joan didion's 1992 book of essays

American writer Joan Didion's 1992 book of essays written after the death of her friend and editor Robbins: 2 wds. - Daily Themed Crossword

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American writer Joan Didion's 1992 book of essays written after the death of her friend and editor Robbins: 2 wds.

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Read 12 Masterful Essays by Joan Didion for Free Online, Spanning Her Career From 1965 to 2013

in Literature , Writing | January 14th, 2014 3 Comments

Image by David Shankbone, via Wiki­me­dia Com­mons

In a clas­sic essay of Joan Didion’s, “Good­bye to All That,” the nov­el­ist and writer breaks into her narrative—not for the first or last time—to prod her read­er. She rhetor­i­cal­ly asks and answers: “…was any­one ever so young? I am here to tell you that some­one was.” The wry lit­tle moment is per­fect­ly indica­tive of Didion’s unspar­ing­ly iron­ic crit­i­cal voice. Did­ion is a con­sum­mate crit­ic, from Greek kritēs , “a judge.” But she is always fore­most a judge of her­self. An account of Didion’s eight years in New York City, where she wrote her first nov­el while work­ing for Vogue , “Good­bye to All That” fre­quent­ly shifts point of view as Did­ion exam­ines the truth of each state­ment, her prose mov­ing seam­less­ly from delib­er­a­tion to com­men­tary, anno­ta­tion, aside, and apho­rism, like the below:

I want to explain to you, and in the process per­haps to myself, why I no longer live in New York. It is often said that New York is a city for only the very rich and the very poor. It is less often said that New York is also, at least for those of us who came there from some­where else, a city only for the very young.

Any­one who has ever loved and left New York—or any life-alter­ing city—will know the pangs of res­ig­na­tion Did­ion cap­tures. These eco­nom­ic times and every oth­er pro­duce many such sto­ries. But Did­ion made some­thing entire­ly new of famil­iar sen­ti­ments. Although her essay has inspired a sub-genre , and a col­lec­tion of breakup let­ters to New York with the same title, the unsen­ti­men­tal pre­ci­sion and com­pact­ness of Didion’s prose is all her own.

The essay appears in 1967’s Slouch­ing Towards Beth­le­hem , a rep­re­sen­ta­tive text of the lit­er­ary non­fic­tion of the six­ties along­side the work of John McPhee, Ter­ry South­ern, Tom Wolfe, and Hunter S. Thomp­son. In Didion’s case, the empha­sis must be decid­ed­ly on the lit­er­ary —her essays are as skill­ful­ly and imag­i­na­tive­ly writ­ten as her fic­tion and in close con­ver­sa­tion with their autho­r­i­al fore­bears. “Good­bye to All That” takes its title from an ear­li­er mem­oir, poet and crit­ic Robert Graves’ 1929 account of leav­ing his home­town in Eng­land to fight in World War I. Didion’s appro­pri­a­tion of the title shows in part an iron­ic under­cut­ting of the mem­oir as a seri­ous piece of writ­ing.

And yet she is per­haps best known for her work in the genre. Pub­lished almost fifty years after Slouch­ing Towards Beth­le­hem , her 2005 mem­oir The Year of Mag­i­cal Think­ing is, in poet Robert Pinsky’s words , a “traveler’s faith­ful account” of the stun­ning­ly sud­den and crush­ing per­son­al calami­ties that claimed the lives of her hus­band and daugh­ter sep­a­rate­ly. “Though the mate­r­i­al is lit­er­al­ly ter­ri­ble,” Pin­sky writes, “the writ­ing is exhil­a­rat­ing and what unfolds resem­bles an adven­ture nar­ra­tive: a forced expe­di­tion into those ‘cliffs of fall’ iden­ti­fied by Hop­kins.” He refers to lines by the gift­ed Jesuit poet Ger­ard Man­ley Hop­kins that Did­ion quotes in the book: “O the mind, mind has moun­tains; cliffs of fall / Fright­ful, sheer, no-man-fath­omed. Hold them cheap / May who ne’er hung there.”

The near­ly unim­peach­ably author­i­ta­tive ethos of Didion’s voice con­vinces us that she can fear­less­ly tra­verse a wild inner land­scape most of us triv­i­al­ize, “hold cheap,” or can­not fath­om. And yet, in a 1978 Paris Review inter­view , Didion—with that tech­ni­cal sleight of hand that is her casu­al mastery—called her­self “a kind of appren­tice plumber of fic­tion, a Cluny Brown at the writer’s trade.” Here she invokes a kind of arche­type of lit­er­ary mod­esty (John Locke, for exam­ple, called him­self an “under­labour­er” of knowl­edge) while also fig­ur­ing her­self as the win­some hero­ine of a 1946 Ernst Lubitsch com­e­dy about a social climber plumber’s niece played by Jen­nifer Jones, a char­ac­ter who learns to thumb her nose at pow­er and priv­i­lege.

A twist of fate—interviewer Lin­da Kuehl’s death—meant that Did­ion wrote her own intro­duc­tion to the Paris Review inter­view, a very unusu­al occur­rence that allows her to assume the role of her own inter­preter, offer­ing iron­ic prefa­to­ry remarks on her self-under­stand­ing. After the intro­duc­tion, it’s dif­fi­cult not to read the inter­view as a self-inter­ro­ga­tion. Asked about her char­ac­ter­i­za­tion of writ­ing as a “hos­tile act” against read­ers, Did­ion says, “Obvi­ous­ly I lis­ten to a read­er, but the only read­er I hear is me. I am always writ­ing to myself. So very pos­si­bly I’m com­mit­ting an aggres­sive and hos­tile act toward myself.”

It’s a curi­ous state­ment. Didion’s cut­ting wit and fear­less vul­ner­a­bil­i­ty take in seem­ing­ly all—the expans­es of her inner world and polit­i­cal scan­dals and geopo­lit­i­cal intrigues of the out­er, which she has dis­sect­ed for the bet­ter part of half a cen­tu­ry. Below, we have assem­bled a selec­tion of Didion’s best essays online. We begin with one from Vogue :

“On Self Respect” (1961)

Didion’s 1979 essay col­lec­tion The White Album brought togeth­er some of her most tren­chant and search­ing essays about her immer­sion in the coun­ter­cul­ture, and the ide­o­log­i­cal fault lines of the late six­ties and sev­en­ties. The title essay begins with a gem­like sen­tence that became the title of a col­lec­tion of her first sev­en vol­umes of non­fic­tion : “We tell our­selves sto­ries in order to live.” Read two essays from that col­lec­tion below:

“ The Women’s Move­ment ” (1972)

“ Holy Water ” (1977)

Did­ion has main­tained a vig­or­ous pres­ence at the New York Review of Books since the late sev­en­ties, writ­ing pri­mar­i­ly on pol­i­tics. Below are a few of her best known pieces for them:

“ Insid­er Base­ball ” (1988)

“ Eye on the Prize ” (1992)

“ The Teach­ings of Speak­er Gin­grich ” (1995)

“ Fixed Opin­ions, or the Hinge of His­to­ry ” (2003)

“ Pol­i­tics in the New Nor­mal Amer­i­ca ” (2004)

“ The Case of There­sa Schi­a­vo ” (2005)

“ The Def­er­en­tial Spir­it ” (2013)

“ Cal­i­for­nia Notes ” (2016)

Did­ion con­tin­ues to write with as much style and sen­si­tiv­i­ty as she did in her first col­lec­tion, her voice refined by a life­time of expe­ri­ence in self-exam­i­na­tion and pierc­ing crit­i­cal appraisal. She got her start at Vogue in the late fifties, and in 2011, she pub­lished an auto­bi­o­graph­i­cal essay there that returns to the theme of “yearn­ing for a glam­orous, grown up life” that she explored in “Good­bye to All That.” In “ Sable and Dark Glass­es ,” Didion’s gaze is stead­ier, her focus this time not on the naïve young woman tem­pered and hard­ened by New York, but on her­self as a child “deter­mined to bypass child­hood” and emerge as a poised, self-con­fi­dent 24-year old sophisticate—the per­fect New York­er she nev­er became.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Joan Did­ion Reads From New Mem­oir, Blue Nights, in Short Film Direct­ed by Grif­fin Dunne

30 Free Essays & Sto­ries by David Fos­ter Wal­lace on the Web

10 Free Sto­ries by George Saun­ders, Author of Tenth of Decem­ber , “The Best Book You’ll Read This Year”

Read 18 Short Sto­ries From Nobel Prize-Win­ning Writer Alice Munro Free Online

Josh Jones  is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at  @jdmagness

by Josh Jones | Permalink | Comments (3) |

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Comments (3), 3 comments so far.

“In a clas­sic essay of Joan Didion’s, “Good­bye to All That,” the nov­el­ist and writer breaks into her narrative—not for the first or last time,..”

Dead link to the essay

It should be “Slouch­ing Towards Beth­le­hem,” with the “s” on Towards.

Most of the Joan Did­ion Essay links have pay­walls.

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Joan Didion’s best books, from essays to fiction

On Thursday, it was announced that prolific writer Joan Didion had died at the age of 87.

An executive at her publisher, Knopf, confirmed the author's death to TODAY in an email and said that Didion passed away at her home in Manhattan from Parkinson's disease.

Here, we round up seven necessary reads by the late author, who was best known for work on mourning and essays and magazine contributions that captured the American experience.

Here are the best books by Joan Didion:

'the year of magical thinking' (2005).

Probably her best known work, this gutting work of non-fiction profiles Didion's experience grieving her husband John Gregory Dunne while caring for comatose daughter Quintana Roo Dunne.

"The Year of Magical Thinking" quickly became an iconic representation of mourning, capturing the sorrow and ennui of that period. It won numerous awards, including the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Awards, and was later adapted into a play starring Vanessa Redgrave.

'Blue Nights' (2011)

A continuation of what is started in "The Year of Magical Thinking," this poignant 2011 work of non-fiction features personal and heartbreaking memories of Quintana, who passed away at the age of 39, not long after Didion's husband died.

"It is a searing inquiry into loss and a melancholy meditation on mortality and time,” wrote book critic Michiko Kakutani of the New York Times.

'Slouching Towards Bethlehem' (1968)

Didion's first collection of nonfiction writing is revered as an essential portrait of America — particularly California — in the 1960s.

It focuses on her experience growing up in the Sunshine state, icons of that time John Wayne and Howard Hughes, and the essence of Haight-Ashbury, a neighborhood in San Francisco that became the heart of the counterculture movement.

'The White Album' (1979) 

A reflective collection of essays, "The White Album" explores several of the same topics Didion touched on in "Slouching Towards Bethlehem," this time focusing on the history and politics of California in the late 1960s and early '70s. Its matter-of-fact and intimate stories give the reader a feeling of what California and the atmosphere was like during that time period.

'Play it as it Lays' (1970)

Set during a time before Roe vs. Wade, this terrifying and at times disturbing novel profiles a struggling actress living in Los Angeles whose life begins to unravel after she has a back-alley abortion.

"(Didion) writes with a razor, carving her characters out of her perceptions with strokes so swift and economical that each scene ends almost before the reader is aware of it, and yet the characters go on bleeding afterward," wrote book critic John Leonard for the New York times.

'Miami' (1987)

A great example of Didion's journalistic work, "Miami" paints a portrait of life for Cuban exiles in the south Florida city.

Didion writes a stunning and passionate page-turner set against the backdrop of Miami’s decline caused by economic and political changes with the refugee immigration from Cuba after Fidel Castro’s rise to power.

Alexander Kacala is a reporter and editor at TODAY Digital and NBC OUT. He loves writing about pop culture, trending topics, LGBTQ issues, style and all things drag. His favorite celebrity profiles include Cher — who said their interview was one of the most interesting of her career — as well as Kylie Minogue, Candice Bergen, Patti Smith and RuPaul. He is based in New York City and his favorite film is “Pretty Woman.”

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Let Me Tell You What I Mean by Joan Didion review – elegant essays spanning four decades

Rejection letters, California dreams and clear reflections on writing in a collection that explores self-doubt

I n the first essay of this new volume of previously uncollected pieces, Joan Didion makes a case against newspapers. Too often, she argues, their reporting style rests on “a quite factitious ‘ objectivity’”, which “lends the entire venture a mendacity” by failing to make explicit the writer’s own particular set of influences and biases. Didion praises instead magazines that cultivate a personal voice, and which aim to impart character and atmosphere rather than straightforward information: “They assume that the reader is a friend, that he is disturbed about something, and that he will understand if they talk to him straight; this assumption of a shared language and a common ethic lends their reports a considerable cogency of style.” Often, she concludes, the real story is “the story not in the newspaper”.

This could be read as a slanted manifesto for Didion’s own style. Across her 60-year career, from her landmark essay collections Slouching Towards Bethlehem (1968) and The White Album (1979), through her formally innovative novels, to her devastating 2005 memoir The Year of Magical Thinking , Didion has established a way of narration that focuses not so much on events as on subtexts, atmospheres and perceptions. She is usually present in her essays as a voice rather than a character, observer rather than participant – though the boundaries regularly blur. Yet even when she’s not saying directly what she’s feeling, it’s there in the architecture of every cool, clear sentence, in the sounds, gestures and images on which she chooses to focus her attention.

At university, Didion writes here in mock self-deprecation, “I would try to contemplate the Hegelian dialectic and would find myself concentrating instead on a flowering pear tree outside my window and the particular way the petals fell on my floor”. Half of the 12 essays in this collection were written for the Saturday Evening Post in the late 1960s, while the latest is from 2000; in them we see Didion exploring the possibility of that attention to detail, working out who exactly the “I” in her writing is, and what it is she’s seeing.

Didion’s essay collections have always included overtly personal moments – “We are here on this island in the middle of the Pacific in lieu of filing for divorce,” she writes in “In the Islands” from The White Book , adding: “I tell you this not as aimless revelation but because I want you to know, as you read me, precisely who I am and where I am and what is on my mind.” This new collection contains several pieces of relatively straight autobiography: a funny essay describing the pain of her rejection from Stanford and subsequent summer spent “in sullen but mild rebellion” (“On Being Unchosen by the College of One’s Choice”); “Telling Stories”, which describes how out of place the 19-year-old Didion felt in the writers’ workshop she took for a semester in 1954, attempting to remain inconspicuous by shrinking into her raincoat while others regaled the group with experiences that seemed far more redolent of the “writer’s life” – international, glamorous, drug-induced – than anything Didion had known growing up in Sacramento. (She went on to take a job composing advertising copy for Vogue, which she credits with teaching her to write.) The same essay includes a ream of rejection letters for an early short story widely condemned as too depressing: “I’m sorry,” wrote a representative of Good Housekeeping magazine, “we are seldom inclined to give our readers this bad a time.”

But the pieces most revealing of Didion’s self are those that discuss the act of writing itself. In “Why I Write” (1976) Didion directly confronts the question of the first person – of what it means for a writer to assume an identity on the page and a relationship with an invisible reader. “In many ways,” she observes, “writing is the act of saying I, of imposing oneself upon other people, of saying listen to me, see it my way, change your mind .” In another essay, on Hemingway’s style, she parses precisely how the very grammar of his sentences reveal “a certain way of looking at the world”: Didion too has a specific way of looking that binds together all her work, whether she’s watching Nancy Reagan pretend to pick flowers for a photoshoot, attending a meeting of Gamblers Anonymous or a reunion of airforce veterans in a Las Vegas hospitality suite, or parsing the mission statement of Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia LLC. Didion writes of “needing room in which to play with what I did not understand”. Her pieces often feel ambiguous, even ambivalent, and her detachment can at times be bemusing: the reader is left wondering where her stake is grounded in the stories she tells. Yet her particular skill lies in asking questions too far-reaching to be contained on the page, that reverberate far beyond the essay, as her images lodge themselves in the reader’s conscience.

The collection – expansively introduced by Hilton Als – touches on many of the themes that run through Didion’s work: the power of illusion, which she learned about at Vogue and later in Hollywood; the unspoken dynamics of makeshift, often precarious communities; the dangerous thrill of pursuing dreams. Recalling San Simeon, the castle on a hill in California which she would glimpse from the highway as a child, she reflects on the impact of knowing that just beyond reach lay this opulent paradise of shimmering turrets and battlements. “San Simeon,” she writes, “was an imaginative idea that affected me, shaped my own imagination in the way that all children are shaped by the actual and emotional geography of the place in which they grow up, by the stories they are told and the stories they invent.” There’s an echo here of Didion’s most famous line: “We tell ourselves stories in order to live.” In that essay – “The White Album” – Didion describes a period between 1966 and 1971 when she “I began to doubt the premises of all the stories I had ever told myself”. Let Me Tell You What I Mean , its chapters largely rooted in this discombobulating period, is a valuable addition to the literature of self-doubt and self-awareness, an elegant untangling of what and why we remember and forget.

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The essential Joan Didion: An L.A. Times reading list for newcomers and fans alike

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Joan Didion, who died Thursday at 87 , produced decades’ worth of memorable work across genres and subjects: personal essays, reporting and criticism on pop culture, political dispatches from at home and abroad and, near the end of her career, a bestselling memoir and a follow-up. Whether you’re a newcomer looking for a place to start or a reader looking to dive deeper, here’s a guide to Didion’s writing, start to finish:

The ‘personals’

If any subset of her work made Didion’s reputation for “inevitable” sentences, it is the personal essays collected in “Slouching Towards Bethlehem” (1968) and “The White Album” (1979). These pieces, starting with “On Self-Respect” in 1961, and originally published in magazines such as Vogue, the American Scholar and the Saturday Evening Post, have come to be appreciated as models of the form, elliptical, poetic, punctuated with the author’s eye for telling detail and lacerating self-awareness. Didion’s essays carefully revealed, and concealed, the correspondent’s inner life: As she once wrote of husband John Gregory Dunne — in a piece he edited — “We are here on this island in the middle of the Pacific in lieu of filing for divorce.”

Didion later described these essays as having been written under “crash circumstances” — “On Self-Respect” was improvised in “two sittings,” she reflected in 2007 , and written “not just to a word count or a line count but a character count” — yet they produced an astonishing number of unforgettable phrases: “I’ve already lost touch with a couple people I used to be” ( “On Keeping a Notebook,” a personal favorite); “That was the year, my twenty-eighth, when I was discovering that not all of the promises would be kept” ( “Goodbye to All That,” which invented the modern “leaving New York” essay); “We tell ourselves stories in order to live” (“The White Album,” possibly the definitive rendering of the end of the ‘60s).

Joan Didion, masterful essayist, novelist and screenwriter, dies at 87

Didion bridged the world of Hollywood, journalism and literature in a career that arced most brilliantly in the realms of social criticism and memoir.

Dec. 23, 2021

A number of additional magazine pieces from her early career are collected in her final published work , “Let Me Tell You What I Mean ” (2021), and her observations of self and culture from the 1970s are central to her travelogue “South and West” (2017).

The counterculture reporting

In and among the “personals” of “Slouching” and “The White Album” are Didion’s cucumber-cool lacerations of the late ‘60s, casting twin gimlet eyes on the delusions of both the rock-ribbed squares and the child revolutionaries. From the gaudy populism of the Getty and the Sacramento Reagans to a requiem for John Wayne, the marriage of bad taste and bad money fills in where the center fails to hold. The title essay of “The White Album” swirls with Jim Morrison, the Manson “family,” Linda Kasabian’s famous dress, Huey P. Newton and all the rest as Didion bravely declines to make sense of it all. The title essay in “Slouching” culminates, likewise, in the senseless final image of a 3-year-old boy, neglected and imperiled in a hippie squat. “On Morality” and “The Women’s Movement” exude the skeptical libertarianism that distanced her from the madness.

To see not just where the nation moved but where Didion did, it’s worth reading the early California pieces, including “Notes from a Native Daughter,” followed by “Where I Was From” (2003), which utterly demolishes California’s disastrous myth of self-reliance step by step, anatomizing its dependence on government largesse from the days of the Gold Rush — the water, the power, the military-industrial muscle. And finally she goes in on herself: the pioneer woman who never was.

Throughout her career, Didion was best known for her nonfiction, but her five novels conjure an equally pungent sense of place and time. Her first book, “Run River ” (1963) — inspired, she later wrote, by profound homesickness — is a family melodrama about the descendants of pioneers that draws heavily on Didion’s Sacramento upbringing. Perhaps her most famous novel, “Play It As It Lays” (1970), is set in a very different California: the Hollywood of the late ‘60s and early ‘70s, suffused with the anomie of its dissolute heroine, Maria Wyeth. (Her opening monologue famously begins with an ice-cold allusion to Othello: “What makes Iago evil? Some people ask. I never ask.”)

But Didion’s most underrated writing may be found in three novels that reflected her growing interest in — and suspicion of — America’s empire abroad. Set in the fictional Central American nation of Boca Grande, “A Book of Common Prayer” (1977) features both acid satire of corrupt U.S.-backed regimes and a tragic riff on the tale of Patty Hearst, as protagonist Charlotte Douglas searches for her daughter Marin, who is on the lam with a Marxist terrorist organization. Her interest in U.S. interference in the region and the absurdities of the late Cold War reappears in her final work of fiction, “The Last Thing He Wanted ” (1996), about a reporter and a government official who fall in love amid a secret arms-dealing operation reminiscent of Iran-Contra.

Entertainment & Arts

Photos: Joan Didion, masterful essayist, novelist and screenwriter, dies at 87

Photos from the life of Joan Didion, who chronicled California, politics and sorrow in ‘Slouching Towards Bethlehem’ and ‘Year of Magical Thinking.’

It is “Democracy” (1984), though, that gathers these personal and political themes into the most extraordinary whole, tracing a history of violence and exploitation from the colonization of Hawaii through the dawn of the atomic age to produce Didion’s answer to the Vietnam War novel. She even casts herself as narrator: “Democracy,” set in the early 1970s, is told from the perspective of “Joan Didion,” whose focused repetitions and circular logic as she attempts to piece together the tale of a U.S. senator, his wife and her lover presage those of her blockbuster memoir, “The Year of Magical Thinking” (2005).

The political commentary

Though most Joan Didion primers begin, as this one does, with the personal essays, my introduction to Didion — and one I recommend if you would like to become as obsessed with her writing as I am — came through “Democracy” and the essays in “Political Fictions” (2001). Beginning in the 1980s, when she forged a close working relationship with legendary New York Review of Books editor Robert Silvers, Didion shifted the focus of her reporting away from culture: She relayed searing descriptions of war-torn El Salvador in “Salvador” (1983), captured the the conspiratorial fever surrounding much of U.S.-Cuba politics in “Miami” (1987) and detailed the ways in which Sept. 11 became a jingoistic cudgel in “Fixed Ideas” (2003).

But for their exceedingly thorough and ultimately devastating authority, there may be no better place to go to understand our current political disaster, and the media’s role in it, than Didion’s dispatches from the presidential campaigns of 1988 (“Insider Baseball”) and 1992 (“Eyes on the Prize”), her exasperated reflections on the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal (“Clinton Agonistes”) or her poisonously funny takedown of Bob Woodward (“The Deferential Spirit,” 1996), author of books “in which measurable cerebral activity is virtually absent.”

She also applied the technique in the damning “Sentimental Journeys” (collected in 1992’s “After Henry ”), detailing the process by which politicians and the press railroaded the Central Park Five in the hothouse atmosphere of late-’80s New York.

The late memoirs

Despite a career in which she befriended celebrities like Natalie Wood and Tony Richardson — and employed Harrison Ford as a carpenter — Didion reached the height of her prominence with her bestselling memoir, “The Year of Magical Thinking, ” published in 2005. While she had experimented with the form two years prior in “Where I Was From,” it was her heartbreakingly lucid dissection of grief that captured the imagination of the broader public, earning her wide acclaim and the National Book Award. “Magical Thinking” recounts a year in Didion’s life in which she grappled with Dunne’s 2003 death from cardiac arrest and daughter Quintana Roo’s serious illness, combining her readings of Sigmund Freud and Emily Post with vivid memories from one of 20th century literature’s most intimate marriages. Her follow-up , “Blue Nights” (2011), which looked back on Quintana’s untimely death in 2005, offered a more caustic vision, searching her relationship with her daughter for moments she wrong-footed herself while revealing her own declining health. In the process she developed a late style all her own — incantatory and poetic but never (God forbid) sentimental.

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Matt Brennan is a Los Angeles Times’ deputy editor for entertainment and arts. Born in the Boston area, educated at USC and an adoptive New Orleanian for nearly 10 years, he returned to Los Angeles in 2019 as the newsroom’s television editor. He previously served as TV editor at Paste Magazine, and his writing has also appeared in Indiewire, Slate, Deadspin and numerous other publications.

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Joan Didion: A guide to five of her most influential books

An overview of the Didion books you'll revisit for the rest of your days

Joan Didion inspired countless writers and readers to put pen to paper and write about the world as they see it. Her unique style, restrained yet honest, affecting yet never sentimental, is peerless. Famed for her incisive depictions of American life and personal journalism, she never wasted a word, nor a character. Her seminal essay for Vogue , On Self-Respect first published in 1961, was written not to a word count or a line count, but to an exact character count.

Didion's work chronicled the mood of the '60s, the highs and the lows, as well as the human experience in general - few writers have explored the subject of death and loss with as much insight, control or candour. Her skill lay not only in her style of prose, but her ability to astutely observe the behaviour of others. She saw what others missed.

Here, we celebrate five of her most influential books.

Slouching Towards Bethlehem, 1968

Although Slouching Towards Bethlehem wasn't Didion's first book ( Run, River of 1963 was), it was the one that cemented her as a prominent writer. A collection of essays about California in the '60s, her work explores the beauty and the ugliness of the decade, from the hippy community of San Francisco's Haight Ashbury to a woman accused of murdering her husband. Considered an essential portrait of American life in the '60s, Slouching Towards Bethlehem received positive attention as soon as it was published and its fandom has only grown over the decades since.

The White Album, 1979

Another collection of essays, The White Album deals with the late '60s to late '70s and the aftermath of the former. She studies the Women's Movement, shares her psychiatric report, parties with Janis Joplin and visits Linda Kasabian, who served as a lookout while members of the Manson family murdered Sharon Tate, in prison. These diverse essays see Didion capture the anxiety of the era and try to make sense of the Manson murders, the event many believe caused the '60s to end abruptly.

Where I Was From, 2003

Didion revisits the California she grew up in, specifically Sacramento County where she lived with her family, but also the state more generally. She questions the history she was taught, debunks Californian mythology and traces her ancestors and their journey moving west. She writes candidly about her upbringing, while exploring class issues with nuance. Where I Was From is one of Didion's lesser-known books, but shouldn't be.

The Year of Magical Thinking, 2005

Written in the aftermath of her husband's sudden death, The Year of Magical Thinking is an account of loss and grief - and the ways in which it can drive us to insanity. Hers was one of the first books to talk about bereavement beyond funerals, tracking the days and months that follow with her signature detachment. She writes about her own 'magical thinking' - how she can't bring herself to get rid of her husband's shoes because she thought he might need them when he returns. It sounds like pure misery, but Didion's deadpan tone impressively stops it from being so.

Blue Nights, 2011

Just a month before The Year of Magical Thinking was published, Didion's daughter, Quintana died of acute pancreatitis, aged 39. Blue Nights - a devastating account of her daughter's life and death - challenges how much tragedy one person can take. She laments over the passage of time and worries about growing older, lonelier. This is a heartbreaking tome, but solace for anyone who has ever faced the incomparable loss of losing a child.

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The Deferential Spirit

September 19, 1996 issue

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The Agenda: Inside the Clinton White House

The Commanders

Veil: The Secret Wars of the CIA 1981-1987

Wired: The Short Life and Fast Times of John Belushi

The Brethren

On the morning of Sunday, June 23, the day the prepublication embargo on Bob Woodward’s The Choice was lifted, The Washington Post , the newspaper for which Mr. Woodward has so famously been, since 1971, first a reporter and now an editor, published on the front page of its A section two stories detailing what its editors believed most newsworthy in The Choice . In columns one through four, directly under the banner and carrying the legend The Choice—Inside the Clinton and Dole Campaigns , there appeared passages from the book itself, edited into a narrative describing the meetings Hillary Clinton had from 1994 to 1996 with Jean Houston, who was characterized in the Post as “a believer in spirits, mythic and other connections to history and other worlds” and as “the most dramatic” of Mrs. Clinton’s “10 to 11 confidants,” a group that includes her mother.

This account of Mrs. Clinton’s not entirely remarkable and in any case private conversations with Jean Houston appeared under the apparently accurate if unarresting headline “At a Difficult Time, First Lady Reaches Out, Looks Within,” occupied one-hundred-and-fifty-four column inches, was followed by a six-column-inch box explaining the rules under which Mr. Woodward conducted his interviews, and included among similar revelations the news that, according to an unidentified source (Mr. Woodward tells us that some of his interviews were on the record, others “conducted under journalistic ground rules of ‘background’ or ‘deep background,’ meaning the information could be used but the sources of the information would not be identified”), Mrs. Clinton had at an unspecified point in 1995 disclosed to Jean Houston (“Dialogue and quotations come from at least one participant, from memos or from contemporaneous notes or diaries of a participant in the discussion”) that “she was sure that good habits were the key to survival.”

The remaining front-page columns above the fold in that Sunday morning’s Post were given over to a news story based on Mr. Woodward’s The Choice , written by Dan Balz, running seventy-nine column inches, and headlined “Dole Seeks ‘a 10’ Among List of 15: Running Mate Must Not Anger Right, Book Says.” Mr. Woodward, according to this story, “quotes Dole as saying he wants a running mate who will be ‘a 10’ in the eyes of the public, with the candidate telling the head of his search team, Robert F. Ellsworth, ‘Don’t give me someone who would send up [anger] the conservatives.”‘ Those Post readers sufficiently surprised by this disclosure to continue reading learned that “at the top of the list of 15 names, assembled in the late spring by Ellsworth and Dole’s campaign manager, Scott Reed, was Colin L. Powell.” When I read this in the Post I assumed that I would find some discussion of how or whether the vice-presidential search team had managed to construe their number-one choice of Colin L. Powell as consistent with the mandate “Don’t give me someone who would send up the conservatives,” but there was no such discussion to be found, neither in the Post nor in The Choice itself.

Mr. Woodward’s rather eerie aversion to engaging the ramifications of what people say to him has been generally understood as an admirable quality, at best a mandarin modesty, at worst a kind of executive big-picture focus, the entirely justifiable oversight of someone with a more important game to play. Yet what we see in The Choice is something more than a matter of an occasional inconsistency left unexplored in the rush of the breaking story, a stray ball or two left unfielded in the heat of the opportunity, as Mr. Woodward describes his role, “to sit with many of the candidates and key players and ask about the questions of the day as the campaign unfolded.” What seems most remarkable in this new Woodward book is exactly what seemed remarkable in the previous Woodward books, each of which was presented as the insiders’ inside story and each of which went on to become a number-one bestseller: these are books in which measurable cerebral activity is virtually absent.

The author himself disclaims “the perspective of history.” His preferred approach has been one in which “issues could be examined before the possible outcome or meaning was at all clear or the possible consequences were weighed.” The refusal to consider meaning or outcome or consequence has, as a way of writing a book, a certain Zen purity, but tends toward a process in which no research method is so commonplace as to go unexplained (“The record will show how I was able to gain information from records or interviews…. I could then talk with other sources and return to most of them again and again as necessary”), no product of that research so predictable as to go unrecorded.

The world rendered is an Erewhon in which not only inductive reasoning but ordinary reliance on context clues appear to have vanished. Any reader who wonders what Vice-President Gore thinks about Whitewater can turn to page 418 of The Choice and find that he believes the matter “small and unfair,” but has sometimes been concerned that “the Republicans and the scandal machinery in Washington” could keep it front and center. Any reader unwilling to hazard a guess about what Dick Morris’s polling data told him about Medicare can turn to page 235 of The Choice and find that “voters liked Medicare, trusted it and felt it was the one federal program that worked.”

This tabula rasa typing requires rather persistent attention on the part of the reader, since its very presence on the page tends to an impression that significant and heretofore undisclosed information must have just been revealed, by a reporter who left no stone unturned to obtain it. The weekly lunch shared by the President and Vice-President Gore, we learn in The Choice , “sometimes did not start until 3 P.M. because of other business.” The President, “who had a notorious appetite, tried to eat lighter food.” The reader attuned to the conventions of narrative might be led by the presentation of these quotidian details into thinking that a dramatic moment is about to occur, but the crux of the four-page prologue having to do with the weekly lunches turns out to be this: the President, according to Mr. Woodward, “thought a lot of the criticism he received was unfair.” The Vice-President, he reveals, “had some advice. Clinton always had found excess reserve within himself. He would just have to find more, Gore said.”

What Mr. Woodward chooses to leave unrecorded, or what he apparently does not think to elicit, is in many ways more instructive than what he commits to paper. “The accounts I have compiled may, at times, be more comprehensive than what a future historian, who has to rely on a single memo, letter, or recollection of what happened, might be able to piece together,” he noted in the introduction to The Agenda , an account of certain events in the first years of the Clinton administration in which he endeavored, to cryogenic effect, “to give every key participant in these events an opportunity to offer his or her recollections and views.” The “future historian” who might be interested in piecing together the details of how the Clinton administration arrived at its program for health-care reform, however, will find, despite a promising page of index references, that none of the key participants interviewed for The Agenda apparently thought to discuss what might have seemed the central curiosity in that process, which was by what political miscalculation a plan initially meant to remove third-party profit from the health-care equation (or to “take on the insurance industry,” as Putting People First, the manifesto of the 1992 Clinton-Gore campaign, had phrased it) would become one distrusted by large numbers of Americans precisely because it seemed to enlarge and further entrench the role of the insurance industry.

This disinclination of Mr. Woodward’s to exert cognitive energy on what he is told reaches critical mass in The Choice , where not much said to the author by a candidate or potential candidate appears to have been deemed too casual for documentation (“Most of them permitted me to tape-record the interviews; otherwise I took detailed notes”), too insignificant for inclusion. President Clinton declined to be interviewed directly for this book, but Senator Dole “was interviewed for more than 12 hours and the typed transcripts run over 200 pages.” Accounts of these interviews, typically including date, time, venue, weather, and apparel details (for one Saturday interview in his office the candidate was “dressed casually in a handsome green wool shirt”), can be found, according to the index of The Choice (“Dole, Robert J. ‘Bob’, interviews by author with”), on pages 87-89, 183, 214-215, 338, 345-348, 378, 414, and 423.

Study of these pages suggests the deferential spirit of the enterprise. In the course of the Saturday interview for which Senator Dole selected the “handsome green wool shirt,” a ninety-minute session which took place on February 4, 1995, in Dole’s office in the Hart Senate Office Building (“My tape recorder sat on the arm of his chair, and his press secretary, Clarkson Hine, took copious notes”), Mr. Woodward asked if Dole, in 1988, thought he was the best candidate. He reports Dole’s answer: “Thought I was.” This gave Mr. Woodward the opportunity to ask what he had previously (and rather mystifyingly, since little else in The Choice tends to this point) defined for the reader as “an important question for my book”: “You weren’t elected,” he reminded Senator Dole, “so you have to come out of that period feeling the system doesn’t elect the best?”

Senator Dole, not unexpectedly, answered agreeably: “I think it’s true. I think Elizabeth raises that a lot, whether it’s president, or Senate or whatever, that a lot of the best—somebody people would describe [as] the best—don’t make it. That’s the way the system works. You also come out of that, even though you lose, if you still have enough confidence in yourself, that you didn’t lose because you weren’t the best candidate. You lost for other reasons. You can always rationalize these things.”

On Saturday, July 1, 1995, again in Dole’s Hart office (Senator Dole in “casual khaki pants, a blue dress shirt with cufflinks, and purple Nike tennis shoes”), Mr. Woodward elicited, in the course of a two-and-a-half-hour interview, these reflections from the candidate:

On his schedule : “We’re trying to pace ourselves. It’s like today I’m not traveling, which is hard to believe. Tomorrow we go to Iowa, get back at 1 A.M. We’re off all day Monday. Then we go to New Hampshire.” On his speechwriters : “You can’t just read something that somebody’s written and say ‘Oh, boy, this is dynamite.’ You’ve got to have a feel for it and you’ve got to think, Jimminy, this might work. And this is the message. And I think we’re still testing it, and I think you can’t say that if I said this on day one, it’s going to be written in stone forever.” On the message, in response to Mr. Woodward’s suggestion that “there’s something people are waiting for somebody to say that no one has said yet” : “Right. I think you’re right.” On his strategy : “As long as we’re on target, on message, and got money in the bank, and people are signing up, we’re mostly doing the right thing. But I also have been around long enough to know that somebody can make a mistake and it’ll be all over, too.” On the Senate : “Somebody has to manage it. And it may not be manageable. It isn’t, you know, it’s a frustrating place sometimes but generally it works out.”

“I was not out of questions,” Mr. Woodward concludes, “but I too was growing tired, and it seemed time to stand up and thank him.”

Mr. Woodward dutifully tries, in the note that prefaces The Choice , to provide the “why” paragraph, the “billboard,” the sentence or sentences that explain to the reader why the book was written and what it is about. That these are questions with which he experiences considerable discomfort seems clear:

Presidential elections are defining moments that go way beyond legislative programs or the role of the government. They are measuring points for the country that call forth a range of questions which each candidate must try to address. Who are we? What mat-ters? Where are we going? In the private and public actions of the candidates are embedded their best answers. Action is character, I believe, and when all is said and sifted, character is what matters most.

This quo vadis , or valedictory, mode is one in which Mr. Woodward has crashed repeatedly when faced with the question of what his books are about, as if his programming did not extend to this point. The “human story is the core” was his somewhat more perfunctory stab at explaining what he was up to in The Commanders . For Wired , his 1984 book about the life and death of the comic John Belushi, Mr. Woodward spoke to 217 people on the record and obtained access to “appointment calendars, diaries, telephone records, credit card receipts, medical records, handwritten notes, letters, photographs, newspaper and magazine articles, stacks of accountants’ records covering the last several years of Belushi’s life, daily movie production reports, contracts, hotel records, travel records, taxi receipts, limousine bills and Belushi’s monthly cash disbursement records,” only to arrive, not unlike HAL in 2001, at these questions: “Why? What happened? Who was responsible, if anyone? Could it have been different or better? Those were the questions raised by his family, friends and associates. Could success have been something other than a failure? The questions persist. Nonetheless, his best and most definitive legacy is his work. He made us laugh, and now he can make us think.”

In any real sense, these books are “about” nothing but the author’s own method, which is not, on the face of it, markedly different from other people’s. Mr. Woodward interviews people, he tapes or takes (“detailed”) notes on what they say. He takes “great care to compare and verify various sources’ accounts of the same events.” He obtains documents, he reads them, he files them: for The Brethren , the book he wrote with Scott Armstrong about the Supreme Court, the documents “filled eight file drawers.” He consults The Almanac of American Politics (“the bible, and I relied on it”), he reads what others have written on the subject: “In preparation for my own reporting,” he tells us about The Choice , “I and my assistant, Karen Alexander, read and often studied hundreds of newspaper and magazine articles.”

Should the information he requires lie outside Washington, he goes the extra mile: “I traveled from coast to coast many times, visiting everyone possible and everywhere possible,” he tells us about the research for Wired . Since Mr. Woodward lives in Washington and John Belushi worked in the motion picture industry and died at the Chateau Marmont in Los Angeles, these coast-to-coast trips might have seemed to represent the minimum in dogged fact-gathering, but never mind: the author had even then, in 1984, transcended method and entered the heady ether of methodology, a discipline in which the reason for writing a book could be the sheer fact of being there. “I would like to know more and Newsweek magazine was saying that maybe that is the thing I should look at next,” he allowed recently when a caller on Larry King Live asked if he might not want to write about Whitewater. “I don’t know. I do not know about Whitewater and what it really means. I am waiting—if I can say this—for the call from somebody on the inside saying ‘I want to talk.”‘

Here is where we reach the single unique element in the method, and also the problem. As any prosecutor and surely Mr. Woodward knows, the person on the inside who calls and says “I want to talk” is an informant, or snitch, and is generally looking to bargain a deal, to improve his or her own situation, to place the blame on someone else in return for being allowed to plead down or out certain charges. Because the story told by a criminal or civil informant is understood to be colored by self-interest, the informant knows that his or her testimony will be unrespected, even reviled, subjected to rigorous examination and often rejection.

The informant who talks to Mr. Woodward, on the other hand, knows that his or her testimony will be not only respected but burnished into the inside story, which is why so many people on the inside, notably those who consider themselves the professionals or managers of the process—assistant secretaries, deputy advisers, players of the game, aides who intend to survive past the tenure of the patron they are prepared to portray as hapless—do want to talk to him. Many Dole campaign aides did want to talk, for The Choice , about the herculean efforts and adroit strategy required to keep the candidate with whom they were saddled even marginally on target, on message, on the program:

Dole offered a number of additional references to the past, how it had been done before, and Reed [Dole campaign manager Scott Reed] countered with his own ideas about how he would handle similar situations. A sense of diffusion and randomness wouldn’t work. Making seat-of-the-pants, airborne decisions was not the way he operated…. Dole needed a coherent and understandable message on which to run, Reed said. Deep down, he added, he knew Dole knew what he wanted to say, but he probably needed some help putting it together and delivering it…. Reed felt he had hit the right weaknesses.

Similarly, many Clinton foreign policy advisers did want to talk, again for The Choice , about the equally herculean efforts and strategy required to guide the President, on the question of Bosnia, from one of his “celebrated rages” (“‘I’m getting creamed!”‘ Clinton, “unleashing his frustration” and “spewing forth profanity,” is reported to have said on being told of the fall of Srebrenica) to a more nuanced appreciation of the policy options on which his aides had been laboring unappreciated: “Berger [Deputy National Security Adviser Sandy Berger] reminded him that Lake [National Security Adviser Anthony Lake] was trying to develop an Endgame Strategy.” At a meeting a few days later in the Oval Office, when Vice-President Gore mentioned a photograph in The Washington Post of a refugee from Srebrenica who had hanged herself from a tree, the adroit guidance continued:

“My 21-year-old daughter asked about that picture,” Gore said. “What am I supposed to tell her? Why is this happening and we’re not doing anything?” It was a chilling moment. The vice president was directly confronting and criticizing the president. Gore believed he understood his role. He couldn’t push the president too far, but they had built a good relationship and he felt he had to play his card when he felt strongly. He couldn’t know precisely what going too far meant unless he occasionally did it. “My daughter is surprised the world is allowing this to happen,” Gore said carefully. “I am too.” Clinton said they were going to do something.

This is a cartoon, but not a cartoon in which anyone who spoke to the author will appear to have taken any but the highest ground. Asked, in the same appearance on Larry King Live , why he thought people talked to him, Mr. Woodward responded:

Only because I get good information and I talk to people at the middle level, lower level, try to talk to the people at the top. They know that I am going to reflect their point of view. One of my earlier books, somebody called me who was in it and said “How am I going to come out?” and I said “Well, essentially, I write self portraits.”…They really are self portraits, because I go to people and I say—I check them and I double check them but—but who are you? What are you doing? Where do you fit in? What did you say? What did you feel?

Those who talk to Mr. Woodward, in other words, can be confident that he will be civil (“I too was growing tired, and it seemed time to stand up and thank him”), that he will not feel impelled to make connections between what he is told and what is already known, that he will treat even the most patently self-serving account as if untainted by hindsight (that of Richard Darman, say, who in 1992 presented himself to Mr. Woodward, who in turn presented him to America, as the helpless Cassandra of the 1990 Bush budget deal * ); that he will be, above all, and herein can be found both Mr. Woodward’s compass and the means by which he is set adrift, “fair.”

I once heard a group of reporters agree that there were at most twenty people who run any story. What they meant by “running the story” was setting the terms, setting the pace, deciding the agenda, determining when and where the story exists, and shaping what the story will be. There were certain people who ran the story in Vietnam, there were certain people in Central America, there were certain people in Washington. An American presidential campaign is a Washington story, which means that the handful of people who run the story in Washington—the people who write the most influential columns, the people who conduct the Sunday shows on which Washington talks to itself—will also run the campaign. Bob Woodward, who is unusual in that he is not a regular participant in the television dialogue and appears in print, outside his books, only infrequently, is one of the people who run the story in Washington.

In this business of running the story, in fact in the business of news itself, certain conventions are seen as beyond debate. “Opinion” will be so labeled, and confined to the op-ed page or the Sunday-morning shows. “News analysis” will be so labeled, and will appear in a subordinate position to the “news” story it accompanies. In the rest of the paper as on the evening news, the story will be reported “impartially,” the story will be “even-handed,” the story will be “fair.” “Fairness” is a quality Mr. Woodward particularly seems to prize (“I learned a long time ago,” he told Larry King, “you take your opinions and your attitudes, your predispositions—get them in your back pocket, because they are only going to get in the way of doing your job”), and mentions repeatedly in his thanks to his assistants.

It was “Karen Alexander, a 1993 graduate of Yale University,” who “brought unmatched intellect, grace and doggedness and an ingrained sense of fairness” to The Choice . On The Agenda , it was “David Greenberg, a 1990 graduate of Yale University,” who “repeatedly worked to bring greater balance, fairness, and clarity to our reporting and writing.” It was “Marc E. Solomon, a 1989 Yale graduate,” who “brought a sense of fairness and balance” to The Commanders. On The Veil, it was “Barbara Feinman, a 1982 graduate of the University of California at Berkeley,” whose “friendship and sense of fairness guided the daily enterprise.” For The Brethren, Mr. Woodward and his co-author, Scott Armstrong, thank “Al Kamen, a former reporter for the Rocky Mountain News ,” for his “thoroughness, skepticism, and sense of fairness.”

The genuflection toward “fairness” is a familiar newsroom piety, the excuse in practice for a good deal of autopilot reporting and lazy thinking but a benign ideal. In Washington, however, a community in which the management of news has become the single overriding preoccupation of the core industry, what “fairness” has too often come to mean is a scrupulous passivity, an agreement to cover the story not as it is occurring but as it is presented, which is to say as it is manufactured. Such institutionalized events as a congressional hearing or a presidential trip will be covered with due diligence, but the story will vanish the moment the gavel falls, the hour Air Force One returns to Andrews.

“Iran-contra” referred exclusively, for many Washington reporters, to the hearings. The sequence of events that came to be known as “the S&L crisis,” which was actually less a “crisis” than the structural malfunction that triggered what remains an uncontrolled meltdown in middle-class confidence, existed as a “story” only on those occasions (hearings, indictments) when it showed promise of rising to its “crisis” slug. Similarly, “Whitewater” (as in “I do not know about Whitewater and what it really means”) has survived as a story only to the extent that it allows those who cover it to note the waning or waxing probability of a “smoking gun,” or “evidence.”

“If there is evidence it should be pursued,” Mr. Woodward told Larry King to this point. “In fairness to the Clintons. And it’s—it—you know, we all in the news business, and in politics have to be very sensitive to the unfair smear…. It’s not fair and again it goes back to what’s the evidence?” Yet the actual interest of Whitewater lies in what has already been documented: it is “about” the S&L crisis, and thereby offers a detailed and specific look at the kinds of political and financial dealing that resulted in the meltdown in middle-class confidence. What Whitewater “really means” or offers, then, is an understanding of that meltdown, which is now being reported as an inexplicable phenomenon weirdly detached from the periodic “growth” figures produced in Washington; but this is not a story that will be put together by waiting for the call from somebody on the inside saying “I want to talk.”

Every reporter, in the development of a story, depends on and coddles, or protects, his or her sources. Only when the protection of the source gets in the way of telling the story does the reporter face a professional, even a moral, choice: he can blow the source and move to another beat or he can roll over, shape the story to continue serving the source. The necessity for making this choice between the source and the story seems not to have come up in the course of writing Mr. Woodward’s books, for good reason: since he proceeds from a position in which the very impulse to sort through the evidence and reach a conclusion is seen as suspect, something to be avoided in the higher interest of fairness, he has been able, consistently and conveniently, to define the story as that which the source tells him.

This fidelity to the source, whoever the source might be, leads Mr. Woodward down avenues that might at first seem dead-end: On page 16 of The Choice we have President Clinton, presumably on the authority of a White House source, “thunderstruck” that Senator Dole, on the morning after Clinton’s mother died in early 1994, should have described Whitewater on the network news shows as “unbelievable,” “mind-boggling,” “big, big news” that “cries out more than ever now for an independent counsel.” On page 346 of The Choice we have Senator Dole, on December 27, 1995, telling Mr. Woodward “that he had never used Whitewater to attack the president personally,” to which Mr. Woodward responds only: “What would be your criteria for picking a vice president?” On page 423 of The Choice we have Mr. Woodward, on April 20, 1996, by which date he had apparently remembered what he said on page 16 that Senator Dole said, although not what he said on page 346 that Senator Dole said, advising Senator Dole that the President had resented his “aggressive call for a Whitewater independent counsel back in early 1994, the day Clinton’s mother had died.”

Only now do we arrive at what seems to be for Mr. Woodward the point, and it has to do with his own role as honest broker, or conscience to the candidates. He reports that Senator Dole was “troubled” by this disclosure, even “haunted by what he might have done,” so much so that he was moved to write Clinton a letter of apology:

Later that week, Dole was at the White House for an anti-terrorism bill signing ceremony. Clinton took him aside into a corridor so they could speak alone. The president thanked him for the letter. He said he had read it twice. He was touched and appreciated it very much. “Mothers are important,” Dole said. Emotion rose up in both men. They looked at each other for an instant, then moved back to business. Soon they agreed on a budget for the rest of the year. It was not the comprehensive seven-year deal both had envisioned and worked on for months. But it was a start.

The human story is the core,” as Mr. Woodward said of The Commanders . To believe that this moment in the White House corridor occurred is not difficult: we know it occurred, precisely because whether or not it occurred makes no difference, has no significance, appears at first to tell us, like the famous moment described in Veil , the exchange between the author and William Casey in Room C6316 at Georgetown Hospital, nothing. “You knew, didn’t you,” Mr. Woodward thought to ask Casey on that occasion.

The contra diversion had to be the first question: you knew all along. His head jerked up hard. He stared, and finally nodded yes. Why? I asked. “I believed.” What? “I believed.” Then he was asleep, and I didn’t get to ask another question.

This account provoked, in the immediate wake of Veil ’s 1987 publication, considerable talk-show and dinner-table controversy (was Mr. Woodward actually in the room, did Mr. Casey actually nod, where were the nurses, what happened to the CIA security detail), including, rather astonishingly, spirited discussion of whether or not the hospital visit could be “corroborated.” In fact there was so markedly little reason to think the account inauthentic that the very question seemed to obscure, as the account itself had seemed to obscure, the actual problem with the scene in Room C6316 at Georgetown Hospital, which had to do with timing, or with what did Mr. Woodward know and when did he know it.

The hospital visit took place, according to Veil , “several days” after Mr. Casey’s resignation, which occurred on January 29, 1987. This was almost four months after the crash of the Hasenfus plane in Nicaragua, more than two months after the Justice Department disclosure that the United States had been selling arms to Iran in order to divert the profits to the contras, and a full month after both the House and Senate Permanent Select Committees on Intelligence had completed reports on their investigations into the diversion. The inquiries of the two congressional investigating committees established in the first week of January 1987, the Senate Select Committee on Secret Military Assistance to Iran and the Nicaraguan Opposition and the House Select Committee to Investigate Covert Arms Transactions with Iran, were already underway. The report of the Tower commission would be released in three weeks.

Against this background and this amount of accumulated information, the question of whether the Director of Central Intelligence “knew” about the diversion was, at the time Mr. Woodward made his hospital visit and even more conclusively at the time he committed his account of the visit to paper, no longer at issue, no longer relevant, no longer a question. The hospital interview, then, exists on the page only as a prurient distraction from the real questions raised by the diversion, only as a dramatization of the preferred Washington view that Iran-contra reflected not a structural problem but a “human story,” a tale of how one man’s hubris could have shaken the basically solid foundations of the established order, a disruption of the solid status quo that will be seen to end, satisfyingly, with that man’s death.

Washington, as rendered by Mr. Woodward, is by definition basically solid, a diorama of decent intentions in which wise if misunderstood and occasionally misled stewards will reliably prevail. Its military chiefs will be pictured, as Colin Powell was in The Commanders , thinking on the eve of war exclusively of their troops, the “kids,” the “teenagers”: a human story. The clerks of its Supreme Court will be pictured, as the clerks of the Burger court were in The Brethren , offering astute guidance as their justices negotiate the shoals of ideological error: a human story. The more available members of its foreign diplomatic corps will be pictured, as Saudi ambassador Prince Bandar bin Sultan was in The Commanders and in Veil , gaining access to the councils of power not just because they have the oil but because of their “backslapping irreverence,” their “directness,” their exemplification of “the new breed of ambassador—activist, charming, profane”: yet another human story. Its opposing leaders will be pictured, as President Clinton and Senator Dole are in The Choice , finding common ground on the importance of mothers: the ultimate human story.

That this crude personalization works to narrow the focus, to circumscribe the range of possible discussion or speculation, is, for the people who find it useful to talk to Mr. Woodward, its point. What they have in Mr. Woodward is a widely trusted reporter, even an American icon, who can be relied upon to present a Washington in which problematic or questionable matters will be definitively resolved by the discovery, or by the demonstration that there has been no discovery, of “the smoking gun,” “the evidence.” Should such narrowly-defined “evidence” be found, he can then be relied upon to demonstrate, “fairly,” that the only fingerprints on the smoking gun are those of the one bad apple in the barrel, the single rogue agent in the tapestry of decent intentions.

“I kept coming back to the question of personal responsibility, Casey’s responsibility,” Mr. Woodward reports having mused (apparently for once ready, at the moment when he is about to visit a source on his deathbed, to question the veracity of what he has been told) before his last visit to Room C6316 at Georgetown Hospital. “For a moment, I hoped he would take himself off the hook. The only way was an admission of some kind or an apology to his colleagues or an expression of new understanding. Under the last question on ‘Key unanswered questions for Casey,’ I wrote: ‘Do you see now that it was wrong?”‘ To commit such Rosebud moments to paper is what it means to tell “the human story” at “the core,” and it is also what it means to write political pornography.

September 19, 1996

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Joan Didion (1934–2021) was the author, most recently, of Blue Nights and The Year of Magical Thinking , among seven other works of nonfiction. Her five novels include A Book of Common Prayer and Democracy .


The Washington Post : “Origin of the Tax Pledge,” by Bob Woodward (October 4, 1992, p. A1), “No-Tax Vow Scuttled Anti-Deficit Mission,” by Bob Woodward (October 5, 1992, p. A1), “Primary Heat Turned Deal into a ‘Mistake,”‘ by Bob Woodward (October 6, 1992, p. A1), and “The President’s Key Men: Splintered Trio, Splintered Policy,” by Bob Woodward (October 7, 1992, p. A1).  ↩

The Fate of the Union: Kennedy and After

December 26, 1963 issue

A Double Standard

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Casey and Woodward: Who Used Whom?

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If the Fighting Had Taken Place Here …

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Vice-Presidential Notes: (The 6th Vice-Presidential Note)

November 28, 1963 issue

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St. Martin's Press, 2015

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Maia silber, more online by maia silber.

• Let Me Tell You What I Mean

The Last Love Song: A Biography of Joan Didion

By tracy daugherty, reviewed by maia silber.

On an August afternoon in 1973, Joan Didion brought her seven-year-old daughter, Quintana, to the Chicago Institute of Art. Quintana stood in front of O’Keeffe’s “Sky Above Clouds” and said, “I need to talk to her.” The girl never met the painter, but eight years later, Didion considered Quintana’s words in an essay on art as self-representation. A painter’s work makes us want to meet her, Didion concluded, because “style is character.”

Martin Amis noted in the London Review of Books that we can find evidence to the contrary in any literary biography, a remark which appears in Tracy Daugherty’s recently published biography of Joan Didion. Daugherty’s work, the first comprehensive account of the writer’s life, is also a 600-page meditation on the statement “style is character.” Daugherty read Didion and needed to talk to her. Like Quintana, Daugherty never met his idol; Didion did not cooperate on the project.

Daugherty’s only extensive interview is with Noel Parmental, an ex-boyfriend who once sued Didion for libel. Mostly, Daugherty engages in extensive dialogue with Didion’s autobiographical works and archived manuscripts. In doing so, he encounters a particularly tangled style and character. Since she began her career as a staff writer for Vogue , Didion’s approach has been extraordinarily personal. In her first column for Life , she pondered divorce. In her seminal collection of essays, The White Album , she transcribed her psychological profile. Her memoirs, The Year of Magical Thinking and Blue Nights , detail the deaths of her husband and daughter, respectively. Yet these works communicate the personal in a fragmentary, elliptical, and repetitious prose as distinctive and obscuring as her famous sunglasses. Any consideration of Didion must take into account this careful exploration of her self and her equally careful construction of that self, the persona she creates, and the mythos that has formed—with or without her control—around her.

These concerns do not escape Daugherty. He promises, in the biography’s preface, to approach Didion’s writing with attention to the distinctions between persona and personality. Yet in seeking the self in the construction of sentences—Daugherty’s first project is to reconstruct Didion’s prose—he often imitates her in lieu of analyzing her. Themes emerge around repeated Didionesque phrases, I don’t know what happened to this country; Just change the script . As Daugherty narrates Didion’s life, he pulls details from her published works: the yellow curtains hanging from her New York window, Quintana’s fuzzy pink slippers, Dunne asking for a second drink before dropping dead of a heart attack. The technique blends Didion’s words into the events of her life. Used to best effect, it demystifies her processes, unearthing the trail from observation to draft.

Used less delicately, this technique can make Daugherty’s prose read as a near-parody of Didion’s. “On those blue, blue nights, slouching toward a center that would not hold … this writer was always true,” Daugherty combines nearly every iconic Didion line in the biography’s closing chapter. “If we pause and bother to listen, we remain dreamers of Didion’s dream.” Details intimate in memoir can seem silly in biography. Daugherty describes a college-aged Didion walking to class, “fingering bags of peanuts in her pockets.”

In Didionesque fashion, too, Daugherty draws his major themes from a dark and romantic mythic past. He traces both Didion’s spare prose and political conservatism to her “wagon-train morality,” the pioneer legends of her Western upbringing. Though Didion, writing for The American Scholar , first identified “wagon-train morality” in a nurse’s decision to retrieve a dead body from Death Valley, Daugherty interprets the phrase to mean leaving the body behind. In Didion’s accounts of the acid-tripping girl in “High Kindergarten,” the child left alone on a California freeway, and the abortion in Play It As It Lays , Daugherty sees the weak one left on the trail. It’s an apt if obvious metaphor for Didion’s treatment of loss and abandonment and for the social and political changes of the twentieth century that she both exemplified and recorded. Daugherty frames that era, with its promise of forward motion and brutality of sacrifice, as a crasser pioneering age. “The casualties from that period lay all along the trail,” Daugherty writes of the sixties coming to an end. “Morrison, Joplin, Hendrix.”

When it comes to Didion’s character, though, less fits into metaphor and myth. Can we liken writing The Year of Magical Thinking and Blue Nights to burying the baby, or refusing to continue along the trail? “What governs [a life] is not pattern but drift,” Cynthia Ozick wrote in an essay on Edith Wharton. Even as Didion wrote about crossings, she drifted, from California to New York to Hawaii to California and back to New York again. Daugherty charts the trail from style to character, but we’re left wondering what went off the trail.

Didion concludes her essay on O’Keeffe by recalling the inspiration for the artist’s “Evening Star” series. O’Keeffe observed the star on evening walks with her sister, while her sister practiced her aim by throwing bottles into the air and shooting them. “In a way one’s interest is compelled as much by the sister Claudia with the gun as by the painter Georgia with the star, but only the painter left us this shining record,” Didion concludes. In the end, only Didion the writer left us her shining record. Didion the woman drifted, like a silent sister beside her.

Published on November 10, 2015

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Review | ‘The World According to Joan Didion’ by Evelyn McDonnell

The Editor of ‘Women Who Rock’ Takes On a Woman Who Wrote

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You know you’re in great authorial hands when, on page two of this book, Evelyn McDonnell insists about her subject Joan Didion, “Narrative was her expertise and her enemy.” Not just a great insight, that line connects the dots between these two powerful women. McDonnell skillfully offers all the lessons she’s learned from years of reading, considering, and teaching (currently journalism at Loyola Marymount University) Didion. So both can wield a rapier thrust of a declarative, quick last sentence of a paragraph. For as McDonnell closes one graph, “For Didion, words were earned, not spent.” Indeed.

McDonnell, editor of  Women Who Rock: Bessie to Beyoncé, Girl Groups to Riot Grrrl , is not attempting a biography with  The World According to Joan Didion , or even a literary biography, but something more attuned to her fascinating subject. It’s an examination of where Didion met the world on the page, read through a series of Didion totems that function as chapter titles, such as “Gold,” “Notebook,” “Stingray,” “Jogger,” “Morgue,” “Orchid.” For what better way to honor Didion than with a collection of essays?

That’s not to say McDonnell doesn’t chart Didion’s growth as a writer and thinker. She does outline the three major segments of Didion’s writing career — her early fame while weaving her own often tenuous life with the tumult of the 1960s and ’70s ( Slouching Towards Bethlehem ,  The White Album ), her move toward scrutinizing the global and political (from  Salvador  to “Sentimental Journeys,” where she dissected the Central Park Jogger case years before the convictions were overturned), to her final years as a clear-eyed keener of grief, “a professional widow in a sense” ( The Year of Magical Thinking ,  Blue Nights ). Agreeing with scholar Kathleen M. Vandenberg, McDonnell argues that “far from reifying and representing the ruling class, as other critics have charged, Didion sounded some of the earliest warnings of the Trumpocalypse to come.” But McDonnell even lets The Donald off the hook here, given in 1989 he took out ads in N.Y.C. newspapers calling for a reinstatement of the death penalty, clearly insinuating that’s what the since exonerated Black and Latino men originally convicted as the Central Park Five deserved. No surprise: Trump has never apologized.

McDonnell certainly doesn’t apologize for Didion’s sense of privilege, making clear she and her husband, John Gregory Dunne, ruled bi-coastally as the Kings of California and “THE New York literati.” (The book does offer a soupçon of celeb gawk and gossip here and there, what with Han Solo/young Harrison Ford as the couple’s Malibu handyman, say.) As she puts it, “#MeNot could have been Joan’s hashtag.”

But McDonnell also makes the case that Didion did much for women if not for movement feminism. She was, after all, one of only two female voices hailed in Tom Wolfe’s scene-codifying  The New Journalism  anthology in 1973. She regularly focused articles on women subjects, and all five of her novels are centered on female protagonists. Ultimately her authority rang out. McDonnell wisely quotes Zadie Smith on this topic: “There is much in Didion one might disagree with personally, politically, aesthetically. I will never love the Doors. But I remain grateful for the day I picked up  Slouching Towards Bethlehem  and realized that a woman could speak without hedging her bets, without hemming and hawing, without making nice, without poeticisms, without sounding pleasant or sweet, without deference, and even without doubt.”

McDonnell’s book attests to that authority from the earliest days of Didion’s writing, including her final exams at UC Berkeley. “Didion’s voice and style are already honed,” McDonnell notes of the Sacramento native. “She has superb control of the flow of words, like she is swimming in the American River.” One could read  The World According to Joan Didion  just to savor scintillating syntax, both Didion’s and McDonnell’s. McDonnell will not only find what she hails a perfect Didion sentence in a  New York Times  interview — “Well every day is all there is” — but also craft a thoughtful beauty of her own like this one, “Didion may have appreciated food like she did the ocean, or natural things in general: from a distance, with a certain degree of skepticism.”

For all McDonnell’s admiration of Didion, that skepticism of writerly gods doesn’t fail her in this book. As much as Didion had to reconsider all her familial myths of Californian Manifest Destiny, McDonnell has to continually probe and question. Her thoughts on Didion as mother to the sadly doomed Quintana Roo in particular are piercing and poignant. For McDonnell offers early in her book, “One of the things I most admire about Joan Didion is her ability to refuse satisfaction. To listen. To change.  Where I Was From , not  Where I Am From .”

Ultimately the book comes down to truth and beauty, “the north and south poles of art,” as McDonnell phrases it. Of Didion, she claims: “She was committed to the enjoyment of beauty as to the pursuit of truth.” The last chapter/essay is “Orchid,” a flower that drew Didion with its exotic beauty all her life. I couldn’t help but think of Rebecca Solnit’s  Orwell’s Roses  while finishing  The World According to Joan Didion , and how these two exemplars of 20th-century nonfiction both uncovered so much of our world with their incisive words that they knew they had to bring us flowers so hope still had a chance to bloom.                                                                                                       

This review originally appeared in the  California Review of Books .

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Joan didion, novelist and essayist, when you write, you’re always revealing a difficult part of yourself..

Joan Didion was born in Sacramento, California. Didion spent most of her childhood in Sacramento, except for several years during World War II, when she traveled across the county with her mother and brother to be near her father, who served in a succession of posts as an officer in the Army Air Corps. Her family had deep roots in the West; family tales of pioneer days informed her first novel, as well as her later memoir, Where I Was From .

By her own account, Didion was a shy, bookish child, although she also pushed herself to overcome her shyness through acting and public speaking. In her final year at the University of California, Berkeley, she won an essay contest sponsored by Vogue magazine. The first prize was a job in the magazine’s New York office. Didion remained at Vogue for two years, progressing from research assistant to contributing writer. At the same time, she published articles in other magazines and wrote her first novel, Run River (1963). Although the novel sold poorly, it attracted favorable reviews, and she was offered a contract to write a second book.

In 1964, Didion married John Gregory Dunne, an aspiring novelist who was writing for Time magazine. The couple moved to Los Angeles with the intention of staying six months, and ended up making their home there for the next 20 years. The pair adopted a baby girl they named Quintana Roo, after the state on the eastern coast of Mexico.

The atmosphere of California in the 1960s provided Didion and Dunne with ample opportunities for writing in the personal mode that was becoming known as the New Journalism, also associated with the writers Norman Mailer, Tom Wolfe, Hunter Thompson and Gay Talese. Didion’s essays on the ’60s counterculture were collected in the volume Slouching Towards Bethlehem (1968). Published to critical acclaim, the book is one of the signature works of the decade. Didion’s second novel, Play It As it Lays (1970), set among aimless souls adrift at the edges of the film industry, captured a mood of anomie and alienation that crept over the film colony at the decade’s close.

Working in collaboration for the first time, Didion and Dunne wrote the screenplay for the film  Panic in Needle Park (1971). Set among homeless drug addicts in New York City, the film introduced film audiences to the actor Al Pacino. Their work on the film was much admired, and the pair would become one of Hollywood’s most sought-after screenwriting teams, a lucrative sideline to their journalism and fiction. Among the many screenplays they wrote together, the best known are screenplays for the film adaptation of Play It As it Lays (1972); the 1976 remake of A Star Is Born,  featuring Barbra Streisand and Kris Kristofferson; the film version of Dunne’s novel True Confessions (1981); and Up Close and Personal (1996) with Robert Redford.

Didion published a second volume of essays, The White Album , in 1979. She had won a national reputation as an intensely acute social observer and prose stylist; her voice was admired for its gemlike precision and elegance. In the 1980s, Didion’s interest turned to the state of her country’s relations with its southern neighbors, examined in two book-length essays, Salvador (1983) and Miami (1987). Travels in Central America and the Pacific also provided the background for novels of political intrigue, including A Book of Common Prayer (1977), Democracy (1984) and The Last Thing He Wanted (1996).

Over the years, Joan Didion and John Gregory Dunne often found themselves in the position of explaining New York to Californians, and California to New Yorkers. In the mid-1980s, the couple moved back to New York City. Many of Didion’s observations of the city appear in her essay collection After Henry (1992). Years of Didion’s essays on American politics and government were collected in the volume Political Fictions (2001). Her thoughts turned back to California in Where I Was From (2003), a wide-ranging volume of reflections on California’s past and present. Her first seven books of nonfiction have been collected in a single volume, We Tell Ourselves Stories in Order to Live .

In late 2003, Didion’s daughter, Quintana, fell gravely ill. Shortly after returning from a visit to their comatose child in the hospital, her husband, John Gregory Dunne, suffered a fatal heart attack. Joan Didion wrote a searing account of her journey through grief in The Year of Magical Thinking . At the time she finished the book, her daughter appeared to be recovering from her illness, but by the time the book was published, Quintana had died. The Year of Magical Thinking was published to widespread acclaim and received the National Book Award for Nonfiction in 2005.

In her first foray into writing for the theater, Didion adapted The Year of Magical Thinking to the stage. The Broadway production opened in 2007 and starred Didion’s friend Vanessa Redgrave, who repeated the role at Britain’s National Theatre. The play has since been performed throughout the English-speaking world, and in French, Spanish and Norwegian translations.  Didion continued to document her experience of personal loss in the 2011 memoir Blue Nights , which directly addressed the death of her daughter, among wide-ranging observations on childhood, motherhood, grief, mortality and the aging process.

In 2013, President Barack Obama awarded Joan Didion the National Medal of Arts.  She is the subject of a feature-length documentary film, directed by her nephew Griffin Dunne. The film, The Center Will Not Hold, premiered on Netflix in 2017.  The same year saw the publication of a book of earlier travel essays, South and West .  In 2019, Library of America began republishing all of Didion’s novels and books of essays in a collected edition, beginning with Joan Didion: The 1960s and 70s .  Let Me Tell You What I Mean , a volume of Didion’s previously uncollected essays, drawn from the years 1968 to 2000, was published early in 2021.  Library of America’s second volume of Didion’s collected works Joan Didion: The 1980s and 90s , appeared in April 2021.

Since the 1960s, Joan Didion has been one of America’s finest novelists and most acute social observers. As an undergraduate at Berkeley, she won an essay contest sponsored by Vogue  magazine and was offered a job in the New York office of the magazine’s publisher, Condé Nast. In New York, she met her husband, the novelist John Gregory Dunne.

The couple moved to Los Angeles, where they enjoyed a unique partnership as Hollywood’s most sought-after screenwriting team. The Hollywood scene and the California counterculture provide the backdrop for her novels of the 1970s: Play It As it Lays and A Book of Common Prayer . Her reflections on the turbulent era appeared in her bestselling essay collections, Slouching Towards Bethlehem and The White Album . She won a devoted audience and the profound admiration of her peers with her immaculate prose and penetrating eye for the revelatory detail. In the 1980s, she broadened her range with provocative explorations of hemispheric politics in the book-length essays Miami and Salvador . In Where I Was From , she explores her memories of childhood in the Sacramento delta, and how history and experience have altered her view of her native region.

Her memoirs, The Year of Magical Thinking and Blue Nights , unflinchingly describe her response to her husband’s sudden death and the fatal illness of their only child. From the depths of grief, Joan Didion has risen to the height of her powers and turned unbearable experience into transcendent art.

You were working at Vogue magazine when you wrote your first novel. Did you always see yourself as a novelist?

I did see myself as a novelist, even though I was having trouble finishing this first novel. After it was published, it was only read by about ten people, but they happened to be ten people who gave it to ten other people and eventually — you know, not only was it not a commercial success, it wasn’t by any means, I don’t think, a success on its own terms. I didn’t know how to do it, and it ended up, because I didn’t know how to do it — I wanted to have a shattered narrative, but I didn’t have a clue how to do that, and so it was confusing. So the publisher pressed me to straighten out the chronology, so it became just a simple novel with a flashback, which wasn’t my intention at all. But anyway, enough people read it so that I was offered a contract for a second novel.

What was the first novel called?

Joan Didion: Well, that was another thing. It was called Run River , but that was the publisher’s title. I said, “What does it mean?” He said, “It means life goes on,” and I said, “That’s not what the book is about.”

And what was the second book?

Joan Didion: The second was Play It As It Lays .

You’ve said that one of your intentions in that work was to write a novel that moved so fast that it would be over before you noticed it, so fast that it would scarcely exist on the page.

Joan Didion: I just wanted to write a fast novel. You always have a vision of what kind of object a piece of fiction is going to be, or anything that you’re making. In that case, it was going to exist in a white space. It was going to exist between the paragraphs. Some of the chapters are only three or four lines long in that book, and I found a way to speed it up. I had started it — just because I didn’t know how else to start it — I started it with two or three characters (who) have short first-person statements, and then it goes into a “close third” for what appears to be the rest of the book, but as the book comes to an end and starts gaining momentum, you can pick up a lot of momentum by going back to this device from the beginning. This sounds so technical. You go back to that first person and shorter and shorter bursts, and it really gives you a lot of speed. So I was sort of thrilled with that.

It was a fairly revolutionary structure, wasn’t it, to employ both third- and first-person narrators that way?

Joan Didion: There is nothing you can’t do, it turns out.

Faulkner, in As I Lay Dying , used all these different first-person narrators, but you mixed that up even further by having first and third-person narrators. When you say you wanted the book to move fast, do you mean you want the reader to kind of gobble it up?

Joan Didion: I always want everything read in one sitting. If they can’t read it in one sitting, you’re going to lose the rhythm of it. You’re going to lose the shape of it. I myself love to read those Victorian novels which go on and on, and you don’t read them in one sitting. You might read one over the course of a summer, but that isn’t what I want to write.

To this day, your books are fairly short, for the most part. Did a publisher ever give you any trouble about that?

Joan Didion: No. Publishers now, it turns out, like short books. They didn’t used to like short books, but they are now convinced that that’s what people want.

I would imagine that it’s harder to write a short book because every word has to be so exact. Isn’t it easier to write long?

Joan Didion: It might be for some people, but it wouldn’t be for me because I would lose interest as it kind of meandered on.

Could you tell us about how you met John Gregory Dunne and how you came to work together as a team?

Joan Didion: We were friends for a long time before we decided to get married. I met him, he was working for Time . He was writing foreign news for Time , and he was just someone I liked and he made me laugh, and we would occasionally have lunch. We had friends in common. Then, for some reason — I don’t remember exactly why — but one night we had dinner. He said he was going to drive to Hartford the next day — he was from Hartford — did I want to come up, and I said sure. So I went up to Hartford, where his family lived, and I was so taken with this entire family that we started seeing each other in a more serious light. Really, at that time, he was, as I said, working for Time . I had published one novel. Neither one of us was very well established, and we went to California and started supporting ourselves by writing pieces. So that required one or the other of us — me to read his pieces, him to read my pieces. So we began to trust each other as first reader.

At what point did you and your husband first collaborate on something together?

Joan Didion: We didn’t collaborate until we wrote a screenplay, which I think was 1969. We did Panic in Needle Park . That’s all we ever collaborated on was screenplays.

Did that change the balance of how you worked together as editors?

Joan Didion: No, because it was a totally different activity.

And also because you were dealing with a studio? As in A Star is Born ?

Joan Didion: You’re always dealing with somebody else. Yes.

We did A Star Is Born in 1972 or ‘3, yeah. That movie was actually John’s idea, because it was conceived as a rock-and-roll remake of A Star Is Born . The names that came to mind were not necessarily the names who were going to be in it, but it was just two faces. It was Carly Simon and James Taylor, and Warner Brothers picked this up right away because they had a lot of music, so they got the idea. They had Warner Brothers music. So it was very easy to set up a contract, and Warner Brothers set up so we could do the research. We went out on tour with bands that summer and then wrote the screenplay, which we had a lot of fun doing because it was totally research. It was fun. You’d find yourself in Johnstown, Pennsylvania, on a summer night with a really bad English metal band — you know, I mean just hopeless — and being really thrilled. Then it got to be heavy weather on that picture because the question of casting came up, and it turned out to be a lot of other personalities involved.

As writers, you don’t have that much control in movies.

Joan Didion: You don’t on a movie, no. Never.

There are so many different aspects of California life in that era that come up in your writings. One that stands out is the Manson murders and how they jolted the town from its previous state of self-satisfaction or complacency. Could you tell us about that?

Joan Didion: What struck me about the Manson murders was how at the moment they happened, it seemed as if they were inevitable. It seemed as if we had been moving toward that moment for about a year.

There were a lot of rumors about stuff, a lot of stuff going on around town, which you would kind of hear about on the edges of your mind and not want to know any more about. After the fact, it was kind of amazing to see how many lives had intersected with the Manson Family’s. I can remember we had a babysitter from Nayarit then, and she was very frightened on the night of the murders, or the afternoon when we heard about the murders, and I assured her, “Don’t worry. It has nothing to do with us,” but it did. It had to do with everyone. Then later I was interviewing Linda Kasabian, who was the wheel person — she wasn’t the “wheel man,” she was the “wheel person” — for the LaBianca murder. I can’t remember. Maybe also for Tate. But anyway, the night they did the LaBianca murder, they were driving along Franklin Avenue looking for a place to hit, and that’s where we lived, and we had French windows open, lights blazing all along on the street.

• 19 photos

Joan Didion: Her Books, Life, and Legacy

A woman with a love for the written word, and a dedication to the truth.

Joan Didion, renowned novelist and essayist, was most often revered for her crisp prose and bold, unapologetic depictions of social issues. She penned five fiction novels, published thirteen nonfiction essay collections, had six screenplays produced, and wrote a play based on one of her books for a Broadway stage. Her journalistic roots gave her a firm and acutely authoritative voice, which has made her one of the most influential writers of her generation and a cultural legend. She passed away on December 23, 2021 at the age of 87, having succumbed to her battle with Parkinson's.

Joan Didion was born in Sacramento in 1934 and grew up in California, reading every book she could get her hands on. While getting her degree in English from the University of California, Berkeley, she entered an essay contest sponsored by Vogue . She won the contest and was awarded a research assistant job at Vogue’s office in New York City. 

Didion remained at Vogue for more than 10 years. During that time she worked her way up to the role of associate features editor, wrote for an array of other magazines and published her first novel in 1963, Run River .

Shortly after the publication of her novel, Didion married her editor—John Gregory Dunne—who was then a writer for Time magazine. The pair packed up and moved to Los Angeles, where a temporary stay became permanent. In 1966 the couple had the joy of adopting their daughter, Quintana Roo Dunne.

In 1968, Didion published her first nonfiction work, Slouching Towards Bethlehem. These essays center around her time in California, from her childhood in Sacramento to the wild counterculture of San Francisco. Didion’s revolutionary writing encapsulated the West Coast in the 1960s. Vivid and and brilliant, the essay collection propelled her forward into notoriety.

Related: Slouching Towards Bethlehem : Joan Didion on 1960s Subculture

Didion returned to fiction writing for her next work, Play It as It Lays , published two years later in 1970. This novel follows the Hollywood life of small-time actress Maria Wyeth. Readers first meet Maria as she recovers from a mental breakdown, but the plot is intercut with flashbacks to the path that led her there. 

From Maria’s girlhood in Nevada to her drug-laden and sexually unsatisfying present, Didion’s work puts a spotlight on the self-destructive and vapid qualities that tend to persist in Hollywood. 

Related: Joan Didion’s Play It as It Lays : The Dark Heart of the American Dream

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It wasn’t until nine years later that Didion published another nonfiction essay collection. The White Album opens with an essay that gives a deep insight into Didion’s personal life, detailing the anxiety and depression that she has struggled with. She refers to a specific incident in the summer of 1968, in which she had a nervous breakdown. A psychiatric evaluation declared she had suffered an attack of vertigo, but she received a more striking blow with the news that she had been diagnosed with multiple sclerosis.

Her essays go on to explore icons in the cultural landscape of the time. “Good Citizens” introduces readers to Nancy Reagan, while other works explore the Manson cult. Keen and precise, Didion’s essays are an invaluable snapshot of their time.

Related: The 19 Books That Changed Joan Didion’s Life

Later, in 1987, Didion published Miami , which is a social and political look at the Cuban expatriates who came to live in the Florida city. Regarded as one of her darkest collections, Didion reported upon the violence and dashed hopes set upon Cuban immigrants. She launches into details of Cuban history, alongside the effect of the Kennedy assassination and the Watergate scandal. She unflinchingly tackled America’s foreign policy, putting it under the microscope right next to the racial tensions overflowing on American soil.

In 1991, Didion was one of the first to speak out against the trial of the Central Park Five . She regarded the guilty verdict to be a gross miscarriage of justice, and attributed it to a racial bias within the court system. With a critical eye, Didion dismantled the flaws within the prosecution’s case. While the Central Park Five would not see release or settlement until 2002, Didion put something vital into words—the media capitalizes on fear, and fear will bend the truth, even in courtrooms.

Related: 24 Joan Didion Quotes that Strike a Nerve

The following year, Didion published After Henry . This book includes twelve geographical essays, as well as a personal tribute to the late Henry Robbins, who had been her editor and close friend for thirteen years. This collection tackles topics such as the founders of the Los Angeles Times and the Reagan administration. “Sentimental Journeys,” the essay about the aforementioned Central Park Five, is also included.

In 1996, Didion published another fiction novel: this time, a political thriller called The Last Thing He Wanted . In 2020, this became a Netflix-produced movie starring Anne Hathaway, Ben Affleck and Willem Dafoe.

In the early 2000s a series of tragedies befell Didion. Her daughter Quintana fell into a coma after a bout of septic shock, and while she lay in the ICU Didion’s husband suffered a fatal heart attack. Didion delayed the funeral until Quintana was well enough to attend, but after the funeral service Quintana acquired a head injury and suffered a massive hematoma. After six hours of surgery and a long recovery, Quintana died from unrelated pancreatitis in 2005. 

Before her daughter had passed, Didion worked through her feelings about her husband’s death and Quintana’s illness in the memoir The Year of Magical Thinking . The heart-wrenching book was well received, and won the National Book Award in Nonfiction.

Didion later wrote about her daughter’s death in Blue Nights , which she published in 2011. This work is chillingly honest and personal. She reflects not only on her own childhood, but on the part she played in her daughter’s too short life. Profoundly diving into her own fears and doubts, Didion’s work boldly paints a portrait of the human condition.

In October of 2017, a documentary profiling Didion was released on Netflix. The film, The Center Will Not Hold , was directed by Griffin Dunne, her nephew. The scope of the documentary covers both her work and her personal life, and aside from interviews with the woman herself, archival footage is also incorporated.

Related: Get Ready for a Joan Didion Documentary

The Center Will Not Hold

• Photo Credit: Netflix

Over the last two decades, Didion’s work has continued to be recognized. In 2005 she won the American Academy of Arts and Letters Gold Medal in Criticism and Belles Lettres. In 2013, President Obama awarded her the National Medal of Arts and Humanities. And while she is well-deserving of the accolades lining her shelves, Joan Didion’s accomplishments are actually far greater: she has had an immeasurable impact on journalism and writing, and given a voice to communities that would have otherwise been overlooked.

Featured photo: Sneha Girap/ Alchetron ; Additional photos: Nisha Rathode/ Alchetron ; Still from "The Center Will Not Hold" courtesy of Netflix

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“To Be A Writer, You Must Write”: How Joan Didion Became Joan Didion

Evelyn mcdonnell on the writing process of one of america's leading literary ladies.

Joan Didion looks straight at the camera, with her fist curled in front of her mouth—as if to indicate it is through her hands that the taciturn thinker speaks. Appropriately, a manual typewriter takes up half the frame in this iconic black-and-white photo taken by Nancy Ellison in 1976.

When she was a teenager, Didion taught herself to type and to write by pecking out stories by Ernest Hemingway and Joseph Conrad on an Olivetti Lettera 22. Her goal: “To learn how the sentences worked,” she told the Paris Review . Thus began her immersion in the physical act as well as the craft of writing. Call it a form of machine learning. “I’m only myself in front of my typewriter,” Didion once told an editor at Ms. magazine.

At some point her father, in one of his random financial schemes, bought a load of Royal 200 typewriters, one of which became Didion’s accomplice. She took it with her everywhere. A typewriter is included in the carry-on items in the packing list she published in The White Album . Her idea was not to write on the plane, but while she waited in the airport, she would sit “and start typing the day’s notes.” This is one of many instructive lessons offered by Joan Didion. She must have hauled a typewriter with her in 1955, when, at age twenty, she took a train alone from Boston back to Sacramento, after a month spent in Mademoiselle ’s guest editor program. She typed multiple letters to her Mademoiselle colleague and college friend Peggy LaViolette on hotel stationery along the way. “Never being one to throw myself wholeheartedly into Adventure, I carefully got a seat alone, barricaded myself in with wicker basket, typewriter, mangled copies of old magazines and thought I could sleep all night,” she typed in one missive.

Many writers become so attached to a physical process that changing tools with the times is not easy; some never manage it. Neil Gaiman, the futurist, has said he prefers to write his novels in longhand. I still print out my writing and edit it on paper, a routine I was chuffed to hear Didion recommend to Hilton Als in an interview late in her life. Over the decades Didion graduated from notebook to manual typewriter to electric typewriter to computer, again demonstrating her openness to progress. Still, she did complain to author Maxine Hong Kingston about the transition to electric in a 1978 letter, saying that combined with moving and quitting smoking, the “reprogramming…had caused an inordinate amount of stress.” She switched to a computer in 1987 and eventually came to love the editing capabilities of word processing programs. “It did for me what geometry was supposed to have done,” she said.

Writers are prone to obsessive interest in other writers’ processes. We write because we are readers, and we read, in part, to see how others write. Didion was a bookworm. When she wasn’t sitting on the fender of her car, she was far from the snakes at the Sacramento library on a Friday night with her friend Maurice, or maybe her gal pal Nancy Kennedy (whose brother Anthony later became a Supreme Court justice and spoke at Joan’s memorial). Photos and videos document her various homes stacked floor to ceiling with books. Among the items sold at auction by her estate in 2022 were Didion’s collections of works by George Orwell, Elizabeth Hardwick, Joyce Carol Oates, and Norman Mailer.

Joan was an avid consumer of culture in general, with broad interests that did not divide art into high and low: She named one anthology after a Yeats poem, another after a Beatles album. Writer and friend Calvin Trillin called her Brentwood home “the West Coast literary consulate,” but she and Dunne largely financed it with Hollywood hack work. She loved biker films, interviewed Jim Morrison for the Saturday Evening Post and Joan Baez for the New York Times , wrote an important essay about Georgia O’Keeffe, and was close friends with writer and artist Eve Babitz ( Slow Days, Fast Company ) and writer and screenwriter Nora Ephron ( When Harry Met Sally ).

There’s a 1971 interview with Joan on YouTube, posted by the Center for Sacramento History. Some of the audio is missing, but the footage of Didion in her office in her Franklin Avenue house is, well, pure gold. She’s wearing a brown flared miniskirt and a black V-neck shirt that fastens in the back. She has tucked her shoulder-length strawberry blond hair behind her ears, as she did, and freckles dot her cheeks. She’s talking about growing up in rural environments; her Valley accent is strong. I’m not talking San Fernando Valley here; I’m talking the almost southern twang of the Central Valley, that Didion said she picked up from the many refugees from the Oklahoma dust bowl with whom she went to school. This is how Didion spoke: not with the English accent of Vanessa Redgrave, who portrayed her in the stage version of The Year of Magical Thinking , or the crisp patrician consonants of Barbara Caruso, who reads the audiobook of that text, but like a freckle-faced country girl. The camera pans across shelves full of books and books piled on the desk, lingering on volumes written by Didion and Dunne. Joan snips an article out of a newspaper in front of a cabinet of haphazardly placed manila folders, presumably full of other clippings. She’s talking about worrying herself sick about a comma being out of place while admitting she doesn’t have the same fastidious approach to her housekeeping. (This is the secret life of women writers: We can’t be good mothers, wives, daughters, writers, cooks, and housekeepers.) She sits on a black leather couch with leopard-print pillows, smoking a cigarette and reading a paperback that’s open on her lap.

“I like words and I’m very excited by seeing what can be done with words,” she says. “ Play It a s It Lays is a very short novel. I worked on it for five years but when I finished it, I thought every word was exactly right. Now I can’t even read it because words pop out at me, or sentences that I think ought to be changed.”

Didion once told a participant in a writing seminar that to get through writer’s block, you had to write one sentence, and then another, and then another.

To be a writer, you must write.

__________________________________

Excerpted from The World According to Joan Didion by Evelyn McDonnell. Copyright © 2023. Reprinted with permission from HarperOne, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers.

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Carrie Fisher's Favorite Books Were A Testament To Her Wit

C arrie Fisher was a voracious reader and the author of several books including "Wishful Drinking" and "Postcards from the Edge." The legend was known primarily as an actor, most famously for her role as Princess Leia in the original "Star Wars" films, but she was also a literary person ever since her childhood. In fact, in many interviews throughout her life before she died in 2016, Fisher spoke about reading and writing with as much energy as she spoke about performing.

In a conversation with the Los Angeles Times in 2008, Fisher talked about her early life as a reader. "I started reading really early. I wanted to impress my father [Eddie Fisher], who is unimpressable," Fisher began. "For whatever reason, he may have given me the 'Drunken Boat' by Rimbaud ... reading was my first drug. I would just go into these books and never surface until it was over. My family called me 'the bookworm,' and they didn't say it in a nice way. I fell in love with words." Fisher obviously connected with writing and reading, and throughout her life, literature served as a meaningful outlet. In 2008, she spoke to The Week about her favorite books, and why she loved them so much, and since Fisher's such a devoted reader, we had to check them out. 

Read more: 22 Celebrities Who Are Unapologetically Childless By Choice (And We Love Them For It)

Carrie Fisher Felt That George Eliot's 'Middlemarch' Was 'One Of The Greatest Books Ever Written'

Carrie Fisher told The Week that she loved George Eliot's 1871 novel "Middlemarch." Eliot, whose real name was Mary Ann Evans, went by a pseudonym because she felt that male authors were treated with more credibility than their female counterparts. But this gumption and creativity were part of the reason that Fisher loved the novel so much. "One of the greatest books ever written by a woman, especially in those early days," the "Star Wars" lead explained. "Although Mary Anne Evans gave herself a male pen name, she showed incredible ambition and scope in her writing — the world she created, the characters she imagined. I love that line in the book that reads: 'The really delightful marriage must be that where your husband was a sort of father, and could teach you Hebrew, if you wished it.' It was hard to be a woman in those days, but her storytelling was exceptional."

It's no light read, and reviewers on Goodreads noted its length, but, like Fisher, how much they loved it. "Middlemarch is a behemoth book at almost 1000 pages," one reviewer began, "but it's a book that grows with you." While the reading process is lengthy, fans felt it was worthwhile. "I conquered the biggest tome for this year. And I loved it," another wrote . It's one of the great English novels.

David Sedaris' 'Naked' Was 'One Of The Funniest Books' Fisher Had Ever Read

Carrie Fisher was a huge fan of American author and humorist David Sedaris, particularly his 1997 collection of essays "Naked." She told The Week why she enjoyed the nonfiction book so much. "This collection of personal essays made me laugh as hard as any book I've ever read," Fisher explained. "I also discovered that I needed glasses when reading this, but still it's one of the funniest books ever."

The Goodreads community, like Fisher, raves about Sedaris's book. "David Sedaris's biting, hilarious memoir about his family and his teenage years made me laugh out loud," one reviewer began. "Not your typical, chuckle to yourself on the bus laugh, no, Sedaris made me guffaw as he recounted his [first] job working at a mall cafeteria, and when his sister first got her period." People reported unanimously that they couldn't contain their laughing fits when reading Sedaris. "Laugh out loud reading... great tales about an interesting family from one of the funniest essayists around... thank you NPR for turning me on to David Sedaris!" another reviewer wrote. Clearly, this Fisher-endorsed book is a quality read.

Joan Didion's 'Play It As It Lays' Influenced Fisher's Own Writing Style

Joan Didion's 1970 novel "Play It as It Lays" made it onto Carrie Fisher's list. While Didion was best known for her style of writing known as New Journalism, her novels are timeless. "I love her use of spare narrative throughout this story about an unfulfilled actress looking for purpose in her life," Fisher told The Week . "I admired the style then and have tried to pattern some of my own writing in that fashion."

The novel made a mark on several Goodreads fans as well, but it's no light read. "Gambling, domestic violence, sexual abuse, drugs, alcohol, promiscuity, insanity, depression, snakes, suicide," a reviewer began. "These are all elements of 'Play It As It Lays,' and much, much more. This is stark, wide-eyed, slap in the face prose that grabs the reader and holds you from beginning to end." Another reviewer spoke about the alluring challenge of the book. "This is a cruel book populated by cruel characters whose hearts, for the most part, stay cold and brutish even in the desert's blistering heat," they wrote . "I have enjoyed Didion's essays, so I was expecting some of the themes, but I had not prepared myself for something so delirious and fragmented." Despite the dark themes of the novel, many readers called it a masterpiece and admitted, like Fisher, that Didion shaped their own literary voices. Singer Lorde counted Didion among her most influential authors too .

Carrie Fisher Enjoyed 'My Old Sweetheart' By Susanna Moore Because Of Her Relationship With Her Mother

Carrie Fisher was a fan of Susanna Moore's 1982 novel "My Old Sweetheart." The novel deals with layered family dynamics, something that seems universally appealing to readers. In fact, in Taylor Swift's top five books, she lists several books that deal with complex family relationships , proving that it's a successful theme for a gripping read. For Fisher, Moore's novel appealed to her because of the mother/daughter dynamic. "She's an extremely talented writer," Fisher told The Week . "Her first novel, set in the 1950s, is about a woman who grew up with a very eccentric mother, which, of course, is why I related to it." Fisher spoke of her own challenging relationship with her mother, Debbie Reynolds. While the two eventually became close, Fisher didn't speak to Reynolds for close to ten years.

It was the fraught familial relationship that drew Fisher to Moore's iconic book. "This book is a marvelous novel set in Hawaii about a twisted, co-dependent mother/daughter relationship," a reviewer began on Goodreads . "A young woman looks at her childhood and her mother's intoxicating beauty and suffocating need in the hopes of trying to understand the past and not duplicate the same unhealthy relationship with her own daughter." While it's a complex read, "My Old Sweetheart" drew readers in and did not disappoint.

Fisher Felt That Finishing Marcel Proust's 'Swann's Way' Was An Achievement

French author Marcel Proust wrote a seven-part novel called "In Search of Lost Time." The epic work was actually fashioned from Proust's own memories, and the publication spanned from 1913 to 1927. The first book in this collection is "Swann's Way," or "Du côté de chez Swann," as it was originally published in French. For Carrie Fisher, simply reading this enormous first book was an accomplishment. "I'm also showing off that I've actually gotten through 'Swann's Way' , the first volume in Proust's monumental work 'In Search of Lost Time . ' Just getting through those first 100 pages, where he could not fall asleep until his mother kissed him good night, was an achievement alone," she told The Week .

Despite the marathon-like read expected of devoted fans, reviewers on Goodreads were positive about Proust's first novel. "I know it is impossible for me to write a proper review for Proust," one person began. "I can only bow my head in front of his genius and be awed by his writing. That's because you have to be a magician of words to pull off a 600-page novel where nothing happens and the reader is glued to the page, wanting more." Another fan wrote , "My goodness, Proust could write." Clearly, Fisher isn't the only one who saw the gem of Proust's work, and enjoyed the bragging rights that came with finishing his saga.

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‘Dear Layla’: Letters for Sale From a Rock Music Love Triangle

Eric Clapton’s handwritten messages, being auctioned this week, shed light on how he wooed Pattie Boyd away from George Harrison and on the impassioned songs the affair inspired.

By Alex Marshall

Reporting from London

One spring morning in 1970, the model Pattie Boyd was having breakfast at her ramshackle mansion in the English countryside when she received a letter marked “Urgent.”

Inside the envelope was a short, lovesick note. “Dearest L,” the letter began, adding later, “It seems like an eternity since I last saw or spoke to you!” As Boyd read on, the note took on a desperate tone: “If there is still a feeling in your heart for me … you must let me know!”

“Don’t telephone,” the emotional scribe added. “Send a letter … that is much safer.”

The author signed off with a mysterious “E.”

In a recent interview, Boyd recalled that she had assumed the letter was from a crazed fan and showed it to her husband, the Beatles guitarist George Harrison . Then she forgot about it — until a few hours later when the phone rang. It was Eric Clapton, the rock guitarist and one of Harrison’s friends.

“Did you get my letter?” Clapton asked.

More than 50 years after Clapton’s missive drew Boyd into one of rock music’s most mythic love triangles, the note is getting a moment in the spotlight. On Friday, Christie’s is auctioning over 110 items from Boyd’s archives, including the letter (with an estimated price of up to 15,000 pounds, or about $19,000), as well as photographs of Clapton and Harrison and handwritten song lyrics by both the rock greats.

Boyd said she was parting with the intimate correspondence because she had moved on from that part of her life. “Eric wrote the most divine, beautiful letters, and I don’t want to keep reading them,” Boyd said. “It hurts.”

After receiving Clapton’s phone call, Boyd said that she didn’t know whether to feel “joyous or guilty” for having caught his attention. Frustrated in her marriage — with Harrison increasingly preoccupied by the Beatles’ breakup — Boyd said she couldn’t choose between the two men. “My astrological sign is Pisces, which is fishes swimming in different directions,” Boyd said. “Making up my mind on these major decisions is always hell.”

Clapton pursued Boyd further, in person, letter and song. Boyd recalled that he invited her to a London apartment where he played her a song he had written about a man obsessed with a woman who keeps refusing his advances. It was “Layla,” which became one of the great love songs of the 1970s.

“I just knew — knew, knew! — it was about me,” Boyd recalled of the moment she first heard “Layla.”

“I went hot and cold because it was beautiful, so intense and amazing,” she said. “At the same time, the old Pisces in me thought, ‘Oh, my God, if George hears this he’s going to realize it’s about me.’” (The Christie’s sale includes a painting used as the cover art for Derek and the Dominos’ 1970 album “Layla and Other Assorted Love Songs.”)

Clapton declined an interview request for this article, but in a 2007 interview with The New York Times , he said that, although he was infatuated with Boyd, “Layla” wasn’t a documentary. “Creating a song is just putting a stamp on a feeling,” he said.

Boyd described her relationship with Clapton as “a fling” but said that she felt “morally bound to remain a married woman.” Her mother had divorced twice, she added. “I saw how destructive it was for her, and so I didn’t want to repeat history.”

Soon after the two became involved, Clapton disappeared into heroin addiction. But he wrote again to Boyd in 1971, when he sent her a letter written on a page torn from John Steinbeck’s novel “Of Mice and Men.”

“I am at the end of my mind,” he wrote in neat cursive. “If you don’t want me, please break the spell that binds me.”

“To cage a wild animal is a sin,” Clapton wrote, “to tame him is divine.”

That letter is also in the Christie’s sale , with an estimated price around $19,000.

Among other correspondence in the auction is a 1971 letter that Harrison sent Boyd from New York, where the Beatle had several business meetings and ate “many” grilled cheese sandwiches, he wrote. Boyd said Harrison always told her he loved her in letters and postcards, but he often focused on the irritations of life on the road. They were “proper letters,” Boyd said, “whereas Eric’s had nothing to do with the day, or what he was doing in the studio. He was just intense.”

Harrison was aware of his friend’s feelings for Boyd. In her memoir, “Wonderful Tonight,” Boyd recalls a party at which Clapton said to Harrison, “I have to tell you, man, that I’m in love with your wife.” Yet the men never came to blows. For musicians, Boyd said, “rivalry is played out via a guitar.”

Eventually, Boyd succumbed to Clapton’s charm. In July 1974, she left Harrison. A week later, Clapton called and asked her to join him on tour, a call that led to a 10-year marriage and another classic song. In 1976, Clapton wrote “ Wonderful Tonight ” while waiting for Boyd to choose a party outfit.

“When I finally made my decision and came downstairs, I expected Eric to be pissed off with me for taking so long,” Boyd said. “Instead he said, ‘Listen to what I’ve written.’”

In an era when many artists write their lyrics, let alone their love letters, on smartphones, Adrian Hume-Sayer, the director of specialist sales at Christie’s, said that he expected there to be fewer sales of such intimate correspondence. It was also rare for a love triangle to “be at the center of such creativity,” he said.

Boyd also seemed aware of how much times had changed. “There was more romance years ago,” she said.

“I’m sure people do romantic things now,” she added, “but I can’t imagine what they are. If you know, please tell me.”

Alex Marshall is a Times reporter covering European culture. He is based in London. More about Alex Marshall

Up for Bids

Photographs. unforgettable outfits. whole estates. here’s a look at some of the most talked-about auctions of memorabilia..

Neil Gaiman: The author decided to auction more than 100 collectibles and donate some of the proceeds to charity. In an interview, Gaiman pointed to some highlights .

‘The Crown’: In February, the auction house Bonhams offered hundreds of costumes and props from the show about the British royal family. These were some of the key lots .

Elton John:  The superstar’s former residence in Atlanta has been emptied for a series of auctions . The collection has it all: art, dinnerware and flamboyant costumes .

‘Succession’:  Bidding on memorabilia from the popular HBO drama at an auction house in Dallas drew over $600,000 in sales .

Prince:  The market for the singer’s wardrobe and other items has been robust since his death. In November, more than 200 pieces became available for bids .

Joan Didion:  Hundreds of the writer’s furnishings and personal items were sold at auction in 2022, offering fans the opportunity to acquire a piece of her legacy .