Joan Didion: Revered writer who chronicled American culture

Joan Didion, a virtuosic prose stylist who for more than four decades explored the agitated, fractured state of the American psyche in her novels, essays, criticism and memoirs, and who as one of the “New Journalists” of the 1960s and 70s helped reportorial non-fiction acquire the status of an art form, has died aged 87. “Long before what I wrote began to be published,” Didion wrote at the book’s outset, “I developed a sense that meaning itself was resident in the rhythms of words and sentences and paragraphs, a technique for withholding whatever it was I thought or believed behind an increasingly impenetrable polish.” Yet, she continued, “this is a case in which I need more than words to find the meaning. “I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means.” open image in gallery At Berkeley in April 1981 Joan Didion was born on 5 December 1934, to a fourth-generation California family. Her father sold insurance and later became a real estate speculator; her mother, Didion later wrote, was a socialite who “‘gave teas’ the way other mothers breathed.” Travelling across the country with her father, who worked as a finance officer with the Army Air Forces during the Second World War, she developed a nearly lifelong habit of taking her notebook with her wherever she went, furtively recording snatches of dialogue from adults whispering behind closed doors or convalescing at military hospitals.