Joan Didion lived in the 1970s in Los Angeles where she wrote the screenplay with her husband John Gregory Dunne, including for A Star is Born (A Star is Born) which has been filmed twice (2018, 1976).
She was born in 1934 in Sacramento, California and grew up at various air bases where her depressed, alcoholic father worked as an economist.
In 1956 she started writing for the fashion magazine Vogue, moved to New York and made her book debut in 1963 with Run River.
Dark subject choices and refined style
But the great fame came with in-depth community reports and essays about the hippie movement in 1968, social unrest and protests against the Vietnam War.
Didion became famous for the contrast between dark subject choices and refined style:
"It was a country with bankruptcies and executive auctions and reports of murder in haste and lost children and abandoned homes and vandals who even misspelled the obscene words they wrote on the walls."
(from Slouching towards Bethlehem, 1968).
Wrote himself through disasters
Joan and her husband John were a writing celebrity couple who often collaborated on lyrics.
The husband's sudden death in a heart attack in 2003 and the void he left after 40 years of marriage are depicted in the autobiographical novel A Year of Magical Thinking (2006).
When John dies, the couple's only child, the adopted daughter Quintana, is in a coma with blood poisoning after years of mental illness and alcoholism, and she passes away a year and a half later in the suites after a head injury, 39 years old.
Joan Didion writes through these disasters to deal with grief and pain:
"Shielding yourself is not a recipe for happiness, but it is a way to stay alive," said the very thin, almost transparent Joan Didion from her home in New York in an interview with SVT's literature program Babel in 2005.
Magnet i jetsetlivet
By then, one of her early novels from the 1970s, Play it as it Lays, had just been translated into Swedish.
Som många av hennes berättelser innehåller den självbiografiska element: den handlar om en skilsmässa och vid tidpunkten då den skrevs knakade äktenskapet med den hetlevrade John Dunne i fogarna, trots att paret utåt sett var en magnet i jetsetlivet, med idel rockstjärnor, skådespelare och regissörer som gäster, exempelvis Janis Joplin, Stephen Spielberg, Martin Scorsese, Harrison Ford och Warren Beatty – den sistnämnde hjälplöst förälskad i Joan, framkommer det i dokumentärfilmen Joan Didion: The Center will not hold (2017).
In the film, Didion tells candidly about her life from fame to loss and grief, with her bird-thin arms raised in large searching gestures, as if she were trying to capture formulations in the air.
Relatives and friends comment on her markedly low weight and how they tried to entice her to eat more.
At one time she weighed only 34 kilos.
Critical commentator
Common to several of the female protagonists in Didion's novels is that they try to endure a feeling of emptiness and meaninglessness.
"I have a penchant for the extreme," she says in the documentary.
"If you investigate something, it becomes less frightening.
That's how I think about confronting pain. "
She was a critical commentator on US actions in the world, such as the invasion of Iraq in 2003. Violence breeds violence in an eternal spiral of revenge, Didion said, but had no illusions about its ability to influence politics.
Often expressed doubts
Despite great professional success and a constant place on the list for the Nobel Prize in Literature, Joan Didion often expressed doubts and self-examination.
In Blå skymning (2012), Joan Didion asks herself if she has been a good enough mother for her creatively talented but anxious daughter.
Could Quintana really trust to be taken care of?
"She regarded me as someone who needed to be taken care of herself.
She considered me fragile.
Was she the one who was anxious, or was it me? ”
In life, Joan Didion was small and sometimes weak - but in language a powerful giant.
Died in the suites of Parkinson's
Joan Didion turned 87 years old.
She died on Thursday at her home in New York.
The cause of death was linked to her Parkinson's disease, according to her publisher for The New York Times.