Joan Didion, an American biographer whose writings changed her mind and revitalized her journalism, has died, aged 87.
In a writing career that spanned more than 50 years, Didion wrote articles in magazines, newspapers, books, and sometimes in collaboration with her husband, John Gregory Dunne – Hollywood films, including 1976. The Star Is Born.
But they are best known for the writings that used their distorted form to capture the turmoil of the people in the 1960s and 1970s as well as the ongoing economic darkness.
As his story “Slouching Towards Bethlehem “, an article from San Francisco’s Haight Ashbury district in 1967, announced in a statement:” The headquarters did not work. It was a country with a lot of money and public declarations and widespread reports of random killings by lost children and abandoned homes by vandals who mispronounced even four-letter words they had written. ”
The title came from a WB Yeats poem which, Didion recalled later, was ringing in his ears during those years and became an epitaph of his work: / Things get broken; the middle will not hold. “
Although his writings were diverse – from Cuban émigrés and deceptive CIA spies in southern Florida to artist Georgia O’Keeffe and the devastation of old age – California was a nightmare. Didion was a descendant of the fifth generation whose great-grandparents left with the party of Donner, a group of 19th-century American pioneers, but he deviated from another path and avoided his terrible tragedy. For Didion, who sees addiction as dangerous, California was not a dream come true paradise but a difficult place that Charles Manson lived far away.
Author Martin Amis called “California Trivial poet”, writes in 1980 that he had a “very sharp ear and a blinking eye” due to his instability.
His nephew, Griffin Dunne, described his aunt’s reunion as a result of a riot. “No matter what happens to him or what’s going on in the world, even though he can’t understand it, he still tries to understand it,” he said in 2017. interview.
Didion was born in Sacramento but endured his childhood and schooling because of his father’s military. He decided to do high school but was told he was too young and just started writing. While studying at the University of California at Berkeley he won a essay competition and a coveted career. Vogue in New York, where he worked for seven years.
Personally, Didion was smaller and was often hidden behind large mirrors. But he was adamant about what he saw, and he could be very aggressive. He famously described the smile of the first American woman Nancy Reagan as a “cold-blooded investigation” and denounced journalist Bob Woodward’s writings as “political pornography” in which “there is no brain test”.
As Didion himself put it: “My beauty as a journalist is that I am so young physically, easily provoked, and mentally retarded that people tend to forget that my presence conflicts with their preferences. And it always does. This is the last thing to remember: ‘writers are always selling someone.‘”
Collections Travel to Bethlehem, published in 1968, confirmed his position along with Tom Wolfe, Truman Capote, Gay Talese and other leading scholars of “New Journalism” – the way writers use writing and commentary techniques to change is often unpredictable. He had no colleague as a visual artist, and after writing Ernest Hemingway works in high school trying to figure out how he works.
The White Album, another well-known group, was published in 1979, and adapted to the madness of the time – The Doors, the Black Panther party, the assassination of Manson – and the emotional anguish of Didion himself. He wrote: “We…
In the 1980s he focused on the political collapse of the US and the formation of a new group of journalists who were excluded from the public sphere. Its facts look much better over time. As he wrote in his 1988 article “.Inside Baseball“:” American journalists ‘if’ reporting on the presidential campaign (out of the way, with balloons, with music, are seen as a major issue, which leads to the respect of their peers, until Sunday. Demonstrations, tuition fees and often to Washington), which is why among those who do this is increasing the interest of ignoring the contradictions that occur in describing what happens to be explained. ”
Although Didion did not go out of fashion, he also received a good reputation at the end of his career with the 2005 edition. Year of Magical Thinking, the National Book Award-winning memoir written the year following the death of her husband.
He wrote: “Sorrow has no place. “Sadness comes from waves, tides, shocks that weaken the knees and eyelids and diminish the joy of life.
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