Joan Didion

Vocation

Notable

Family

American novelist, journalist, and screenwriter. Her first book, "Run River," was published 1/30/1964; she also wrote for magazines as a free-lancer. She wrote best sellers, "Play It As It Lays" in 1970, and "A Book Of Common Prayer", in 1977. She collaborated on screenplays, "Panic In Needle Park" in 1971, and "A Star Is Born" in 1975. A fifth-generation Californian, Didion was born in Sacramento and raised in the great central plain of California, an area she often describes nostalgically in her work. As an undergraduate English major at UC Berkeley she won an essay sponsored by Vogue magazine. As a result, Vogue hired her, and for eight years she lived in New York City, while she rose to associate features editor. She wrote her first novel, "Run River," in 1963. On 1/30/1964 she married John Gregory Dunne and they returned to California, where they remained for twenty-five years, collaborating on screenplays and meeting everyone in the film business. Working as a writing team, she and Dunne took eight years and 27 drafts to script "Up Close and Personal," the screenplay about newswoman Jessica Savitch. On March 3, 1966 they adopted an infant daughter whom they named Quintana Roo. Intensely individualistic, she makes a point of avoiding psychoanalysis and women's groups. Didion focused her trenchant powers of observation in two documentary, book-length studies: "Salvador," 1983 and "Miami," 1987. In 1996 she published the political thriller "The Last Thing He Wanted," her first novel in 12 years, having had devoted her time to screenplays. Didion’s husband, John Gregory Dunne, died on December 30, 2003 of a heart attack. Five days prior their only daughter, photographer Quintana Roo Dunne Michael, had been hospitalized with pneumonia and fell into a coma from septic shock. Quintana Roo recovered but suffered a brain hematoma shortly thereafter, followed months later by a bout of acute pancreatitis. Didion in her grief for her husband, and in an attempt to cope with her daughter's illness, began to write "The Year of Magical Thinking" on October 4, 2004 and it was published a year later in October 2005. A few months prior to its release, her only child Quintana Roo died on August 26, 2005 in New York City of complications from an abdominal infection. Link to Wikipedia biography