Didion's 1984 book, became a national bestseller. Still, reviews revealed critics' frustration. "Democracy," wrote Mary McCarthy in the New York Times Book Review, "is deeply mysterious, cryptic, enigmatic, like a tarot pack of most of Didion's work."

Published in 1996, the political thriller and love story The Last Thing He Wanted was Didion's first novel in 12 years. Set in the same, shadowy Latin American world as several of her previous books, it is the story of a middle-aged woman who takes her father's place in a Central Intelligence Agency scheme gone awry. "Didion explores the hidden world behind the political looking glass, the world of conspiracies, assassinations, and quasi-military operations," observed David W. Madden in Magill Book Reviews.

Like some of her earlier works, the book won more praise for its style than for its substance. "In the final analysis," wrote Paul Gray in Time Australia, the story "seems to say more about Rodeo Drive angst than it does about illegal foreign policies."

Scripting Spouses

Didion's partner in life and sometimes in work is writer John Gregory Dunne, whom she met around 1958. Married in 1964, the pair adopted a baby girl, Quintana Roo, in 1966, and spent 25 years in California. They have worked together intermittently ever since Dunne helped edit Didion's first book, Run River.

"Joan Didion and John Gregory Dunne are rare authors, able to move deftly between writing scripts for Disney and essays for The New York Review of Books, " noted Josh Young in Esquire. Together Didion and Dunne have written dozens of essays for publications including Esquire, Saturday Evening Post, and New York Time Book Review. They have also penned about 20 scripts, five of which have made it to the big screen, including Panic in Needle Park in 1971, A Star Is Born, the 1976 film that featured Barbra Streisand, and True Confessions in 1981.

The writers spent eight years working on a script for the 1996 film Up Close and Personal, which starred Michelle Pfeiffer and Robert Redford. Writing about the late news anchor Jessica Savitch, Dunne and Didion battled with the movie studio and wrote more than 25 drafts before the film was finally produced, bearing little resemblance to the original story. Although Didion is by far the more famous spouse, she and Dunne seem to have a harmonious working relationship. "He reads everything I write," Didion told Lewis Burke Frumkes in Writer. "I read everything he writes."

Work Critically Dissected

While they can always find something to denounce about her writing, critics agree that Didion is a key contemporary literary figure. "Didion is one of the most interesting writers in America," claimed Vivian Gornick in Women's Review of Books: "a writer whose prose continues to lure readers high and low with its powerful suggestiveness."

A common complaint in early reviews of Didion's novels was that her female characters were more real than her male ones, argued Henderson in her critical study. "Didion's fictional women engage her immense talents as a realistic novelist; she draws each of them with fine, sharp brush strokes that reveal every dimension of their personalities, every connection between character and action," Henderson continued, "Although her men cannot be called flat characters, they do not fully compel the reader's credence, for their behavior is often inconsistent with their character as Didion has presented it."

Applied to Didion's prose, even that which could be criticism, sometimes winds up complementary. Anne Tyler, for example, wrote in the New Republic that "Joan Didion writes from a vantage point so remote that all she describes seems tiny and trim and uncannily precise, like a scene viewed through the wrong end of a telescope. That cleared space where she stands, that chilly vacuum that could either be intellectual irony or profound depression, gives her a slant of vision that is arresting and unique."

"Few writers move back and forth between the essay and the novel with equal skill and talent," Gornick concluded. "Joan Didion is one of them. In Didion, anxiety is an organization principle that has resulted in some of the finest essays in American literature, and at least one enduring novel, Play It As it Lays. "

Further Reading

American Writers: A Collection of Literary Biographies, edited by A. Walton Litz, Charles Scribner's Sons, 1996.

Contemporary Authors, New Revision Series, Volume 52, edited by Pamela Dear and Jeff Chapman, Gale, 1996.

Contemporary Literary Criticism, Volume 32, edited by Jean C.Stine and Daniel G. Marowski, Gale.

Henderson, Katherine Usher, Joan Didion, Frederick Ungar Publishing Co., 1981.

Advertising Age, March 10, 1997, p. 24.

America, April 5, 1997, p. 28.

Commentary, October 1996, p. 70.

Esquire, March 1996, p. 36.

The Listener, Vol. 109, No. 2806, April 28, 1983, pp. 23-24.

Magill Book Reviews, National Review, May 4, 1998, p. 32.

New Republic, Vol. 190, No. 14, April 9, 1984, pp. 35-36.

New York Times Book Review, April 22, 1984, p. 1, 18-19.

Raritan, Winter 1996, p. 122.

Time, June 29, 1992, p. 81.

Time Australia, April 14, 1997, p. 73.

Village Voice, February 28, 1977; June 25, 1979; May 26, 1992.

Women's Review of Books, December 1996, p. 6.

Writer, March 1999, p. 14.

"The Salon Interview - Joan Didion," Salon.com,http://www.salon.com/oct96/interview961028.html (February 12, 2000).

Quotes:

"Grammar is a piano I play by ear. All I know about grammar is its power."

"There is in Hollywood, as in all cultures in which gambling is the central activity, a lowered sexual energy, an inability to devote more than token attention to the preoccupations of the society outside. The action is everything, more consuming than sex, more immediate than politics; more important always than the acquisition of money, which is never, for the gambler, the true point of the exercise."

"Of course great hotels have always been social ideas, flawless mirrors to the particular societies they service."

"We forget all too soon the things we thought we could never forget."

"When we start deceiving ourselves into thinking not that we want something or need something, not that it is a pragmatic necessity for us to have it, but that it is a moral imperative that we have it, then is when we join the fashionable madmen, and then is when the thin whine of hysteria is heard in the land, and then is when we are in bad trouble."

"We are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not. Otherwise they turn up unannounced and surprise us, come hammering on the mind's door at 4am of a bad night and demand to know who deserted them, who betrayed them, who is going to make amends. We forget all too soon the things we thought we could never forget."

See more famous quotes by Joan Didion

Joan Didion
Didion at the 2008 Brooklyn Book Festival
Born	December 5, 1934 (1934-12-05) (age 74) Sacramento, California, U.S.
Occupation	Novelist, Memoirist, Essayist
Nationality	American
Writing period	1963–present
Subjects	Memoir, Drama
Notable work(s)	Slouching Towards Bethlehem (1968) The Year of Magical Thinking (2005)
Spouse(s)	John Gregory Dunne (1964-2003; his death)

Joan Didion (born December 5, 1934) is an American author best known as a novelist and writer of personalized, journalistic essays. The disintegration of American morals and cultural chaos upon which her essays comment are explored more fully in her novels, where the overriding theme is individual and social fragmentation. A sense of anxiety or dread permeates much of her work.^[1]

Contents 1 Childhood and education 2 Adult life 2.1 Professional life 2.2 Personal life 3 Didion as a writer 3.1 New Journalism 3.2 Writing style and themes 4 Awards and recognitions 5 Published works 5.1 Fiction 5.2 Nonfiction 5.3 Drama 5.4 Screenplays 6 References 7 External links

Childhood and education

Joan Didion was born in Sacramento, California to parents Frank Reese and Eduene (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 these personal obstacles through acting and public speaking.^[2]

As a child, Didion went to kindergarten and first grade; however, as a direct result of her father's involvement in World War II in the Army Air Corps, she did not attend school on a regular basis because of her family's constant relocation. It was not until the age of nine or ten that her family stopped moving around, settling back in Sacramento in 1943 or early 1944. During this time, her father went to Detroit to settle defense contracts for World War I and II. Didion states that moving as often as her family did had a profound influence on her, claiming that she often felt like a perpetual outsider. Didion later used these experiences when writing her 2003 memoir Where I Was From.^[2]

In 1956, Didion graduated from the University of California, Berkeley with a Bachelor of Arts in English. During her senior year, she participated in an essay contest sponsored by Vogue, winning the first place prize of a job at the magazine's New York office.

Adult life

Professional life

After landing her job at Vogue right out of college, Didion worked her way up from promotional copywriter to associate feature editor, remaining there for two years. While at the magazine, she wrote her first novel, Run, River which was published in 1963. A few years after returning to California with her new husband, Didion published Slouching Towards Bethlehem in 1968, her first work of non-fiction.^[3]

Together with her husband, Didion has also co-written a number of screenplays, including the screen adaptation of her novel Play It As It Lays and Up Close & Personal.

The White Album, a collection of journalistic essays from her time at Life, Esquire, The Saturday Evening Post, The New York Times, and The New York Review of Books, was published June 17, 1979 by Simon & Schuster. It is said to function as a sort of follow-up to Slouching Towards Bethlehem.

Play It As It Lays, set in Hollywood, was published in 1970 and A Book of Common Prayer was published in 1977. Her 1983 essay, Salvador, was written after a two-week long trip to El Salvador with her husband. She also wrote Democracy in 1984 which deals with her concern for the loss of society's traditional values. Her 1987 novel, Miami, addresses U.S. foreign policy. In 1992, she published After Henry, a collection of twelve geographical essays. In 1996, she published The Last Thing He Wanted, a romantic thriller.

Didion began writing The Year of Magical Thinking on October 4, 2004 and finished 88 days later on New Year's Eve.^[4] She went on a book tour following the release of this memoir, doing many readings and interviews to promote it. She has said that she found the process very "therapeutic" during her period of mourning.^[5]

In 2006, Everyman's Library published We Tell Ourselves Stories in Order to Live, a compendium of much of Didion's writing, including the full content of her first seven published nonfiction books Slouching Towards Bethlehem, The White Album, Salvador, Miami, After Henry, Political Fictions, and Where I Was From, with an introduction by her contemporary, the noted critic John Leonard.

In 2007, she began working on a one-woman adaptation of The Year of Magical Thinking. Produced by Scott Rudin, this Broadway play featured Vanessa Redgrave. Although at first she was hesitant about the idea of writing a play, she has since found this new genre to be quite exciting.^[5]

Didion wrote early drafts of the screen play for an HBO biopic directed by Robert Benton on the famous newspaper dame, Katharine Graham. It currently remains untitled. Sources say it may trace Graham's paper, The Washington Post, in its dogged reportage on the Watergate scandal which led to President Richard Nixon's resignation.^[6] However, Didion is no longer working on that project.^[7]

Personal life

While in New York and working at Vogue, Didion met her future husband of almost forty years, John Gregory Dunne, who at the time was writing for Time Magazine. The couple married in 1964 and moved to Los Angeles, California soon after, with intentions of staying only temporarily. California ultimately became their home for the next twenty years.

In the title essay of The White Album, Didion documents a nervous breakdown she experienced in the summer of 1968. After undergoing a psychiatric evaluation, she is diagnosed as having had an attack of vertigo and nausea.

In December, 2003, in the midst of dealing with their only daughter's life-threatening illness, Dunne suffered a fatal heart attack one night while at the dinner table. At the time of her father's sudden death, Quintana Roo Dunne was in the ICU with pneumonia, which subsequently put her into septic shock and a coma. Didion put off Dunne's funeral arrangements for approximately a month until her daughter was well enough to attend the service; however, it was not long before tragedy struck Joan Didion once again. While her daughter was preparing to board a plane at LAX, she collapsed from a massive hematoma. She required six hours of brain surgery at UCLA Medical Center,^[4] yet, while Didion was in the middle of her New York promotion for The Year of Magical Thinking Quintana died on August 26, 2005 in New York City at the age of 39.^[5]

Physically, Didion is most commonly described as being a thin, frail woman.^[4] Even at the younger age of 44, Didion was said to weigh just 95 pounds at 5 feet 2 inches in height. She claims to have an Okie accent, which she attributes to attending Sacramento high schools.

In 1979, Didion was living in Brentwood Park, California, a quiet, residential suburb of Los Angeles.^[8] As of 2005, Didion has resided in an apartment on East 71st Street in New York City.^[4]

Didion as a writer

New Journalism

New Journalism seeks to communicate facts through narrative storytelling and literary techniques. This style is also described as creative nonfiction, intimate journalism, or literary nonfiction. Tom Wolfe, author of The New Journalism (1974), popularized this style and pointed to the fact that "it is possible to write journalism that would ... read like a novel."^[9] New Journalist writers tend to turn away from “just the facts” and focus more upon the dialogue of the situation and the scenarios that the author may have experienced. The style gives the author more creative freedom and blends elements of fiction, opinion, and fact. This can help to represent the truth and reality through the author's eyes. Exhibiting subjectivity is a major theme in New Journalism. Here, the author’s voice is critical to a reader forming opinions and thoughts concerning the work.^[10]

Didion's Slouching Towards Bethlehem exemplifies much of what New Journalism represents as they explore the cultural values and experiences of American life in the 1960’s. Didion includes her personal feelings and memories in this first person narrative, describing the chaos of individuals and the way in which they perceive the world. Here Didion rejects conventional journalism, and instead prefers to create a subjective approach to essays, a style that is her own.

Writing style and themes

Didion views the structure of the sentence as essential to what she is conveying in her work. In the New York Times article, Why I Write (1976)^[11] Didion remarks, "To shift the structure of a sentence alters the meaning of that sentence, as definitely and inflexibly as the position of a camera alters the meaning of the object photographed...The arrangement of the words matters, and the arrangement you want can be found in the picture in your mind...The picture tells you how to arrange the words and the arrangement of the words tells you, or tells me, what's going on in the picture."^[11]

Didion is heavily influenced by Ernest Hemingway, whose writing taught Didion the importance of the way sentences worked within a text. Other influences include writer Henry James, who wrote "perfect, indirect, complicated sentences" and George Eliot.^[12] Didion has been inspired predominantly by male authors, looking to women as role models for life lessons, as opposed to particular writing styles.^[12] Specifically, Didion mentions the Brontës, because they "probably encouraged my own delusions of theatricality."^[12]

Because of her belief that it is the media that tells us how to live, Joan Didion has become an observer of journalists themselves.^[10] She believes that the difference between the process of fiction and nonfiction is the element of discovery that takes place in nonfiction. This happens not during the writing, but rather during the research.^[12]

Like any writer, there are rituals that are a part of Didion's creative thought process. At the end of the day, Didion must take a break from writing to remove herself from the "pages."^[12] She feels closeness to her work; without a necessary break, she cannot make proper adjustments. Didion spends a great deal of time cutting out and editing her prose before concluding her evening. The next day, Didion begins by looking over her work from the previous evening, making further adjustments as she sees fit. As this process culminates, Didion feels that it is necessary to sleep in the same room as her book. In Didion's own words, "That's one reason I go home to Sacramento to finish things. Somehow the book doesn't leave you when you're right next to it."^[12]

Awards and recognitions

Didion has received a great deal of recognition for one of her more recent books, The Year of Magical Thinking, which was awarded the National Book Award in 2005. Documenting the grief she experienced following the sudden death of her husband, the book has been said to be a "masterpiece of two genres: memoir and investigative journalism."^[5]

In 2007, Didion received the National Book Foundation's annual Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters for "her distinctive blend of spare, elegant prose and fierce intelligence." This same year, Didion also won the Evelyn F. Burkey Award from the Writers Guild of America.^[13]

In 2009, Didion was awarded an honorary Doctor of Letters degree by Harvard University. ^[14]

Published works

Fiction

• Run, River (1963)
• Play It As It Lays (1970)
• A Book of Common Prayer (1977)
• Democracy (1984)
• The Last Thing He Wanted (1996)

Nonfiction

• Slouching Towards Bethlehem (1968)
• The White Album (1979)
• Salvador (1983)
• Miami (1987)
• After Henry (1992)
• Political Fictions (2001)
• Where I Was From (2003)
• Fixed Ideas: America Since 9.11 (2003; preface by Frank Rich)
• Vintage Didion (2004)
• The Year of Magical Thinking (2005)
• We Tell Ourselves Stories in Order to Live: Collected Nonfiction (2006; includes her first seven volumes of nonfiction)

Drama

• The Year of Magical Thinking (2006)

Screenplays

• The Panic in Needle Park (1971)
• Play It As It Lays (1972) (based on her novel)
• A Star Is Born (1976)
• True Confessions (1981)
• Up Close & Personal (1996)

References

1. ^ "Joan Didion (1934-)." Contemporary Literary Criticism. Ed. Jean C. Stine and Daniel G. Marowski. Vol. 32. Detroit: Gale Research, 1985. 142-150. Literature Criticism Online. Gale. St. John's University Library. 10 April 2009 http://galenet.galegroup.com/servlet/LitCrit/jama62549/FJ3511650016
2. ^ ^{a b} Joan Didion Biography - Academy of Achievement - http://www.achievement.org/autodoc/page/did0bio-1
3. ^ Joan Didion (1934-)." Contemporary Literary Criticism. Ed. Jeffrey W. Hunter. Vol. 129. Detroit: Gale Group, 2000. 58-108. Literature Criticism Online. Gale. St. John's University Library. 10 April 2009 http://galenet.galegroup.com/servlet/LitCrit/jama62549/FJ3533350004
4. ^ ^{a b c d} Feature: When Everything Changes - http://nymag.com/nymetro/arts/books/14633/
5. ^ ^{a b c d} Guernica/a magazine of art & politics- http://www.guernicamag.com/interviews/146/seeing_things_straight/
6. ^ Michael Fleming (November 14, 2008). "HBO sets Katharine Graham biopic"
7. ^ JoanDidion.info "Biopic Abandoned" http://joandidion.info/2009/01/29/biopic-in-limbo/
8. ^ Joan Didion: Staking Out California - http://www.nytimes.com/1979/06/10/books/didion-calif.html?pagewanted=1
9. ^ A Masterpiece of Literary Journalism: Joan Didion's Slouching towards Bethlem - Feb. 2006, Volume 3, No.2 (Serial No. 26), Sino-US English Teaching, ISSN1539-8072,USA
10. ^ ^{a b} Joan Didion: Sandra Braman - http://www.english.upenn.edu/~despey/didion.htm
11. ^ ^{a b} Why I Write by Joan Didion, New York Times (1857-Current file); Dec 5,1976; ProQest Historical Newspapers The New York Times (1851-2005) pg. 270
12. ^ ^{a b c d e f} The Paris Review: The Art of Fiction No. 71: Joan Didion
13. ^ New York Times: "A Medal for Joan Didion," Sept. 11, 2007
14. ^ http://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2009/06/ten-honorary-degrees-awarded-at-commencement/

External links

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Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Joan Didion

• joandidion.info
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• 2005 audio interview of Joan Didion by Susan Stamberg of National Public Radio - RealAudio
• Didion and Vanessa Redgrave on NPR's Morning Edition
• Didion on NPR's Fresh Air discusses The Year of Magical Thinking
• Author interview in Guernica Magazine (Guernicamag.com)
• CBC: Didion wins U.S. National Book Award
• The New York Review of Books: Joan Didion
• The Paris Review Interview with Joan Didion, 1978
• The Paris Review Interview with Joan Didion, 2006
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• Joan Didion is writing the screenplay for HBO's upcoming Katharine Graham biopic.

Persondata
NAME	Didion, Joan
ALTERNATIVE NAMES
SHORT DESCRIPTION	American author
DATE OF BIRTH	December 5, 1934
PLACE OF BIRTH	Sacramento, California
DATE OF DEATH
PLACE OF DEATH

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