"Things fall apart; the center cannot hold; / Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world." These lines and the William Butler Yeats poem from which they come hold a special fascination for Joan Didion which is reflected in her fictional work. Her...

Ever since she first appeared on the literary scene in the early 1960s, Joan Didion has been identified as a California writer. Although her heart belongs to the provincial Sacramento of her girlhood, her best-known essays and novels are set in the...

Joan Didion told an interviewer in 1992 that she "started out thinking things were pretty coherent. Then I was surprised when they weren't. I decided I better tell people." Didion tells stories of disorder in minimalist novels, lyrical reportage, and...

Joan Didion has proven herself one of the most acute observers of and commentators on American life in the latter half of the twentieth century. Her widely anthologized essays have been required reading for two generations of college students....

Joan Didion (born December 5, 1934) is an American writer, known as a journalist, essayist, and novelist. Didion contributes regularly to The New York Review of Books. According to a 1979 New York Times review of Didion's book, "The White Album,"...

Vanessa Redgrave is intense _ on stage, screen or living room sofa.It can be intimidating in an interview, but it's the quality Joan Didion sought for the starring role in the Broadway adaptation of "The Year of Magical Thinking," her best-selling memoir of the aftermath...

We all saw the photo on the cover of The New York Times Magazine: a skeletal Joan Didion showing us up close the real-time re-enactment of a widow’s pain—the image of bereavement blown up like a billboard. One glance at that photo and you’re primed...

Competition is fierce on Broadway this year among Tony Award seekers for best musical as Mary Poppins goes head-to-head with Jackie O.'s relatives and a rock musical takes on a whodunit for nominations Tuesday.Last season, Tony nominators ignored Disney's stage version of "Tarzan" in the...

"The Coast of Utopia" was chosen best play of the New York theater season, and "Spring Awakening" was named best musical in awards given Sunday by the Drama Desk, an organization of theater journalists."Utopia," Tom Stoppard's epic look at 19th century Russian intellectuals, was the...

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 mantle, someone who has porcelain elephant end tables, someone who has chosen to burden her adopted daughter with the name Quintana Roo; I am disinclined to find endearing a chronicler of the 1960s who is beset by migraines that can be triggered by her decorator�...

Few contemporary American writers are "American" in all the ways that Joan Didion is. Although she has visited Europe often, she has never written an essay on Europe, nor do we find a single European character in her fiction. Not only are all of her major fictional characters born and raised in the United States; they also bear no marks of European nationality, carry no memory traces of European traditions. (p. 140) In both her fiction and her essays, Didion sees the American character as ofte...

Joan Didion is one of those writers—Norman Mailer, Mary McCarthy, and Gore Vidal are others—who are so good at the higher journalism that their status as novelists may sometimes seem insecure. Do they, we may wonder, keep writing fiction out of professional pride, as if only the novel could truly certify their literary talent and seriousness? Are not their novels, however fine, shadowed by a suspicion, however baseless, that the form is not quite the best form for such powers? Certainly Democr...