Joan Didion earned worldwide recognition for her best-known book
Renowned writer, journalist, essayist and screenwriter Joan Didion , a cultural icon in the United States, died this Thursday at the age of 87 at her home in the New York neighborhood of Manhattan. The author, who had a characteristic incisive gaze, suffered from Alzheimer’s.
Didion was an outstanding exponent of the New Journalism , in which the writer acts as narrator and witness. According to her critics, she was one of the best at sharply portraying the American way of life.
She was born in Sacramento, California, on December 5, 1934. He graduated from the University of Berkeley in California and was awarded an honorary degree in Letters by Harvard and Yale universities. She began working at Vogue magazine , where she was an editor and film critic, and was a regular contributor to The New York Review of Books .
Together with her husband, John Gregory Dunne (another exponent of New Journalism in the 1960s), she also wrote film scripts, among which is the one that gave rise to the film As the Game Comes (1972), made into a film by Frank Perry. and starring Anthony Perkins. She was the author in addition to the novelsTroubled River , Book of Common Prayer , Democracy and The Last Thing she Wanted .
However, Didion would achieve worldwide celebrity with The Year of Magical Thought , which was her reaction to the family tragedy that engulfed her starting in 2003 . At the end of that year, she lost her husband, and in those days she had to face the illness of her daughter Quintana, who died of pancreatitis in 2005.
With that book, Didion won the National Book Award . In 2017, the Netflix platform aired a documentary about her titled Joan Didion: Downtown Gives Up and directed by her nephew, actor Griffin Dunne .
“She established a distinctive voice in American fiction before turning to political reporting and screenwriting,” says the New York Times in the obituary dedicated to the writer.