In Spain she became known after the publication of ‘The Year of Magical Thought’, in which she narrated the duel she had to face after the sudden death of her husband John Dunne
The writer Joan Didion, one of the great chroniclers of the 20th century, known in Spain as a result of ‘The Year of Magical Thought’, where she recounted the mourning for the death of her husband, the also journalist John Gregory Dunne, has died at the 87 years old at his home in Manhattan (New York). It was Paul Bogaards, editor of Knopf, the American label that publishes the author, who has informed ‘The New York Times’ in a statement, of her death due to Parkinson’s disease with which she lived for years.
Born in Sacramento (United States) in 1934, Didión graduated from the University of Berkeley and began to have relevance as a writer in the late 1960s. He was one of the first voices of what was called ‘new journalism’, in which they bet on a more narrative style and a certain author tone when telling things.
His first major work was ‘Slouching Toward Bethlehem’ (1968), a collection of essays stemming from the regular column he wrote for the ‘Saturday Evening Post’, in which he analyzed the culture of his native California. He did it by charging the ink against the emerging hippie culture in San Francisco. That year, ‘The New York Times’ assured that the book brought together “some of the best pieces published in the magazines of this country in recent years.”
She was a heroine of the newspaper chronicle in the days of Nixon. A cool reporter, at the epicenter of the countercultural storm, capable of recounting LSD and the Charles Manson massacre without falling into propaganda or paranoia. His texts exuded uncertainty in the golden land, with touches of boredom and skepticism. A distant but intimate look.
Didion married John Dunne in 1964. When they met she was working on ‘Vogue’, as an editor and film critic, and he on ‘Time’. They were the elite of journalism, a creative and loving tandem. Together with her husband, she wrote film scripts, including the one based on his book ‘As the Game Comes’, made into a movie by Frank Perry and starring a young Anthony Perkins. She became a celebrity with vertigo attacks, but little by little she stopped being fashionable.
In 2003 her husband was struck down by a heart attack while their daughter was shutting down in the ICU. Didion exorcised her pain in ‘The Year of Magical Thinking’ and was resurrected as a writer. Then, caged in her grief, she wrote again about the loss to talk about the death of her daughter Quintana Roo Dunne in ‘Blue Nights’.
Often photographed wearing sunglasses, she became so famous and cool again in 2015 as to star in an advertising campaign by the French fashion house Céline to advertise her sunglasses, already bony and where there was hardly any trace of that girl from the sixties. Among his novels are ‘Rio revolted’, ‘Book of Common Prayer’, ‘Democracy’ and ‘The Last Thing He Wanted’.
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