Didion recalled writing things down as early as the age of five, although she said that she never saw herself as a writer until after her work had been published. She had one brother five years her junior, James Jerrett Didion, who was a real estate executive. Didion was profiled in the Netflix documentary entitled, The Center Will Not Hold, directed by her nephew Griffin Dunne, in 2017.ĭidion was born on December 5, 1934, in Sacramento, California, to Eduene (née Jerrett) and Frank Reese Didion. In 2013, she was awarded the National Humanities Medal by President Barack Obama. She later adapted the book into a play that premiered on Broadway in 2007. In 2005, Didion won the National Book Award for Nonfiction and was a finalist for both the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Pulitzer Prize for The Year of Magical Thinking, a memoir of the year following the death of her husband, writer John Gregory Dunne. In 1991, she wrote the earliest mainstream media article to suggest the Central Park Five had been wrongfully convicted. Didion's political writing in the 1980s and 1990s often concentrated on the subtext of political and social rhetoric. Her writing during the 1960s through the late 1970s engaged audiences in the realities of the counterculture of the 1960s, the Hollywood lifestyle, and the history and culture of California. Didion's career began in the 1950s after she won an essay contest sponsored by Vogue magazine.

She is considered one of the pioneers of New Journalism along with Gay Talese, Hunter S. Joan Didion ( / ˈ d ɪ d i ən/ Decem– December 23, 2021) was an American writer.

Joan didion let me tell you what i mean