Both novelist, journalist, essayist and screenwriter for Hollywood, the author died at her home in Manhattan from Parkinson's disease, her editor Knopf-Penguin Random House announced, paying tribute to one of the writers "sharpest" and "one of the most astute observers" of the United States.

Throughout her career, from "Slouching Towards Bethlehem" (1968) to "The Year of Magical Thinking" (2007), she has been celebrated both for her keenness in portraying contemporary American society, but also for his autobiographical talents.

"She was fierce and feared nothing in her reporting. Her timeless and powerful writing and prose influenced millions of people," praised her editor at Knopf, Shelley Wanger.

Between New York and California

Born in Sacramento on December 5, 1934, Joan Didion divided her life between California and New York.

After studying literature at the University of Berkeley, she left in 1956 for the cultural capital of the east coast of the United States, where she began as a proofreader at Vogue.

It was also in New York that she met her husband John Gregory Dunne, who wrote for Life magazine at the time.

In 1963, Joan Didion published her first novel, "Run River" ("A Season of Nights"), but this book on the disintegration of a Californian family did not sell much and confirmed the end of his passion for New York, as she explained it later in a "Goodbye to all that" ("Goodbye to all that"), text which paints a capital of skyscrapers all in poetry and disillusionment.

The couple leave New York for Los Angeles.

They get married and make a place for themselves in Hollywood, where they write and collaborate on numerous screenplays, including a remake of "A Star Is Born".

In 1966, they also adopted a little girl, Quintana, their only child.

Joan Didion leaves in the summer of 1967 for San Francisco, documenting the hippie counter-culture for the Saturday Evening Post.

From this immersion in a world of young people adrift in the district of Haight-Ashbury, then in full discovery of drugs and acid trips, emerges a famous text, "Slouching Towards Bethlehem", a first-person report that made her a figure of the new journalism.

His documentation of the cultural and social turmoil of California in the 1960s and 1970s continues, through his chronicles in "Life" and "Esquire", and is the subject of another collection, "The White Album", published in 1979.

Worship

Returning to New York with her husband at the end of the 1980s, she learned about political journalism and gathered her experiences in a 2001 collection, "Political Fictions".

Fifteen years later, some will see in his description of a "professional political class" disconnected from the daily life of the voters, a premonitory warning from the Trump era.

The death of her husband, of a devastating heart attack at the end of 2003, then that of their daughter Quintana in 2005 paralyzes her for a time.

But she draws from her grief the energy to write two autobiographical accounts, "The Year of Magical Thinking" (2007) - awarded the prestigious National Book Award, the Medici Essay Prize in France and transposed to the theater with Vanessa Redgrave featured - and "Le Bleu de la Nuit" (2011).

Author Joan Didion, July 10, 2013 with US President Barack Obama, at the White House in Washington, for a Mandel NGAN award presentation AFP / Archives

With many psychoanalytic references, she dissects the springs of mourning and loss of control, giving her lucidity a new dimension and a new audience.

The face hollowed out of wrinkles, the silhouette more frail than ever, she had accepted an award from the hands of the former president Barack Obama in 2013. In 2015, she posed for an advertising campaign of the designer Celine.

The photo immortalizes him as a cult figure, his face behind big black sunglasses, like decades earlier, behind the wheel of a white Corvette Stingray.

She had also told herself without complacency, in the privacy of her apartment on the Upper East Side, in Manhattan, for a documentary directed by her nephew Griffin Dunne, "The center will not hold" (2017), with the inspired title from one of his 1967 articles.

© 2021 AFP