'She put a certain kind of voice - Western, female, anxious - on the page that hadn't been there before.Joan Didion was a working writer.

'It's hard to remember how important it was to see evidence of real female intelligence on the page,' Prose says. Novelist and nonfiction writer Francine Prose says it's a style - and a voice - that Didion pioneered in the '60s. Reviewer John Leonard said her sentences were like 'icepick laser beams.' That excerpt, from 1963, is the essence of Didion's writing style: terse, polished, elegant and piercing. The heat drained the distinctions from things - marriage and divorce and new curtains and overdrafts at the bank, all the same - and Lily could not at the moment imagine any preoccupation strong enough to withstand the summer.' 'It was a great comfort, watching the towns come and go through the tinted window of the Greyhound bus. 'There was a sense that to close one's eyes on a Valley town was to risk opening them a moment later on dry fields, the sun bleaching out the last traces of habitation, a flowered straw hat, a neon advertisement which had blinked a moment before from a wall no longer visible: More Yield from Every Acre with Seeds from Northrup-King. She'd also published two novels: Play It as It Lays, which could have been subtitled 'Lost in Las Vegas and Most Other Places,' and Run River, her first novel. By then, Didion had published Slouching Towards Bethlehem, a collection of reportage about life in the chaos of 1960s America. Her definition of a writer was 'a person whose most absorbed and passionate hours are spent arranging words on pieces of paper.' She said that in a 1976 speech at her alma mater, the University of California, Berkeley. The writing itself was a path to understanding and clarification. 'I write entirely to find out what is on my mind, what I'm thinking,' she said. The bestselling writer began describing her home state, California, for magazines in the 1960s and broadened her subjects over the decades in nonfiction, fiction and films.ĭidion spoke about the act of writing more astutely than pretty much anybody else. 26, 2005.Īmerican novelist, journalist and essayist Joan Didion died on Thursday at her home in New York at age 87 from Parkinson's disease, according to Knopf publicist Paul Bogaards.

Author Joan Didion poses for a portrait in her New York apartment on Sept.

Joan didion bethlehem