The essayist and writer Joan Didion is dead. She died Thursday at the age of 87 in her Manhattan home, her publisher announced.
Didion gave the American novel an unmistakable tone.
Along with Tom Wolfe, Truman Capote and Norman Mailer, she was one of the most famous representatives of "New Journalism", a radically subjective, sometimes rough, very open way of reporting.
Didion was born in Sacramento in 1934. She began her journalistic work in the sixties. She wrote for “Vogue”, became increasingly political, dealt with the hippie movement, with emancipatory currents, attended film premieres and accompanied election campaigns. She was often drawn to places of unrest, about which she wrote historically informative essays. The narrator has always been an active protagonist of her stories. In “Spiel dein Spiel” she relentlessly dealt with the radical consumer society of California. In her volume of essays "The White Album" she described a stay in a clinic for the mentally ill in Santa Monica.
In the 1970s she lived with her husband, the writer John Gregory Dunne, in Malibu, California, and wrote columns, novels and screenplays.
After the death of Dunne, with whom she had been together for almost forty years, she began to brutally openly describe and analyze her grief and pain.
Her texts often entangled memories, observations, and analyzes, and her writing ability was widely praised for what was
not
said and described.
Her view of reality was skeptical.
At the end of her life, Didion suffered from Parkinson's.