With her late husband, the writer John Gregory Dunne, she collaborated on several screenplays. She lives in New York City.

Biography

Born in Sacramento, California, Didion graduated from the University of California, Berkeley in 1956 with a BA in English. Much of Didion's writing draws upon her life in California, particularly during the 1960s as the world in which she grew up "began to seem remote". Her non-fiction portraits of conspiracy theorists, paranoiacs, and sociopaths are now considered part of the canon of American literature. She has developed a very distinct writing style in which commas, and imposters (not to mention her frequent employment of parentheses) litter her sentences. Written in narrative form, they are usually filled with different concepts as well. She employs 'narrative' almost as a literary tool, such as citing another's essay in order to reach the reader. Often failing to structure her essays around a singular point as is conventional, Didion touches on numerous issues that can be tied into (however remotely) her original topic. Fact: date=April 2007

Initially adopting a culturally conservative stance, she demarcated her early career as a Goldwater conservative and wrote incisive articles in William Buckley's National Review. Perhaps as a reaction to Reagan, whom she termed a faux conservative, or as a result of being closely aligned with progressive writers in the New York literary world in which she moved in the seventies, she abandoned her earlier leanings and moved toward the liberal tenets of the Democrats. Didion retains a conservative bent, though, sharply chronicling America after World War II with its endless search for privacy and fulfillment of individual dreams.

Didion is the author of five novels and eight books of nonfiction. Her early collections of essays, Slouching Towards Bethlehem (1968) and The White Album (1979) -- a book described in one review as helping to define California as "the paranoia capital of the world" -- made her famous as an observer of American politics and culture with a distinctive style of reporting that mixed personal reflection and social analysis. These qualities led her to be associated with members of the New Journalism such as Tom Wolfe and Hunter S. Thompson, though Didion's ties to that movement have never been considered particularly strong.

Didion is not without her critics. Barbara Grizzuti Harrison skewered Didion's style (and to some extent Didion herself) in her essay: Joan Didion: Only Disconnect from Off Center: Essays by Barbara Grizzuti Harrison. ("When I am asked why I do not find Joan Didion appealing, I am tempted to answer -- not entirely facetiously -- that my charity does not naturally extend itself to someone whose lavender love seats match exactly the potted orchids on her mantel, someone who has porcelain elephant end tables, someone who has chosen to burden her daughter with the name Quintana Roo....")