Joan Didion was born on 5 December 1934 to Frank Reese and Eduene (Jerrett) Didion, a family whose roots in California's Central Valley go back five generations. She was raised in Sacramento as an Episcopalian and attended the University of California at Berkeley where she took her undergraduate degree in 1956. Winning Vogue magazine's Prix de Paris that same year brought her to New York. There she became associate feature editor of Vogue until 1963, the year she won the Bread Loaf Fellowship in fiction. She has written articles and stories for Mademoiselle, the American Scholar, the New York Times Magazine, Harper's Bazaar, Holiday, and the National Review, where she became a contributing editor.

In 1958, she met John Gregory Dunne, a Princeton graduate from Hartford, Connecticut, and an editor at Time magazine. They were married 30 January 1964. Didion's first novel, Run River, had been published the previous year. Her collection of essays, Slouching...