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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.

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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).

"Slouching Towards Bethlehem," by Joan Didion

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.

Joan Didion, wearing a white shirt, stands in the hallway of her apartment, next to a portrait of her late husband

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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 Year of Magical Thinking," by Joan Didion

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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7 Best Joan Didion Books You Need To Read Before You Die

Known for her extensive observations of different American subcultures, and her explicit writing on issues surrounding the disintegration of American morals and cultural chaos, award-winning journalist and writer Joan Didion has left an indelible mark on literary journalism as she was revered for her unique ability to capture American life. Her work has received extensive recognition over the years, including the National Book Award for Nonfiction in 2015, the Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters from the National Book Foundation in 2007, and the National Medal of Arts from the United States government, among many others.

The Sacramento, California native, who graduated from the University of California, Berkeley with a Bachelor of Arts degree in English in 1956, began her career with Vogue after having won the “Prix de Paris” essay contest sponsored by the magazine in her senior year. She started off as a promotional copywriter before moving up to become an associate feature editor.

While still with Vogue, Joan Didion wrote her first novel titled Run, River (1963) with the help of her future husband, John Gregory Dunne, who was writing for Time magazine at the time. A few years later, Didion published her first non-fiction work, kicking off what can only be described as a brilliant writing career.

The American journalist and author Joan Didion has died at her home in Manhattan, New York on Thursday, 23 December 2021. She was 87 years old.

Here is our selection of the seven best writings by Didion that we believe everyone should read at least once in their lifetime.

7 Best Joan Didion Books

1. Slouching Towards Bethlehem (1968)

Slouching Towards Bethlehem is the first non-fiction book written by Joan Didion. It features a collection of essays about the writer’s experiences in California during the 1960s. Some of these experiences include meeting a 5-year-old girl whose mother always gave LSD and a neglected young boy who nearly sets his house on fire.

2. The Year of Magical Thinking (2005)

Described as a classic book about mourning and one of the most intimate looks into the life of Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking is a memoir that recounts the year following the death of the writer’s husband, John Gregory Dunne. The book received rave reviews and won the 2005 National Book Award for Nonfiction. It was further a finalist for both the Pulitzer Prize for Biography/Autobiography and the National Book Critics Circle Award.

3. The White Album (1979)

The White Album is another collection of essays by Didion that is also based around the events in California. It specifically centers around the history and politics of the state in the late ’60s and early ’70s. Most of the essays that appeared in the book had previously been published in magazines like Life, Esquire, The Saturday Evening Post, The New York Times, and The New York Review of Books.

4. Play It as It Lays (1970)

Undoubtedly one of the most popular works of fiction, Didion’s Play It as It Lays paints a ruthlessly true picture of American life in the late 1960s. Such was the impact of the book that it was adapted into a movie of the same name two years after it was published. Time magazine has also since included the novel among the 100 Best English-language Novels from 1923 to 2005.

5. South and West (2017)

Fans of Joan Didion know that the writer has all her life kept in notebooks of observations, overheard dialogue, interviews, drafts of essays and articles. To put together this non-fiction book, she opens her notebook to recount a road trip that she and her husband, John Gregory Dunne, took through the Southeastern United States; Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama in the 1970s.

6. Blue Nights (2011)

Another book similar to The Year of Magical Thinking where Didion mourns the loss of a family member, Blue Nights gives an account of the death of the writer’s daughter, Quintana Roo Dunne. She further explores her feelings on parenthood and aging using a conventional narrative path.

7. After Henry (1992)

After Henry, which was named in honor of her late friend and former editor, Henry Robbins, is a compilation of essays she wrote after his death that appeared in various publications. The book delves into various aspects of American life in the 1980s, from the racial battlefields of New York’s criminal courts to interpretations of the stories of Nancy Reagan and Patty Hearst.

About The Author Joan Didion and How She Died?

Joan Didion was an eminent journalist, author, and anthropologist of contemporary American politics and culture popularly known for her lucid prose style and incisive depictions of social unrest and psychological fragmentation. Joan Didion died at her home in Manhattan, New York on Thursday, 23 December 2021. She was 87 years old.

The cause of death was Parkinson’s disease, according to Paul Bogaards, an executive at Didion’s publisher Knopf.

Prior to her death, Didion was a leading figure of the New Journalism movement in the 1960s and ’70s. Among many of her several awards were:

The National Book Foundation’s Medal of Distinguished Contribution to American Letters in 2007
The American Academy of Arts and Letters Gold Medal in Belles Letters and Criticism in 2005
The National Medal of Arts and Humanities awarded to her by former President Barack Obama in 2013
In 1981, Didion was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters
The Edward MacDowell Medal in 1996

This article has been updated with additional details about Didion’s life and death.

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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)

Joan Didion Speaks At The College Of Marin

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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6 Essays By Joan Didion...

6 Essays By Joan Didion You Should Know

Joan Didion is lauded as one of the best literary journalists to emerge from the New Journalism school in the ’60s, among Tom Wolfe , Terry Southern and Hunter S. Thompson, and one of California’s wittiest contemporary writers . Best known for her sharply reported stories that service frequently dystopian and despondent cultural commentary, even Didion’s more journalistic works are in part personal essay. It’s precisely her authorial presence that lends credence, honesty and depth to her work. Her subjectivity makes her observations all the more resonant, and in a way, more accurate too. Here’s a look at some of the California writer’s greatest hits.

‘some dreamers of the golden dream’.

‘This is a story about love and death in the golden land, and begins with the country,’ the essay begins. Making good on her promise, this piece reports a lascivious tale of adultery and murder in San Bernardino County in 1966. In true Didion form, however, atmosphere and place play characters just as important as the perpetrators and, in that way, this piece is about much more than the details of a single crime.

‘John Wayne: A Love Song’

Though this essay presents itself as an ode the great American frontiersman of the silver screen, it charts a loss of innocence – personal, though perhaps also cultural – against Wayne’s larger than life persona . ‘In a world we understand early to be characterized by venality and doubt and paralyzing ambiguities, he suggested another world… a place where a man could move free, could make his own code and live by it.’

‘On Keeping a Notebook’

Having kept a notebook from the age of five, Didion considers the compulsion to capture our lives. She writes, ‘however dutifully we record what we see around us, the common denominator of all we see is always, transparently, shamelessly, the implacable ‘I.” This observation seems especially fitting for a writer who candidly reports through the filter of the self.

Cover for Joan Didion’s Slouching Towards Bethlehem

‘On Self Respect’

This philosophical musing pays homage to the wrestling with the self that perhaps writers know best. It was first published in Vogue magazine in 1961, where it can be found in its original form . ‘To assign unanswered letters their proper weight, to free us from the expectations of others, to give us back to ourselves – there lies the great, the singular power of self-respect.’

‘The Santa Ana’

Didion calls upon the eerie desert mythology of the Santa Anas, the wicked winds that brings a tangible unease and tension to Los Angeles whenever they blow through the city. In this essay, LA is not always sunny as it’s so often portrayed. In this strange ode to place, Didion writes, ‘the violence and the unpredictability of the Santa Ana affect the entire quality of life in Los Angeles, accentuate its impermanence, its unreliability. The winds shows us how close to the edge we are.’

‘Goodbye to All That’

In one of Didion’s most known essays, she recounts a love affair with New York City that calls upon the city’s deeply arresting aura with delicious turns of phrase: ‘I would stay in New York, I told him, just six months, and I could see the Brooklyn Bridge from my window. As it turned out the bridge was the Triborough, and I stayed eight years.’

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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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“Syntax and sensibility: Nobody wed them quite like Joan Didion,” says New York Times columnist Frank Bruni , in a profession of love to Joan and her unusually placed prepositional phrases.

Nobody does anything quite like Joan Didion. The way she almost unsentimentally audits death and memory. The way she waves a bony index finger, more knowing than yours. The way she, without judgment, sets the scene of a five-year-old named Susan on LSD in the height of San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury hippie culture.

She’s fearless, she’s cool as hell, she’s thisbig and could paper-cut you to death page-by-page with any one of her masterpieces.

Where do you start with her repertoire? She’s done it all: fiction, essays, political commentaries, memoirs, journalistic pieces and just about everything in between. Joan, now 83, has never not been relevant, but she’s in the headlines again these days, as Netflix recently debuted the long-awaited Joan Didion: The Center Will Not Hold , a documentary-slash-love-letter made by her nephew, Griffin Dunne. (Yes, son of Dominick Dunne, Hollywood legend.)

Have you cozied up and clicked play on The Center Will Not Hold already? Great. Either way, let’s use this occasion to revisit Joan the Great, or Our Mother of Sorrows, as Vanity Fair once begrudgingly called her.

Below are some of Joan’s essential readings, though really, every subject paired with a predicate strung together by Joan is essential. W hether you’re picking up The Year of Magical Thinking for the first time (what’s your address? I’ll send you tissues) or you’re paging through Slouching Towards Bethlehem again , scrounging for the meaning of life for the umpteenth time, happy reading.

The Year of Magical Thinking (2005) Don’t lie down while reading The Year of Magical Thinking , or you’ll choke on your tears.

The title refers to the psychological and anthropological phrase – cross your fingers enough and you’ll avoid the inevitable – though it may as well been called The Year of Joan Didn’t Deserve or The Year You Wouldn’t Wish Upon the Devil , as it tiptoes along the time following the death of Joan’s husband, fellow writer John Gregory Dunne, which coincided with the hospitalization of her beloved daughter Quintana Roo. The seemingly small scenes make your heart hurt the most. Like when Joan, shortly after John’s death, stares into his closet, remarking that she can’t give his things away – what if John comes back for them? It’s raw, it’s brave, it’s beautiful. It’ll ruin you and wreck you and rebuild you.

The Year of Magical Thinking is a seminal book on grief and bereavement and it’s simply a must read for any thinking, feeling human being. No wonder it won the 2005 National Book Award for Nonfiction and was a finalist for both the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Pulitzer Prize.

“Life changes in the instant. The ordinary instant. You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends.”

“I know why we try to keep the dead alive: we try to keep them alive in order to keep them with us. I also know that if we are to live ourselves there comes a point at which we must relinquish the dead, let them go, keep them dead.”

“We were not having any fun, he had recently begun pointing out. I would take exception (didn’t we do this, didn’t we do that) but I had also known what he meant. He meant doing things not because we were expected to do them or had always done them or should do them but because we wanted to do them. He meant wanting. He meant living.”

On Self-Respect (1961) Joan first proved her astute skills in Vogue , in 1961, with the publishing of On Self-Respect (which you can also find in Slouching Towards Bethlehem ). New to the Vogue staff, Joan was given the opportunity to write the essay after another writer assigned to the piece failed to follow through. The title was already placed as a headline on the cover, so Joan swept in and wrote her first major piece – elegant and critical and thoughtful – not only to an exact word count, to place into the layout, but to an exact character count. She’s been flexing her power, letter by letter, ever since.

Read it in full here .

“Once, in a dry season, I wrote in large letters across two pages of a notebook that innocence ends when one is stripped of the delusion that one likes oneself.”

“Self-respect is something that our grandparents, whether or not they had it, knew all about. They had instilled in them, young, a certain discipline, the sense that one lives by doing things one does not particularly want to do, by putting fears and doubts to one side, by weighing immediate comforts against the possibility of larger, even intangible, comforts.”

Goodbye to All That (1967) Joan set the standard for “New York, I love you, but I must leave you” essays, now floating around every book and blog, with Goodbye to All That in 1967. I could list a dozen essays (I’ll spare you) that trample over the trope, the New York love affair gone wrong arc. Joan did it first. She wrote about her love/hate/love relationship with the city, how it gave her life and then took that life. “It is easy to see the beginnings of things, and harder to see the ends. I can remember now, with a clarity that makes the nerves in the back of my neck constrict, when New York began for me, but I cannot lay my finger upon the moment it ended, can never cut through the ambiguities and second starts and broken resolves to the exact place on the page where the heroine is no longer as optimistic as she once was.” “ I was in love with New York. I do not mean ‘love’ in any colloquial way, I mean that I was in love with the city, the way you love the first person who ever touches you and you never love anyone quite that way again.”

Slouching Towards Bethlehem (1968) Perhaps Joan’s most renowned series of essays, Slouching Towards Bethlehem now acts as a time capsule for a life and time many of us never lived yet sometimes dream about. With a few exceptions, most of the essays are set in California in the ’60s, giving a vivid vibe of life then+there – including mass murders, kidnapped heiresses and the explosion of American counterculture.

That five-year-old named Susan, the one on LSD? You’ll find her in the titular essay, a famous piece about the sex-and-drug-filled Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco in the ’60s. Susan is the center of the disturbing passage, as well as the most chilling scene of The Center Will Not Hold . While discussing Goodbye , Joan – then a mother to a young girl herself – is asked what it was like to find the kindergartener high.

After a long pause, waving her arm about, she says simply, with a slight smile, “It was gold.” That’s the audacious Joan, the one who could immerse herself into any culture without judgment and the one who knows a journalistic goldmine when she finds it, the one we know, we love.

The entire book is a classic collection of journalism and includes a few of the essays mentioned above: Goodbye to All That and On Self-Respect . Perhaps my favorite piece though is O n Keeping a Notebook . (At least today it is. Ask again tomorrow.)

“I think we are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not. Otherwise they turn up unannounced and surprise us, come hammering on the mind’s door at 4 a.m. of a bad night and demand to know who deserted them, who betrayed them, who is going to make amends. We forget all too soon the things we thought we could never forget. We forget the loves and the betrayals alike, forget what we whispered and what we screamed, forget who we were.”

The White Album (1979) If Slouching Towards Bethlehem didn’t earn Joan the title of California’s most prominent voice, her 1979 collection of essays, The White Album , did. The New York Times review of The White Album , after claiming “California belongs to Joan Didion,” just as Kilimanjaro belongs to Ernest Hemingway and Oxford, Mississippi belongs to William Faulkner, says, “Joan Didion’s California is a place defined not so much by what her unwavering eye observes, but by what her memory cannot let go.”

Her memories are worth a read.

“ We tell ourselves stories in order to live…We look for the sermon in the suicide, for the social or moral lesson in the murder of five. We interpret what we see, select the most workable of the multiple choices.”

“I suppose everything had changed and nothing had.”

Play It As It Lays (1970) Joan writes what she knows best, even when tackling fiction: the American west, angst, despair. This short but not-so-sweet novel tells the story of Maria and captures an intense mood of a teetering woman with just enough words, no more. I won’t give any more away.

“There was silence. Something real was happening: this was, as it were, her life. If she could keep that in mind she would be able to play it through, do the right thing, whatever that meant.”

“Everything goes. I am working very hard at not thinking about how everything goes.”

Blue Nights (2011) Think of Blue Nights as The Year of Magical Thinking, Part II , the companion piece Joan never wanted to write. Before Magical Thinking was even published, Joan’s daughter Quintana Roo died at just 39 years old. Joan refused to amend it though, instead, writing an entire new ode to the new type of grief she felt – a mother’s grief, compounded by a wife’s grief. It touches on themes of parenthood, failure, adoption, and memory, as well as memory’s ultimate uselessness if you don’t appreciate the moment as it’s occurring.

Whatever sense Joan had made out of her life, she lost it alongside losing John and then Quintana, now living a mother’s nightmare. Did she protect Quintana enough? Pay enough attention to her? Did she love her enough?

Whereas Magical Thinking is a sharp and polished masterpiece, Blue Nights feels as if Joan has taken a beating. She has. She’s older now, baffled at the state of her life, too tired to attempt to make sense of the chaos. Yet she’s graceful as ever in her words. Read for yourself.

“This book is called ‘ Blue Nights ’ because at the time I began it I found my mind turning increasingly to illness, to the end of promise, the dwindling of the days, the inevitability of the fading, the dying of the brightness. Blue nights are the opposite of the dying of the brightness, but they are also its warning.”

“Memory fades, memory adjusts, memory conforms to what we think we remember.”

“In theory mementos serve to bring back the moment. In fact they serve only to make clear how inadequately I appreciated the moment when it was here. How inadequately I appreciated the moment when it was here is something else I could never afford to see.”

Additional readings, if you just can’t get enough:

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)
Joan’s packing list from The White Album
Joan’s favorite books of all time, delightfully hand-written

Images via Kate Worum .

Megan is a writer, editor, etc.-er who muses about life, design and travel for Domino, Lonny, Hunker and more. Her life rules include, but are not limited to: zipper when merging, tip in cash and contribute to your IRA. Be a pal and subscribe to her newsletter Night Vision or follow her on Instagram .

BY Megan McCarty - December 4, 2017

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Reading this post convinces me I should read all of Joan Didion’s works! – Charmaine Ng | Architecture & Lifestyle Blog http://charmainenyw.com

Megan, Thank you for a further introduction to the writing of Joan Didion. I recently subscribed to the “Saturday Evening Post” email newsletter, and she is featured in their fiction section along with many other authors of note. I plan to read her books “Democracy” and “Play It As It Lays” for a sample of her fiction. My personal efforts in writing are aimed towards the short story and mostly general fiction. Thank you once again.

David Russell, Michigan

Awesome post really interesting thanks for your work.

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20 great articles and essays by joan didion, on life and death, goodbye to all that, on morality, on self respect, fixed opinions, or the hinge of history, insider baseball, the women's movement, slouching towards bethlehem, the shopping center, the american frontier reinvented, in sable and dark glasses, marrying absurd, the promises martha stewart made—and why we wanted to believe them, 150 great articles and essays.

On Keeping a Notebook

Why i write, the santa ana, some dreamers of the golden dream, fire season in los angeles, the white album, the year of magical thinking, political fictions.

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9 Didion Essays Every Woman Should Read

Happy 79th Birthday, Joan Didion! As any longtime female fan of the iconic essayist, journalist and novelist will tell you, Didion's writing is as essential to a woman's literary education as Beverly Cleary, Virginia Woolf, bell hooks and Sylvia Plath are (each in her unique way, of course). The Gospel According to Didion inspires special devotion in women under 40, as many of Didion's most beloved personal essays and journalistic work concern her time in New York and California in her late 20s and early 30s. Whether she's describing Joan Baez's quirks or her own neuroses, Didion's prose is always resonant and, for many, addictively vivid. The precise observation, the nervous energy, the intellectual heft, the sudden, nearly paralyzing insight: Didion changes you.

Here's a list of nine Joan Didion essays every woman should read, ideally while still in her formative years, and a peek into what makes them unforgettable:

1. " On Self-Respect "

There is a common superstition that “self-respect” is a kind of charm against snakes, something that keeps those who have it locked in some unblighted Eden, out of strange beds, ambivalent conversations, and trouble in general. It does not at all. It has nothing to do with the face of things, but concerns instead a separate peace, a private reconciliation.

2. " Goodbye to All That "

Nothing was irrevocable; everything was within reach. Just around every corner lay something curious and interesting, something I had never before seen or done or known about ... I could make promises to myself and to other people and there would be all the time in the world to keep them. I could stay up all night and make mistakes, and none of them would count.

3. " On Keeping a Notebook "

I think we are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not. Otherwise they turn up unannounced and surprise us, come hammering on the mind’s door at 4 a.m. of a bad night and demand to know who deserted them, who betrayed them, who is going to make amends.

4. " The White Album "

I was even named, in 1968, a Los Angeles Times "Woman of the Year," along with Mrs. Ronald Reagan, the Olympic swimmer Debbie Meyer, and ten other California women who seemed to keep in touch and do good works. I did no good works but I tried to keep in touch.

5. " Why I Write "

During the years when I was an undergraduate at Berkeley I tried, with a kind of hopeless late-adolescent energy, to buy some temporary visa into the world of ideas, to forge for myself a mind that could deal with the abstract.

In short I tried to think. I failed. My attention veered inexorably back to the specific, to the tangible, to what was generally considered, by everyone I knew then and for that matter have known since, the peripheral. 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.

6. " The Women's Movement "

That many women are victims of condescension and exploitation and sex-role stereotyping was scarcely news, but neither was it news that other women are not: nobody forces women to buy the package.

7. " After Life "

Life changes fast. Life changes in the instant. You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends.

...What I remember about the apartment the night I came home alone from New York Hospital was its silence.

8. " Holy Water "

Not many people I know carry their end of the conversation when I want to talk about water deliveries, even when I stress that these deliveries affect their lives, indirectly, every day. "Indirectly" is not quite enough for most people I know. This morning, however, several people I know were affected not "indirectly" but "directly" by the way water moves.

9. " In Sable and Dark Glasses "

My own fantasies of what life would be like at 24 tended to the more spectacular. In these dramas of my own devise I was sometimes wearing a sable coat, although I had never seen one. I was wearing this sable coat in an urban setting that looks in retrospect not unlike Shubert Alley. I was at other times walking on a moor, although I had not yet read those English novels in which moors figured heavily. But here is how I most often preferred to visualize myself: not on a moor, not in Shubert Alley, but standing on the steps of a public building somewhere in South America (Argentina comes first to mind, although Argentina was like the sable coat, never actually seen, more concept than reality), wearing dark glasses and avoiding paparazzi. If you were to have asked me why I was standing on the steps of this public building in Argentina, I would have had a ready answer: I was standing on the steps of this public building in Argentina because I was getting a divorce. Hence the dark glasses, hence the paparazzi.

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On Self-Respect: Joan Didion’s 1961 Essay from the Pages of Vogue

Joan Didion , author, journalist, and style icon, died today after a prolonged illness. She was 87 years old. Here, in its original layout, is Didion’s seminal essay “Self-respect: Its Source, Its Power,” which was first published in Vogue in 1961, and which was republished as “On Self-Respect” in the author’s 1968 collection, Slouching Towards Bethlehem. Didion wrote the essay as the magazine was going to press, to fill the space left after another writer did not produce a piece on the same subject. She wrote it not to a word count or a line count, but to an exact character count.

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Once, in a dry season, I wrote in large letters across two pages of a notebook that innocence ends when one is stripped of the delusion that one likes oneself. Although now, some years later, I marvel that a mind on the outs with itself should have nonetheless made painstaking record of its every tremor, I recall with embarrassing clarity the flavor of those particular ashes. It was a matter of misplaced self-respect.

I had not been elected to Phi Beta Kappa. This failure could scarcely have been more predictable or less ambiguous (I simply did not have the grades), but I was unnerved by it; I had somehow thought myself a kind of academic Raskolnikov, curiously exempt from the cause-effect relationships that hampered others. Although the situation must have had even then the approximate tragic stature of Scott Fitzgerald's failure to become president of the Princeton Triangle Club, the day that I did not make Phi Beta Kappa nevertheless marked the end of something, and innocence may well be the word for it. I lost the conviction that lights would always turn green for me, the pleasant certainty that those rather passive virtues which had won me approval as a child automatically guaranteed me not only Phi Beta Kappa keys but happiness, honour, and the love of a good man (preferably a cross between Humphrey Bogart in Casablanca and one of the Murchisons in a proxy fight); lost a certain touching faith in the totem power of good manners, clean hair, and proven competence on the Stanford-Binet scale. To such doubtful amulets had my self-respect been pinned, and I faced myself that day with the nonplussed wonder of someone who has come across a vampire and found no garlands of garlic at hand.

Although to be driven back upon oneself is an uneasy affair at best, rather like trying to cross a border with borrowed credentials, it seems to me now the one condition necessary to the beginnings of real self-respect. Most of our platitudes notwithstanding, self-deception remains the most difficult deception. The charms that work on others count for nothing in that devastatingly well-lit back alley where one keeps assignations with oneself: no winning smiles will do here, no prettily drawn lists of good intentions. With the desperate agility of a crooked faro dealer who spots Bat Masterson about to cut himself into the game, one shuffles flashily but in vain through one's marked cards—the kindness done for the wrong reason, the apparent triumph which had involved no real effort, the seemingly heroic act into which one had been shamed. The dismal fact is that self-respect has nothing to do with the approval of others—who are, after all, deceived easily enough; has nothing to do with reputation—which, as Rhett Butler told Scarlett O'Hara, is something that people with courage can do without.

To do without self-respect, on the other hand, is to be an unwilling audience of one to an interminable home movie that documents one's failings, both real and imagined, with fresh footage spliced in for each screening. There’s the glass you broke in anger, there's the hurt on X's face; watch now, this next scene, the night Y came back from Houston, see how you muff this one. To live without self-respect is to lie awake some night, beyond the reach of warm milk, phenobarbital, and the sleeping hand on the coverlet, counting up the sins of commission and omission, the trusts betrayed, the promises subtly broken, the gifts irrevocably wasted through sloth or cowardice or carelessness. However long we postpone it, we eventually lie down alone in that notoriously un- comfortable bed, the one we make ourselves. Whether or not we sleep in it depends, of course, on whether or not we respect ourselves.

Joan Didion

To protest that some fairly improbable people, some people who could not possibly respect themselves, seem to sleep easily enough is to miss the point entirely, as surely as those people miss it who think that self-respect has necessarily to do with not having safety pins in one's underwear. There is a common superstition that "self-respect" is a kind of charm against snakes, something that keeps those who have it locked in some unblighted Eden, out of strange beds, ambivalent conversations, and trouble in general. It does not at all. It has nothing to do with the face of things, but concerns instead a separate peace, a private reconciliation. Although the careless, suicidal Julian English in Appointment in Samarra and the careless, incurably dishonest Jordan Baker in The Great Gatsby seem equally improbable candidates for self-respect, Jordan Baker had it, Julian English did not. With that genius for accommodation more often seen in women than in men, Jordan took her own measure, made her own peace, avoided threats to that peace: "I hate careless people," she told Nick Carraway. "It takes two to make an accident."

I Drink a Ginger Shot Every Morning&-Here Are All the Benefits

Like Jordan Baker, people with self-respect have the courage of their mistakes. They know the price of things. If they choose to commit adultery, they do not then go running, in an access of bad conscience, to receive absolution from the wronged parties; nor do they complain unduly of the unfairness, the undeserved embarrassment, of being named corespondent. If they choose to forego their work—say it is screenwriting—in favor of sitting around the Algonquin bar, they do not then wonder bitterly why the Hacketts, and not they, did Anne Frank.

In brief, people with self-respect exhibit a certain toughness, a kind of moral nerve; they display what was once called character, a quality which, although approved in the abstract, sometimes loses ground to other, more instantly negotiable virtues. The measure of its slipping prestige is that one tends to think of it only in connection with homely children and with United States senators who have been defeated, preferably in the primary, for re-election. Nonetheless, character—the willingness to accept responsibility for one's own life—is the source from which self-respect springs.

Self-respect is something that our grandparents, whether or not they had it, knew all about. They had instilled in them, young, a certain discipline, the sense that one lives by doing things one does not particularly want to do, by putting fears and doubts to one side, by weighing immediate comforts against the possibility of larger, even intangible, comforts. It seemed to the nineteenth century admirable, but not remarkable, that Chinese Gordon put on a clean white suit and held Khartoum against the Mahdi; it did not seem unjust that the way to free land in California involved death and difficulty and dirt. In a diary kept during the winter of 1846, an emigrating twelve-year-old named Narcissa Cornwall noted coolly: "Father was busy reading and did not notice that the house was being filled with strange Indians until Mother spoke about it." Even lacking any clue as to what Mother said, one can scarcely fail to be impressed by the entire incident: the father reading, the Indians filing in, the mother choosing the words that would not alarm, the child duly recording the event and noting further that those particular Indians were not, "fortunately for us," hostile. Indians were simply part of the donnée.

In one guise or another, Indians always are. Again, it is a question of recognizing that anything worth having has its price. People who respect themselves are willing to accept the risk that the Indians will be hostile, that the venture will go bankrupt, that the liaison may not turn out to be one in which every day is a holiday because you’re married to me. They are willing to invest something of themselves; they may not play at all, but when they do play, they know the odds.

That kind of self-respect is a discipline, a habit of mind that can never be faked but can be developed, trained, coaxed forth. It was once suggested to me that, as an antidote to crying, I put my head in a paper bag. As it happens, there is a sound physiological reason, something to do with oxygen, for doing exactly that, but the psychological effect alone is incalculable: it is difficult in the extreme to continue fancying oneself Cathy in Wuthering Heights with one's head in a Food Fair bag. There is a similar case for all the small disciplines, unimportant in themselves; imagine maintaining any kind of swoon, commiserative or carnal, in a cold shower.

But those small disciplines are valuable only insofar as they represent larger ones. To say that Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton is not to say that Napoleon might have been saved by a crash program in cricket; to give formal dinners in the rain forest would be pointless did not the candlelight flickering on the liana call forth deeper, stronger disciplines, values instilled long before. It is a kind of ritual, helping us to remember who and what we are. In order to remember it, one must have known it.

To have that sense of one's intrinsic worth which, for better or for worse, constitutes self-respect, is potentially to have everything: the ability to discriminate, to love and to remain indifferent. To lack it is to be locked within oneself, paradoxically incapable of either love or indifference. If we do not respect ourselves, we are on the one hand forced to despise those who have so few resources as to consort with us, so little perception as to remain blind to our fatal weaknesses. On the other, we are peculiarly in thrall to everyone we see, curiously determined to live out—since our self-image is untenable—their false notions of us. We flatter ourselves by thinking this compulsion to please others an attractive trait: a gift for imaginative empathy, evidence of our willingness to give. Of course we will play Francesca to Paolo, Brett Ashley to Jake, Helen Keller to anyone's Annie Sullivan: no expectation is too misplaced, no rôle too ludicrous. At the mercy of those we can not but hold in contempt, we play rôles doomed to failure before they are begun, each defeat generating fresh despair at the necessity of divining and meeting the next demand made upon us.

It is the phenomenon sometimes called alienation from self. In its advanced stages, we no longer answer the telephone, because someone might want something; that we could say no without drowning in self-reproach is an idea alien to this game. Every encounter demands too much, tears the nerves, drains the will, and the spectre of something as small as an unanswered letter arouses such disproportionate guilt that one's sanity becomes an object of speculation among one's acquaintances. To assign unanswered letters their proper weight, to free us from the expectations of others, to give us back to ourselves—there lies the great, the singular power of self-respect. Without it, one eventually discovers the final turn of the screw: one runs away to find oneself, and finds no one at home.

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Remembering essayist Joan Didion, a keen observer of American culture

Terry Gross

Didion, who died Dec. 23, was known her cool, unsentimental observations. Her books include Slouching Towards Bethlehem and The Year of Magical Thinking . Originally broadcast in 1987 and 2005.

NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by an NPR contractor. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.

Books About Death

List of 10 Must-Read Joan Didion Books

Updated 12/9/2022

Published 05/6/2021

Amy Wolkenhauer, BA in English/Creative Writing

Contributing writer

Discover Joan Didion books that are must-reads including ten of her best fiction and non-fiction works.

Cake values integrity and transparency. We follow a strict editorial process to provide you with the best content possible. We also may earn commission from purchases made through affiliate links. As an Amazon Associate, we earn from qualifying purchases. Learn more in our affiliate disclosure .

If you haven’t been introduced to Joan Didion before this must-read list, then by the end of it, you’ll be heading to the nearest bookstore to pick up what will most assuredly be your favorite book to quote or re-read.

Overview: Our Top Picks

Best nonfiction joan didion books.

The Year of Magical Thinking ($11.71)
Slouching Towards Bethlehem ($13.99)
The White Album ($12.59)
Blue Nights ($11.39)
Let Me Tell You What I Mean ($8.69)

Best Fiction Joan Didion Books

Play It as It Lays ($12.99)
A Book of Common Prayer ($13.19)
Democracy ($17.00)
The Last Thing He Wanted ($9.99)
Run River ($10.99)

Jump ahead to these sections:

Joan Didion’s zenith collection of nonfiction is listed here, whether critics agree or not. Her’s is a fearlessness of authorship, where interesting lives and beautiful stories mingle with what is sometimes miserable or even humiliating.

1. The Year of Magical Thinking

After her husband's sudden death, Didion attempts to make sense of her life in the immediate days and following months. Her flawless, skillful writing guides the reader through description and grief stages using rhythmic wording and authentic emotion. Didion writes:

"Grief is different. Grief has no distance. Grief comes in waves, paroxysms, sudden apprehensions that weaken the knees and blind the eyes and obliterate the dailiness of life."

While praised for her style and authenticity, some readers found that the author’s general lifestyle was unreachable for the average person and therefore unrelatable.

Check out a more in-depth The Year of Magical Thinking book review from our Cake contributor Rev. Nancy Niero for more on this raw and intense look into one widow’s travel through grief.

View This Book on Amazon

2. Slouching Towards Bethlehem

Didion's first nonfiction work came budding out of the late ‘60s in a coming-into-her-own story about traveling the sunny west coast observing, writing, and ingesting life. From every essay, especially "Self-Respect," you can pluck any number of beautiful quotes. Such quotes will lock you inside beautiful but indiscriminate truths, offering far more value than any shiny bauble. Here's one to chew on:

"To have that sense of one's intrinsic worth which constitutes self-respect is potentially to have everything: the ability to discriminate, to love and to remain indifferent. To lack, it is to be locked within oneself, paradoxically incapable of either love or indifference."

Some find her work pretentious at best and unfulfilling at its worst, but the eye and mind see art differently with age. What may be boring homework to a college student one day often becomes one of the most revelatory or best memoirs with time.

3. The White Album

The White Album will help you appreciate the feminist essayist. Didion's flawless use of commas and artful texturing of phrases melodically and effortlessly weave you in and out of a moment in time until she reveals the glorious truth.

"All one's actual apprehension of what it is like to be a woman, the irreconcilable difference of it—that sense of living one's deepest life underwater, that dark involvement with blood and birth and death—could now be declared invalid, unnecessary, one never felt it at all."

The Sixties were a moment of change for women in all landscapes. However, critics suggest that Didion often sacrifices the complex, dusty realities of the everyday or commonplace for the beautiful, contemporary, or fashionable.

4. Blue Nights

Some of Joan Didion's critics decry Blue Nights as selfishly about Didion and those that are the backdrop or wallpaper of her life; people who happen to be famous. She writes:

"I tell you this true story just to prove that I can. That my frailty has not yet reached a point at which I can no longer tell a true story."

Didion doesn't grieve through the eyes of others, nor does she grieve what others have lost. It's impossible to know loss through their lens. Instead, her grief is authentically displayed. After the loss of her husband and partner, grief was already familiar.

Here, you'll find the rawness in the loss of her daughter. And while her writing style seems to spin around into repetition and grief like a conveyor belt, it nonetheless brings you relentless sorrow.

5. Let Me Tell You What I Mean

Didion isn’t for everyone. Her social circle is often off-putting as if to make her experiences inauthentic because someone she knows once had their name in lights. But to brush off these didactic moments of American life as fluff simply for their famous names is to miss out on a piece of history.

In previously unpublished essays, Let Me Tell You What I Mean supports the cultural significance of a writer who’s been part of the fabric of American authorship for decades. She’s humble, recalls humiliating events, and at best offers a vulnerability most are too insecure to share.

If you’re the kind of person who appreciates growth and substance over immediate perfection, this book may be the best read ever.

In no particular order, you’ll find Joan Didion’s best fiction books listed below—whether you agree or not.

6. Play It as It Lays

One can best describe the character Maria Wyeth’s life as decayed, miserable, and desperate. Didion’s novel, Play It as It Lays , is not one best ingested on a happy Saturday afternoon among the birds. Still, the often putridity of self-destruction is too interesting to deny. In the story, Maria clings to various happy moments, some with her daughter, others throughout her overall despondent life. Agonizingly, Maria says:

“I was raised to believe that what came in on the next roll would always be better than what went out on the last. I no longer believe that, but I am telling you how it was.”

The truth of the end seems necessary and authentic to the novel. Maria will remind you of Lily Bart from Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth , where the finality and degradation feel like a rush of relief as the character is released from her anguish. There, you’ll discover that there is far more beauty in the pain of truths than in the lie.

7. A Book of Common Prayer

This Joan Didion novel is about politics, tragedy, and womanhood in Boca Grande, Central America. Narrator Grace Strasser-Mendana is an American expatriate who marries into one of the dominant and controlling families therein.

In a parallel story of anguish, anger, and hopelessness, Grace, acting as either a witness or eulogist, tells the reader Charlotte Douglas's story—another American. Of Charlotte, Grace explains:

"She died, hopeful. In summary. So you know the story. Of course, the story had extenuating circumstances, weather, cracked sidewalks and paregorina, but only for the living".

With journalistic prowess and know-how, fans hail Didion's book as a deep dive into the plot and twists of human behavior inside that of terrorism, intrigue, and violence .

8. Democracy

In Democracy , Didion sets up a cryptic puzzle set in Hawaii's post-Vietnam backdrop. For some, her efforts are more irritating than interesting, mainly when the slowness of the reveal seems sluggish, confusing, and filled with odd or misplaced colloquialisms. While for others, the novel feels like a brilliant character study, especially of Jack Lovett.

If this makes you confused or unsure if you're even going to like the book, then buy it bargain-priced. From the moment you pick it up, even if you've decided to dislike everything about it, you'll be free to fall madly in love with every bit of nuance in its complex narration. The artful weaving and tale-telling abilities from Didion are where the story truly lies.

9. The Last Thing He Wanted

Many who are fond of Didion's fiction credit her with the ability to tell a tale in puzzle form. Each piece fits together with a knowing sigh of relief after assessing the details. You'll find that writing prowess throughout her novel, The Last Thing He Wanted .

In it, Journalist Elena McMahon revisits her experience in 1980s Costa Rica. There, she became a stand-in weapons runner for her father and gets caught up in a plot to frame him—now her—for the ambassador's assassination. She escapes, but her father isn’t so lucky.

Her novel is a quick read with repetitive, rapid-fire sentence structures. Although it doesn't have the same Didion-esque bursting sentences, it's still a page-turner right up to the end when the critique of Central American governments and greedy politicians takes the stage.

10. Run River

Run River begins with a marriage, ends with suicide, and languishes slightly in the middle.

You’ll discover several California pioneering references. Plus, her character study is true to the style of typical Didion dynamism.

Except, there seems to be an almost byline to every character. One of “perpetrator-victim.” Nearly everyone has a lonely, horrid life with too much time, bourbon, and money to complain away the afternoon. It’s tough to be in a situation you’ve created and yet feel somewhat victimized by its honesty.

But apart from the Gatsby-esque terror of being so despairingly (or overwhelmingly) privileged and unhappy, the novel is nonetheless insightful. Read it with some bourbon, or not, and prepare yourself to enjoy Didion’s first tragedy novel.

Introducing Joan Didion

It’s a late introduction for those who’ve never heard of her, but Joan Didion has been writing for decades. Her observations, writing style, and character study make her one of the most well-known authors in our diverse American history.

“A Book of Common Prayer.” Zola Books, Inc, The Joan Didion, n.d., www.thejoandidion.com/a-book-of-common-prayer

Categories:

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The Most Anthologized Essays of the Last 25 Years

In which joan didion appears more than once.

Depending on who you are, the word “essay” may make you squirm. After all, here in America at least, our introduction to the essay often comes complete with five paragraphs and “repeat but rephrase” and other soul-killing rules. But in actuality, essays are nothing like the staid, formulaic, boring things they make you write in high school. They’re all over the place. They’re wild. Or at least they can be. After all, the word essay comes from the French verb essayer , which means “to try.” Essays are merely attempts, at expression, or at proof; they claim to be nothing more. I’ve always thought that was lovely.

For this list, I looked at 14 essay anthologies, plus the three volumes of Lee Gutkind’s The Best Creative Nonfiction and John D’Agata’s three-part survey of the form ( The Next American Essay, The Lost Origins of the Essay , and The Making of the American Essay ), for a total of 20 books published between 1991 and 2016. I ignored all themed anthologies, as well as any limited to a specific year or publication. This is the last survey of anthologies in a series—earlier this month, I looked at the most anthologized short stories and the most anthologized poems —and considering all three lists together affords the ability to compare the way the different forms are canonized and read in America.

Of the three, I was most surprised by the data here. The essay is perhaps the most ravenous of forms, but these anthologies included letters, speeches (notably, a fair number of presidential addresses), excerpts from longer, reported works of non-fiction, and a number of works that I consider stories (like Jamaica Kincaid’s “Girl,” which most agree is a short story, and some argue is a poem, but is certainly not an essay) or even actual poetry (John D’Agata, I know you’re a rebel and all, but “ For I Will Consider My Cat Jeoffrey ,” while incredible, is not an essay). On the other hand, several essays that I consider top-notch classics didn’t make the cut (like Jo Ann Beard’s “The Fourth State of Matter,” and Gay Talese’s “Frank Sinatra Has a Cold,” which each appear only once in all the anthologies I surveyed). And Michel de Montaigne, who essentially coined the term, is only feebly represented. The better news is that five of the nine most anthologized essays are by writers of color, which is significantly better than either of the other lists do in that regard.

Below, I’ve separated my findings into four lists: the most anthologized essays (this should be self-explanatory), the most anthologized essayists (the authors with the most essays total across the anthologies), the most widely anthologized essayists (the authors with the most discrete essays across the anthologies), and the one hit wonders (those essays that were their authors only piece represented across the anthologies, albeit multiple times). At the end, there’s the full list, consisting of all duplicated essays and all essayists who had at least three pieces among the books I surveyed.

Most Anthologized Essays

Nine inclusions:

“Once More to the Lake,” E. B. White

Seven inclusions:

“Letter from Birmingham Jail,” Martin Luther King, Jr.

Six inclusions:

“How it Feels to be Colored Me,” Zora Neale Hurston “A Modest Proposal,” Jonathan Swift “Mother Tongue,” Amy Tan “The Death of the Moth,” Virginia Woolf

Five inclusions:

“Stranger in the Village,” James Baldwin “No Name Woman,” Maxine Hong Kingston “Shooting an Elephant,” George Orwell

Four inclusions:

“On Keeping a Notebook,” Joan Didion “The Search for Marvin Gardens,” John McPhee “The Way to Rainy Mountain,” N. Scott Momaday

Three inclusions:

“Graduation,” Maya Angelou “Notes of a Native Son,” James Baldwin “The Pain Scale,” Eula Biss “Seeing,” Annie Dillard “Learning to Read,” Frederick Douglass “Of the Coming of John,” W.E.B. Du Bois from Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting by in America , Barbara Ehrenreich “On Dumpster Diving,” Lars Eighner “The Crack-up,” F. Scott Fitzgerald “Sex, Drugs, Disasters, and the Extinction of Dinosaurs,” Stephen Jay Gould “Illumination Rounds,” Michael Herr “Salvation,” Langston Hughes “The Declaration of Independence,” Thomas Jefferson “The Undertaking,” Thomas Lynch “Aria: a Memoir of a Bilingual Childhood,” Richard Rodriguez “Declaration of Sentiments and Resolutions,” Elizabeth Cady Stanton “Black Men and Public Space,” Brent Staples “Civil Disobedience,” Henry David Thoreau “Consider the Lobster,” David Foster Wallace “Yeager,” Tom Wolfe

Two inclusions:

from Two or Three Things I Know for Sure , Dorothy Allison “How To Tame a Wild Tongue,” Gloria Anzaldúa “Graven Images,” Saul Bellow “Time and Distance Overcome,” Eula Biss “I Want a Wife,” Judy Brady “Why Don’t We Complain?,” William F. Buckley Jr. “Is Google Making Us Stupid?,” Nicolas Carr “The Dream,” Winston Churchill “Remarks to the United Nations Fourth World Conference on Women Plenary Session,” Hillary Rodham Clinton “Silent Dancing,” Judith Ortiz Cofer “Music Is My Bag: Confessions of a Lapsed Oboist,” Meghan Daum “The White Album,” Joan Didion “On Going Home,” Joan Didion “On Morality,” Joan Didion “Total eclipse,” Annie Dillard “Living Like Weasels,” Annie Dillard from An American Childhood , Annie Dillard “Somehow Form a Family,” Tony Earley “Life with Daughters: Watching the Miss America Pageant,” Gerald Early “The Solace of Open Spaces,” Gretel Ehrlich “Ways We Lie,” Stephanie Ericsson “Young Hunger,” M.F.K. Fisher “When Doctors Make Mistakes,” Atul Gawande “He and I,” Natalia Ginzburg “Mirrorings,” Lucy Grealy “The Lost Childhood,” Graham Greene “Apotheosis of Martin Luther King,” Elizabeth Hardwick “On the Pleasure of Hating,” William Hazlitt “The Courage of Turtles,” Edward Hoagland “A Small Place,” Jamaica Kincaid “Dream Children: a Reverie,” Charles Lamb “Coming Home Again,” Chang-Rae Lee “On Being a Cripple,” Nancy Mairs “Of Some Verses on Virgil,” Michel de Montaigne “Two Ways to Belong in America,” Bharati Mukherjee “Eulogy for the Honorable Reverend Clementa Pinckney,” Barack Obama “Politics and the English Language,” George Orwell “The Allegory of the Cave,” Plato “Oranges and Sweet Sister Boy,” Judy Ruiz “Under the Influence,” Scott Russell Sanders “The Men We Carry in our Minds,” Scott Russell Sanders “Letter to President Pierce, 1855,” Chief Seattle “Language and Literature from a Pueblo Indian Perspective,” Leslie Marmon Silko “What Should a Billionaire Give—and What Should You?,” Peter Singer “A Century of Cinema,” Susan Sontag “Regarding the Pain of Others,” Susan Sontag “Decolonizing the Mind,” Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o “Walking,” Henry David Thoreau “Where I Lived, and What I Lived For,” Henry David Thoreau “Ain’t I a Woman?,” Sojourner Truth “Advice to Youth,” Mark Twain “In Search of our Mothers’ Gardens,” Alice Walker “Writing and Analyzing a Story,” Eudora Welty “The Clan of One-Breasted Women,” Terry Tempest Williams “A Preface to Persius,” Edmund Wilson “In Search of a Room of One’s Own,” Virginia Woolf

The Most Anthologized Essayists ( the authors with most essays published among the anthologies )

Sixteen essays: Joan Didion

Fourteen essays: Annie Dillard

Thirteen essays: Virginia Woolf

Eleven essays: James Baldwin George Orwell E. B. White

Nine essays: Richard Rodriguez Henry David Thoreau

Eight essays: Martin Luther King, Jr. Susan Sontag Jonathan Swift

Seven essays: Samuel Johnson Michel de Montaigne Mark Twain Eudora Welty

Six essays: Francis Bacon Barbara Ehrenreich Stephen Jay Gould Maxine Hong Kingston Zora Neale Hurston Charles Lamb John McPhee David Sedaris Amy Tan

Five essays: Maya Angelou Eula Biss M.F.K. Fisher Atul Gawande William Hazlitt Jamaica Kincaid Nancy Mairs H.L. Mencken N. Scott Momaday Adrienne Rich Lewis Thomas Alice Walker David Foster Wallace Tom Wolfe

The Most Widely Anthologized Essayists ( authors with most discrete essays published among the anthologies )

Ten essays:

Joan Didion

Nine essays:

Annie Dillard

Seven essays:

Samuel Johnson Richard Rodriguez Virginia Woolf

Six essays:

Sir Francis Bacon Michel de Montaigne George Orwell David Sedaris Seneca Susan Sontag Mark Twain Eudora Welty

Five essays:

James Baldwin Charles Lamb H.L. Mencken Adrienne Rich Lewis Thomas Henry David Thoreau

Four essays:

Max Beerbohm G.K. Chesterton Barbara Ehrenreich M.F.K. Fisher Atul Gawande Stephen Jay Gould William Hazlitt Jamaica Kincaid Phillip Lopate Barry Lopez Nancy Mairs Cynthia Ozick Anna Quindlen Scott Russell Sanders Robert Louis Stevenson James Thurber Alice Walker

One Hit Wonders ( authors with a only single essay represented across the anthologies )

“How it Feels to be Colored Me,” Zora Neale Hurston “Mother Tongue,” Amy Tan

“On Dumpster Diving,” Lars Eighner “Illumination Rounds,” Michael Herr “The Declaration of Independence,” Thomas Jefferson “The Undertaking,” Thomas Lynch

from Two or Three Things I Know for Sure , Dorothy Allison “How To Tame a Wild Tongue,” Gloria Anzaldúa “Graven Images,” Saul Bellow “I Want a Wife,” Judy Brady “Why Don’t We Complain?,” William F. Buckley Jr. “Is Google Making Us Stupid?,” Nicolas Carr “Remarks to the United Nations Fourth World Conference on Women Plenary Session,” Hillary Rodham Clinton “Music Is My Bag: Confessions of a Lapsed Oboist,” Meghan Daum “Somehow Form a Family,” Tony Earley “Ways We Lie,” Stephanie Ericsson “He and I,” Natalia Ginzburg “Mirrorings,” Lucy Grealy “The Lost Childhood,” Graham Greene “Apotheosis of Martin Luther King,” Elizabeth Hardwick “Coming Home Again,” Chang-Rae Lee “Two Ways to Belong in America,” Bharati Mukherjee “The Allegory of the Cave,” Plato “Oranges and Sweet Sister Boy,” Judy Ruiz “Letter to President Pierce, 1855,” Chief Seattle “Language and Literature from a Pueblo Indian Perspective,” Leslie Marmon Silko “Decolonizing the Mind,” Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o “Ain’t I a Woman?,” Sojourner Truth “The Clan of One-Breasted Women,” Terry Tempest Williams

The Full List ( all essays by writers with at least one duplication or three disparate essays anthologized )

“The Great American Desert,” Edward Abbey “The Cowboy and his Cow,” Edward Abbey “Havasu,” Edward Abbey

“Superman and Me,” Sherman Alexie “Indian Education,” Sherman Alexie “Captivity,” Sherman Alexie

from Two or Three Things I Know for Sure , Dorothy Allison (x 2)

“Graduation,” Maya Angelou (x 3) “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings,” Maya Angelou “Champion of the World,” Maya Angelou

“How To Tame a Wild Tongue,” Gloria Anzaldúa (x 2)

“Of Truth,” Sir Francis Bacon “Of Revenge,” Sir Francis Bacon “Of Boldness,” Sir Francis Bacon “Of Innovations,” Sir Francis Bacon “Of Masques and Triumphs,” Sir Francis Bacon “Antithesis of Things,” Sir Francis Bacon

“Stranger in the Village,” James Baldwin (x 5) “Notes of a Native Son,” James Baldwin (x 3) “Alas, Poor Richard,” James Baldwin “The Fight: Patterson vs. Liston,” James Baldwin “Equal in Paris,” James Baldwin

“Going Out for a Walk,” Max Beerbohm “Laughter,” Max Beerbohm “Something Defeasible,” Max Beerbohm “A Clergyman,” Max Beerbohm

“Graven Images,” Saul Bellow (x 2)

“What Reconciles Me,” John Berger “Photographs of Agony,” John Berger “Turner and the Barber’s Shop,” John Berger

“The Pain Scale,” Eula Biss (x 3) “Time and Distance Overcome,” Eula Biss (x 2)

“Blindness,” Jorge Luis Borges “Borges and I,” Jorge Luis Borges “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Teritus,” Jorge Luis Borges

“I Want a Wife,” Judy Brady (x 2)

“Why Don’t We Complain?,” William F. Buckley Jr. (x 2)

“Is Google Making Us Stupid?,” Nicholas Carr (x 2)

“The Glass Essay,” Anne Carson from Short Talks , Anne Carson “Kinds of Water,” Anne Carson

“Marginal world,” Rachel Carson “The Obligation to Endure,” Rachel Carson “A Fable for Tomorrow,” Rachel Carson

“A Piece of Chalk,” G.K. Chesterton “On Running After One’s Hat,” G.K. Chesterton “A Defense of Penny Dreadfuls,” G.K. Chesterton “On Sandals and Simplicity,” G.K. Chesterton

“The Dream,” Winston Churchill (x 2) from “We Shall Fight on the Beaches,” Winston Churchill from “This Was Their Finest Hour,” Winston Churchill

“Silent Dancing,” Judith Ortiz Cofer (x 2) “More Room,” Judith Ortiz Cofer “Myth of the Latin Woman: I just met a girl named Maria,” Judith Ortiz Cofer

“Another Country,” Edwidge Danticat “Uncle Moïse,” Edwidge Danticat “Westbury Court,” Edwidge Danticat

“Music Is My Bag: Confessions of a Lapsed Oboist,” Meghan Daum (x 2)

“On Keeping a Notebook,” Joan Didion (x 4) “The White Album,” Joan Didion (x 2) “On Going Home,” Joan Didion (x 2) “On Morality,” Joan Didion (x 2) “Goodbye to All That,” Joan Didion “In Bed,” Joan Didion “At the Dam,” Joan Didion “Georgia O’Keeffe,” Joan Didion from Salvador , Joan Didion “The Santa Ana,” Joan Didion

“Seeing,” Annie Dillard (x 3) “Total Eclipse,” Annie Dillard (x 2) “Living Like Weasels,” Annie Dillard (x 2) rom An American Childhood , Annie Dillard (x 2) “Sight into Insight,” Annie Dillard “On Foot in Virginia’s Roanoke Valley,” Annie Dillard from For the Time Being , Annie Dillard “The Chase,” Annie Dillard “The Stunt Pilot,” Annie Dillard

“Learning to Read,” Frederick Douglass (x 3) from “Fourth of July Oration,” Frederick Douglass

“Of the Coming of John,” W.E.B. Du Bois (x 3) “A Mild Suggestion,” W.E.B. Du Bois

“Somehow Form a Family,” Tony Earley (x 2)

“Life with Daughters: Watching the Miss America Pageant,” Gerald Early (x 2) “Digressions,” Gerald Early

from Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting by in America , Barbara Ehrenreich (x 3) “Serving in Florida,” Barbara Ehrenreich “Cultural Baggage,” Barbara Ehrenreich “War Without Humans: Modern Blood Rites Revisited,” Barbara Ehrenreich

“The Solace of Open Spaces,” Gretel Ehrlich (x 2) from the Journals, Gretel Ehrlich “Lijiang,” Gretel Ehrlich

“On Dumpster Diving,” Lars Eighner (x 3)

“Brown Wasps,” Loren Eiseley “The Angry Winter,” Loren Eiseley “The Snout,” Loren Eiseley

“Tradition and the Individual Talent,” T.S. Eliot “Marie Lloyd,” T.S. Eliot “The Dry Salvages,” T.S. Eliot

“The American Scholar,” Ralph Waldo Emerson “The Conservative,” Ralph Waldo Emerson “Nature,” Ralph Waldo Emerson

“Ways We Lie,” Stephanie Ericsson (x 2)

“Young Hunger,” M.F.K. Fisher (x 2) “Once a Tramp, Always,” M.F.K. Fisher “The Flaw,” M.F.K. Fisher “Paris Journal,” M.F.K. Fisher

“The Crack-up,” F. Scott Fitzgerald (x 3) “Sleeping and Waking,” F. Scott Fitzgerald

“Learning to Write,” Benjamin Franklin from the Autobiography , Benjamin Franklin “The Levee,” Benjamin Franklin

“When Doctors Make Mistakes,” Atul Gawande (x 2) from “Overkill,” Atul Gawande “Final Cut,” Atul Gawande “Why Boston’s Hospitals Were Ready,” Atul Gawande

“He and I,” Natalia Ginzburg (x 2)

“Java Man,” Malcolm Gladwell “None of the Above: What I.Q. Doesn’t Tell You about Race,” Malcolm Gladwell “The Tipping Point,” Malcolm Gladwell

“Sex, Drugs, Disasters, and the Extinction of Dinosaurs,” Stephen Jay Gould (x 3) “Creation Myths of Cooperstown,” Stephen Jay Gould “A Biological Homage to Mickey Mouse,” Stephen Jay Gould “The Median Isn’t the Message,” Stephen Jay Gould

“Mirrorings,” Lucy Grealy (x 2)

“The Lost Childhood,” Graham Greene (x 2)

“Apotheosis of Martin Luther King,” Elizabeth Hardwick (x 2)

“No Name Woman,” Maxine Hong Kingston (x 5) “Tongue-Tied,” Maxine Hong Kingston

“On the Pleasure of Hating,” William Hazlitt (x 2) “On Going a Journey,” William Hazlitt “The Fight,” William Hazlitt “Brummelliana,” William Hazlitt

“Illumination Rounds,” Michael Herr (x 3)

“The Courage of Turtles,” Edward Hoagland (x 2) “The Threshold and the Jolt of Pain,” Edward Hoagland “Heaven and Nature,” Edward Hoagland

“Salvation,” Langston Hughes (x 3) “Bop,” Langston Hughes

“How it Feels to Be Colored Me,” Zora Neale Hurston (x 6)

“The Declaration of Independence,” Thomas Jefferson (x 3)

“The Boarding house,” Samuel Johnson “The Solitude of the Country,” Samuel Johnson “Dignity and Uses of Biography,” Samuel Johnson “Conversation,” Samuel Johnson “Debtors’ Prisons (1),” Samuel Johnson “Debtors’ Prisons (2),” Samuel Johnson “To Reign Once More in Our Native Country,” Samuel Johnson

“A Small Place,” Jamaica Kincaid (x 2) “On Seeing England for the First Time,” Jamaica Kincaid “Girl,” Jamaica Kincaid “Biography of a Dress,” Jamaica Kincaid

“Letter from Birmingham Jail,” Martin Luther King, Jr. (x 7) “I Have a Dream,” Martin Luther King, Jr.

“Dream Children: a Reverie,” Charles Lamb (x 2) “New Year’s Eve,” Charles Lamb “A Chapter on Ears,” Charles Lamb “The Superannuated Man,” Charles Lamb from “On Some of the Old Actors,” Charles Lamb

“Coming Home Again,” Chang-Rae Lee (x 2)

“Second Inaugural Address,” Abraham Lincoln (x 3) “First Inaugural Address,” Abraham Lincoln “The Gettysburg Address,” Abraham Lincoln

“Against Joie de Vivre,” Phillip Lopate “Portrait of my Body,” Phillip Lopate “On the Necessity of Turning Oneself into a Character,” Phillip Lopate “The Dead Father: A Rememberance of Donald Barthelme,” Phillip Lopate

“Flight,” Barry Lopez “Grown Men,” Barry Lopez “The Raven,” Barry Lopez “Landscape and Narrative,” Barry Lopez

“The Fourth of July,” Audre Lorde “Poetry is Not a Luxury,” Audre Lorde “The Uses of Anger: Women Responding to Racism,” Audre Lorde

“The Undertaking,” Thomas Lynch (x 3)

“On Being a Cripple,” Nancy Mairs (x 2) “Ron her Son,” Nancy Mairs “Body in Trouble,” Nancy Mairs “Disability,” Nancy Mairs

“My Confession,” Mary McCarthy “Artists in Uniform,” Mary McCarthy “Yonder Peasant, Who Is He?,” Mary McCarthy

“The Case for Single-Child Families,” Bill McKibben “Waste Not, Want Not,” Bill McKibben “Curbing Nature’s Paparazzi,” Bill McKibben

“The Search for Marvin Gardens,” John McPhee (x 4) “Under the Snow,” John McPhee from Annals of the Former World , John McPhee

“On Being an American,” H.L. Mencken “Hills of Zion,” H.L. Mencken “Reflections on Journalism,” H.L. Mencken “The Libido for the Ugly,” H.L. Mencken “Funeral march,” H.L. Mencken

“The Way to Rainy Mountain,” N. Scott Momaday (x 4) “An American Land Ethic,” N. Scott Momaday

“Of some verses on Virgil,” Michel de Montaigne (x 2) “Of books,” Michel de Montaigne “Of a monstrous child,” Michel de Montaigne from “On Cannibals,” Michel de Montaigne “Of Democritus and Heraclitus,” Michel de Montaigne “Of Experience,” Michel de Montaigne

“Two Ways to Belong in America,” Bharati Mukherjee (x 2)

“This is Not Who We Are,” Naomi Shihab Nye “Thank You in Arabic,” Naomi Shihab Nye “One Village,” Naomi Shihab Nye

“Eulogy for the Honorable Reverend Clementa Pinckney,” Barack Obama (x 2) “A More Perfect Union,” Barack Obama

“Shooting an Elephant,” George Orwell (x 5) “Politics and the English Language,” George Orwell (x 2) “Such, Such were the Joys,” George Orwell “Reflections on Gandhi,” George Orwell “The Moon under Water,” George Orwell “A Hanging,” George Orwell

“Drugstore in Winter,” Cynthia Ozick “The Lesson of the Master,” Cynthia Ozick “Highbrow Blues,” Cynthia Ozick “Portrait of the Essay as a Warm Body,” Cynthia Ozick

“The Allegory of the Cave,” Plato (x 2)

“An Animal’s Place,” Michael Pollan “Why “Natural” Doesn’t Mean Anything Anymore,” Michael Pollan “What’s Eating America,” Michael Pollan

“Future is Now,” Katherine Anne Porter “St. Augustine and the Bullfight,” Katherine Anne Porter “The Necessary Enemy,” Katherine Anne Porter

“Between the Sexes, a Great Divide,” Anna Quindlen “Stuff Is Not Salvation,” Anna Quindlen “The War We Haven’t Won,” Anna Quindlen “Homeless,” Anna Quindlen

“Split at the Root,” Adrienne Rich “Women and Honor: Some Notes on Lying,” Adrienne Rich “Taking Women Students Seriously,” Adrienne Rich “Claiming an Education,” Adrienne Rich from “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence,” Adrienne Rich

“Aria: a Memoir of a Bilingual Childhood,” Richard Rodriguez (x 3) “Late Victorians,” Richard Rodriguez “Going Home Again,” Richard Rodriguez from Crossing Borders , Richard Rodriguez from Darling , Richard Rodriguez “Private Language, Public Language,” Richard Rodriguez “‘Blaxicans’ and Other Reinvented Americans,” Richard Rodriguez

“Oranges and Sweet Sister Boy,” Judy Ruiz (x 2)

“Under the Influence,” Scott Russell Sanders (x 2 ) “The Men we Carry in our Minds,” Scott Russell Sanders (x 2) “The Singular First Person,” Scott Russell Sanders “The Inheritance of Tools,” Scott Russell Sanders

“Letter to President Pierce, 1855,” Chief Seattle (x 2)

“Repeat After Me,” David Sedaris “Loggerheads,” David Sedaris “A Plague of Tics,” David Sedaris “Guy Walks into a Bar Car,” David Sedaris “The Drama Bug,” David Sedaris “Remembering My Childhood on the Continent of Africa,” David Sedaris

“On Noise,” Seneca “Asthma,” Seneca “Scipio’s Villa,” Seneca “Slaves,” Seneca “Epistle 47,” Seneca “Sick,” Seneca

“Language and Literature from a Pueblo Indian Perspective,” Leslie Marmon Silko (x 2)

“What Should a Billionaire Give—and What Should You?,” Peter Singer (x 2) from Animal Liberation , Peter Singer

“A Century of Cinema,” Susan Sontag (x 2) “Regarding the Pain of Others,” Susan Sontag (x 2) “Notes on ‘Camp,'” Susan Sontag from “Freak Show,” Susan Sontag “Unguided Tour,” Susan Sontag from “AIDS and Its Metaphors,” Susan Sontag.

“Declaration of Sentiments and Resolutions,” Elizabeth Cady Stanton (x 3) “Seneca Falls Keynote Address,” Elizabeth Cady Stanton

“Black Men and Public Space,” Brent Staples (x 3) “Why Colleges Shower Their Students with A’s,” Brent Staples

“Aes Triplex,” Robert Louis Stevenson “The Lantern-bearers,” Robert Louis Stevenson “An Apology for Idlers,” Robert Louis Stevenson “On Marriage,” Robert Louis Stevenson

“A Modest Proposal,” Jonathan Swift (x 6) “Good Manners and Good Breeding,” Jonathan Swift “A Meditation upon a Broom-stick,” Jonathan Swift

“Mother Tongue,” Amy Tan (x 6)

“Decolonizing the Mind,” Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o (x 2)

“Lives of a Cell,” Lewis Thomas “Notes on Punctuation,” Lewis Thomas “To Err is Human,” Lewis Thomas “Becoming a Doctor,” Lewis Thomas “The Medusa and the Snail,” Lewis Thomas

“Civil Disobedience,” Henry David Thoreau (x 3) “Walking,” Henry David Thoreau (x 2) “Where I Lived, and What I Lived For,” Henry David Thoreau (x 2) “The Battle of the Ants,” Henry David Thoreau “Night and Moonlight,” Henry David Thoreau

“The Secret Life of James Thurber,” James Thurber “Sex Ex Machina,” James Thurber “My Own Ten Rules for a Happy Marriage,” James Thurber “Snapshot of a Dog,” James Thurber

“Ain’t I a Woman?,” Sojourner Truth (x 2)

“Advice to Youth,” Mark Twain (x 2) “Corn-pone Opinions,” Mark Twain “Italian without a master,” Mark Twain “Thoughts of God,” Mark Twain from Life on the Mississippi “Letters from the Earth,” Mark Twain

“In Search of our Mothers’ Gardens,” Alice Walker (x 2) “Looking for Zora,” Alice Walker “Beauty: When the Other Dancer Is the Self,” Alice Walker “Becoming What We’re Called,” Alice Walker

“Consider the Lobster,” David Foster Wallace (x 3) “Ticket to the Fair,” David Foster Wallace “Shipping Out: On the (Nearly Lethal) Comforts of a Luxury Cruise,” David Foster Wallace

“Once More to the Lake,” E.B. White (x 9) “The Ring of Time,” E.B. White “About Myself,” E.B. White

“Writing and Analyzing a Story,” Eudora Welty (x 2) “Sweet Devouring,” Eudora Welty “Clamorous to Learn,” Eudora Welty “One Writer’s Beginnings,” Eudora Welty “The Little Store,” Eudora Welty “Listening,” Eudora Welty

“The Clan of One-Breasted Women,” Terry Tempest Williams (x 2)

“A Preface to Persius,” Edmund Wilson (x 2) “Old Stone House,” Edmund Wilson “Life is a Narrative,” Edmund Wilson

“Yeager,” Tom Wolfe (x 3) “Putting Daddy On,” Tom Wolfe “The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby,” Tom Wolfe

The Death of the Moth,” Virginia Woolf (x 6) “In Search of a Room of One’s Own,” Virginia Woolf (x 2) “Leslie Stephen,” Virginia Woolf “Harriette Wilson,” Virginia Woolf “Ellen Terry,” Virginia Woolf “Street Haunting,” Virginia Woolf from Three Guineas , Virginia Woolf

Anthologies Surveyed:

The Art of the Personal Essay: An Anthology from the Classical Era to the Present , ed. Philip Lopate (1997); The Best American Essays of the Century, ed. Joyce Carol Oates and Robert Atwan (2001); Touchstone Anthology of Contemporary Creative Nonfiction: Work from 1970 to the Present , ed. Lex Williford and Michael Martone (2007); The Norton Reader: An Anthology of Nonfiction , 14th edition, ed. Melissa Goldthwaite, Joseph Bizup, John Brereton, Anne Fernald, Linda Peterson (2015); The Norton Book of Personal Essays , ed. Joseph Epstein (1997); The Best Creative Nonfiction , ed. Lee Gutkind, Volumes 1, 2, & 3 (2007); The Signet Book of American Essays , ed. M. Jerry Weiss and Helen Weiss (2006); The Oxford Book of Essays , ed. John Gross (1991); 50 Essays: A Portable Anthology , Samuel Cohen (2011); The Eloquent Essay: An Anthology of Classic & Creative Nonfiction , ed. John Loughery (2000); The Broadview Anthology of Expository Prose , Third Edition, ed. Laura Buzzard, Don LePan, Nora Ruddock, Alexandria Stuart (2016); The Next American Essay , ed. John D’Agata (2003) & The Lost Origins of the Essay , ed. John D’Agata (2009) & The Making of the American Essay , ed. John D’Agata (2016); Contemporary Creative Nonfiction , ed. B. Minh Nguyen and Porter Shreve (2005); Contemporary Creative Nonfiction: The Art of Truth , ed. Bill Roorbach (2001); 40 Model Essays , Second edition, ed. Jane E. Aaron and Ellen Kuhl Repetto (2003); The Seagull Reader: Essays , Third Edition, ed. Joseph Kelly (2015)

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27 Best Memoirs: Unforgettable Stories That Inspire

These autobiographies deliver poignant self-reflection, humor, and resilience.

men we reaped, i know why the caged bird sings, year of magical thinking, kitchen confidential, heavy, party of one, memoirs

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Whether it's an account of someone else's childhood adventures, professional triumphs, or personal struggles, these stories are meant to transport you — the reader — to new places and broaden your understanding of the human experience. The memoirs in this roundup resonate deeply and will leave you with a lasting impression you won't be able to unsee in the best possible way. We know you'll appreciate these selections. Memoirs or not, they represent some of the best books ever published .

From juicy tales from celebrities to acclaimed writers to renowned chefs and even lesser-known yet compelling voices, each book offers a unique lens on life. Check out the best memoirs below!

More Books: The Best Books from Reese Witherspoon’s Book Club • 19 Books About the Royal Family • The Juiciest Celebrity Memoirs

Anthony Bourdain "Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Kitchen Underbelly" (2000)

You’ve probably seen this book on several similar lists, but that’s because it’s endlessly interesting. Bourdain dishes on such a niche culture—that of high-octane kitchens in some of the world’s best restaurants—and doesn’t shy away from some of its ugliest qualities. He gets personal, too, with anecdotes both amusing and somber.

Sonali Deraniyagala "Wave by Sonali Deraniyagala" (2013)

Sri Lankan writer and economist Sonali Deraniyagala lost her parents, her husband, and her two young sons in the 2004 tsunami that devastated parts of Thailand, Sri Lanka, Indonesia, and India. In this relentless memoir, she explores the seemingly bottomless depths of grief and how our power to remember the past can be healing. Readers who love a resolution might look elsewhere, but they’d be missing out on some unflinching, courageous writing.

Roxane Gay "Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body" (2017)

Widely recommended as one of the best books of 2017, Hunger is Roxane Gay’s raw and powerful memoir about her own self-image and our society’s obsession with appearance. There’s a reason Gay is such a prolific writer today, whether you follow her musings on Twitter or her New York Times column; she is incredibly inquisitive and can make any reader question the status quo. Hunger is no exception.

Jennette McCurdy "I’m Glad My Mom Died" (2022)

In what was arguably the most talked-about memoir of the past year, actor and writer/director Jennette McCurdy details what went on behind the scenes in her life before, during, and after making the hit Nickelodeon show iCarly . She bears it all—discussing her eating disorder and the toxic relationship she had with her mother—while using pitch perfect humor, in a memoir that’s hard to stomach at times. But it’s worth it to see how she ultimately takes back control of her life.

Patric Gagne "Sociopath: A Memoir" (2024)

"Sociopath: A Memoir" by self-identified Patric Gagne takes a deep dive into the author's life as he navigates the complexities of living with antisocial personality disorder. Gagne, now a writer and mental health advocate, offers an unflinching look at her experiences. Throughout its chapters, she sheds light on the challenges and misunderstandings surrounding sociopathy.

With personal anecdotes and introspective insights, she aims to humanize the condition and foster empathy for others in the same position. For those interested in mental health, it's a crucial read and one of the best memoirs you can opt for, as it provides a rare, authentic perspective on a frequently stigmatized disorder of sociopathy.

Saeed Jones "How We Fight for Our Lives" (2019)

Saeed Jones, an award-winning poet, writes with such a distinct style in this searing memoir about coming of age as a young, black, gay man from the South. He writes about grief, about identity in a world that makes it hard to find one, and about acceptance. It’s a short read in length (at 192 pages) but leaves a memorable impression.

Carmen Maria Machado "In the Dream House" (2019)

If you want to read a book that turns the concept of a memoir on its head, pick up Carmen Maria Machado’s In the Dream House . While playing with traditional form, Machado delves into the abuse she suffered in a same-sex relationship. She references horror tropes and fairy tales and gives readers a completely vulnerable (and often terrifying) look into a dark and traumatizing experience. We’ve heard the audio version is just as engrossing.

Chanel Miller "Know My Name" (2019)

You might remember Chanel Miller as Emily Doe. After being sexually assaulted by Brock Turner on the Stanford University campus in 2015, she wrote a victim impact statement under this name that reverberated around the world. In this profound memoir, she reclaims her real name and reveals the frustrating truths surrounding victimhood and the criminal justice system. But her writing also divulges her incredible strength—it’s a powerful read that this writer finished in one sitting.

Eric Ripert "32 Yolks: From My Mother’s Table to Working the Line" (2016)

Two memoirs on this list from acclaimed chefs? We couldn’t resist. For those who might’ve already enjoyed Bourdain’s Kitchen Confidential , might we suggest Eric Ripert’s 32 Yolks . Ripert is, as some will know, the famed French chef behind renowned New York City restaurant Le Bernardin. In this memoir, he chronicles his upbringing in a fractured family in the south of France and how food was always a great comfort. Equal parts fun, infuriating, and awe-inspiring, Ripert includes high-stakes stories from his days in culinary school and working the line at fine dining establishments in Paris.

Jesmyn Ward "Men We Reaped" (2013)

For anyone who loves Jesmyn Ward’s renowned novels like Sing, Unburied, Sing or Salvage the Bones , her memoir should be next on your TBR list. Here, she chronicles her upbringing in rural Mississippi and remembers the five men in her life that she lost in the space of four years to suicide, drugs, and sheer bad luck. The most deeply felt is her brother, who was hit by a drunk driver. With beautiful, introspective prose, Ward delves into masculinity, poverty, survivor’s guilt, and loneliness.

Maya Angelou "I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings" (1969)

An American classic, Maya Angelou ’s debut memoir recounts the acclaimed author ’s childhood and adolescence from Arkansas to Missouri to California. She touches on themes of identity and self-acceptance and recounts the abhorrent racism she and her family experienced, as well as the sexual violence she suffered at the hands of her mother’s boyfriend. But there’s great joy here, too, especially when young Angelou learns to come out of her shell through her love of literature.

Joan Didion "The Year of Magical Thinking" (2005)

From acclaimed writer Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking recounts the sudden death of her husband and the hospitalization of their daughter within days of each other. (Her daughter eventually died at 39, which Didion writes about in Blue Nights .) It’s an engrossing and vulnerable look into a year of experiencing and coping with tragedy—filled, of course, with the writer’s famously incisive prose.

Dave Holmes "Party of One: A Memoir in 21 Songs" (2017)

We all have songs that can conjure specific memories. Writer, comedian, and TV personality Dave Holmes takes that notion to heart in his memoir, where he writes about growing up Catholic and closeted in Missouri and how he “accidentally” became an MTV VJ. There’s a plethora of references to ʼ80s and ʼ90s music and self-deprecating humor that strikes the perfect balance.

Kiese Laymon "Heavy" (2018)

With the deeply moving Heavy , Kiese Laymon shares the trials of his upbringing in Jackson, Mississippi. It’s written in the second person, addressing his mother, and it touches on his relationship to his body and how racism permeated his views of himself and the world around him. This modern memoir should be on every reading list.

Tara Westover "Educated" (2018)

It can be hard at times to read Tara Westover’s bestselling memoir, Educated . Along with her incredible journey to becoming a scholar at Harvard and Cambridge without receiving any kind of formal education, she recounts the psychological and physical abuse she suffered while growing up with her survivalist family in the mountains of Idaho. But it’s an unforgettable story about her will to change the course of her life.

Casey Wilson "The Wreckage of My Presence" (2021)

Reading actress and comedian Casey Wilson’s memoir is like sinking into a comfy couch with your favorite beverage, ready to hear all of your best friend’s exploits. You’ll be laughing out loud during some chapters—whether they’re about her affinity for the Real Housewives franchise or behind-the-scenes moments from the (cut much too short) ABC comedy Happy Endings —then shedding tears the next, as she mourns the death of her mother. This is a quippy, heartwarming addition to any bookshelf.

Michelle Obama "Becoming" (2018)

In Michelle Obama 's memoir, "Becoming," the former First Lady of the United States chronicles her journey from growing up on the South Side of Chicago to her time in the White House . Obama shares personal stories about her childhood, education, career, motherhood, and experience as a First Lady.

This powerful and inspiring read gives insights into her challenges and triumphs, including moments in history you might even remember. Her advocacy for education, health, and women's rights are major themes in her book and life. It is a must-read for those interested in personal growth, resilience, and the life of one of the most influential women in recent history.

Drew Barrymore "Wildflower" (2015)

Drew Barrymore's memoir "Wildflower" comprises of personal essays where the actress reflects on her unconventional upbringing , career in Hollywood, and her journey to becoming a successful actress and mother. Through candid and heartfelt stories, she shares the lessons learned from her tumultuous childhood , early fame, and struggles with addiction.

"Wildflower" is an inspiring read for its honesty and resilience, offering an intimate glimpse into her life and evolution into the grounded and joyous adult we see today on her own talk show.

Glennon Doyle "Untamed" (2020)

"Untamed" by Glennon Doyle is a memoir that chronicles the author's journey to find her true self. Doyle, a renowned speaker and activist, shares her experiences with personal struggles, including divorce and coming out. During the process, she learns to trust her inner voice. It's one of the best memoirs you can read because it challenges societal norms, encouraging readers to break free from expectations and live authentically just as Doyle did. With its powerful message of self-discovery and empowerment, "Untamed" is a compelling read for anyone looking to embrace their true identity and find liberation in their own lives.

Sandra Tsing Loh "The Madwoman and the Roomba: My Year of Domestic Mayhem" (2020)

"The Madwoman and the Roomba: My Year of Domestic Mayhem" is a humorous memoir by award-winning columnist Sandra Tsing Loh. The book captures Loh's chaotic and relatable experiences managing household life, technology mishaps, and the everyday challenges of modern domesticity.

Through her witty anecdotes and sharp observations, she explores themes of middle age, parenting, and the absurdities of suburban life. You should read it for its laugh-out-loud humor and keen insights into the trials and tribulations of family and home management. It may even give you a comforting and comedic take on the universal struggles of domestic life if that's where you're at in life.

Ysolt Usigan is a lifestyle writer and editor who has created share-worthy content for publishers like Shape , What To Expect , Cafe Mom , TODAY , CBS News , HuffPo , The Bump , Health , Ask Men , and BestGifts . A working mom of two, her editorial expertise in shopping, parenting, and home are rooted in her everyday life. Her passion is hunting for the best products and sharing them with the masses, so others don't have to waste time and money.

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David Firestone

Deputy Editor, the Editorial Board

Biden Should Listen Hard to Trump’s Ravings

Several voices in the Democratic Party are telling President Biden to either stay in the race or leave. He seems to be listening only to those telling him, against all evidence, that he can still win in November. But the real voice Biden should care most about isn’t that of a Democrat at all. The president should be required to watch all 80 minutes of the unhinged rant let loose by the Republican candidate on Tuesday in Florida.

It couldn’t really be called a speech; Donald Trump doesn’t give those. Instead, standing on his golf course in Doral, Trump just lobbed random lies and nonsense into the crowd, as if firing a T-shirt gun. There was no particular coherence or theme to it, beyond apocalyptic descriptions of the failures of the Biden administration, now featuring the new cartoon character “Laffin’ Kamala Harris.” His weird pauses and bumbled words often rivaled Biden’s speaking problems, and the content was far worse.

By pursuing legal charges against him and his cronies for trying to stay in power in 2020, Biden “and his thugs,” Trump said, “are turning America into Communist Cuba.” Biden “ doesn’t know what a synagogue is ,” he said. Electric cars are essentially golf carts and have to be recharged for three hours every 45 minutes, he said. Melania won’t buy him bacon anymore because it’s too expensive. He challenged Biden to a golf contest. And then, ignoring the statistics showing a sharp drop in crime in Washington, D.C., this year, he produced this twisted take on tourism at the city’s biggest attractions:

“Right now, if you leave Florida, ‘Oh, let’s go, darling, let’s look at the Jefferson Memorial, let’s look at the Washington Monument, let’s go and look at some of the beautiful scenes,’ and you end up getting shot, mugged, raped.” That would come as a shock to the crowds of tourists on the Mall in Washington this summer.

Trump’s remarks should prompt revulsion and an immediate desire to do whatever it takes to keep him from the White House. No sacrifice should be considered too great for this cause, even the self-sacrifice of Biden’s personal ambitions. By staying in the race, Biden is making it far more likely that a disordered fearmonger is going to displace him. Dave Wasserman, a prominent political analyst at Cook Political Report, says the race is no longer a tossup ; Trump has a considerable advantage since the debate, and Cook just shifted six important states in Trump’s direction.

The Biden campaign put out a sharp retort to Trump’s rant, but news releases won’t do the job when the infirmities of the man at the top of the Democratic ticket continue to drive away voters, state by state.

Serge Schmemann

Editorial Board Member

Macron’s Gamble Has Opened the Door to ‘La Rupture’

Two terms crop up often in the French political lexicon: “la rupture” and “la cohabitation.” The former means the same as in English and is applied to any political parting of the ways — between candidates, parties, ideologies. “Cohabitation” refers to times when the president and the majority in the National Assembly fall into different political camps.

Both terms have been in heavy use since the second and final round of the surprise election President Emmanuel Macron called on June 10, after the far right scored big in elections to the European Parliament. Macron’s timing and calculations remain a bit puzzling, but stopping Marine Le Pen and her nationalist, anti-immigrant National Rally was one major goal; another was to achieve “clarity” in a muddled political landscape in which the president was growing increasingly unpopular. French elections come in two rounds, and Macron probably hoped that a strong showing by Le Pen in round one would shock the electorate into common sense in round two.

The gambit succeeded. After scoring big in the first round Le Pen was blocked in the second. But clarity was not to be. Rather than flock to Macron’s center, voters shifted to a hastily assembled bloc of left-wing parties called the New Popular Front, which included traditional Socialists, radical leftists, Communists and Greens. They are now the biggest grouping in the National Assembly, the French parliament.

That was the rupture. Now comes the challenge of cohabitation. The left-wing coalition is hardly favorable for Macron, especially given that the strongest party in the grouping, the aggressively named France Unbowed, is also the most radical, under the rabble-rousing Jean-Luc Mélenchon. He doesn’t get along with Macron, or most any of his partners, and has already demanded the prime ministry for his party.

The left, moreover, will go after many of Macron’s pet economic policies. Last year, the president unleashed fiery protests when he raised the retirement age from 62 to 64; the left wants to lower it to 60, along with other costly social spending the French economy is not in shape to handle. And Mélenchon, a supporter of the Palestinian cause, might try to recognize a Palestinian state.

There’s no indication yet of Macron’s choice for prime minister. He could try someone from his humbled party, or an acceptable leftist, or an apolitical technocrat. In any case, past bouts of cohabitation have not achieved much.

As for the far right, blocking the National Rally — again — may have brought relief, but it was hardly a victory. The party got 37 percent of the vote and increased its seats in the parliament from 89 to 142, the most of any single party. It can’t be dismissed as the radical fringe of nativists and antisemites the way it was in its early years.

So we’re likely to hear “rupture” a lot more.

Pamela Paul

Opinion Columnist

It’s an Old Story: Great Authors Are Not Always Great People

Is a single transgression enough to torpedo a writer’s reputation — Virginia Woolf wearing blackface , for example? Or does the full-throated denouncement require a lifetime of racism, antisemitism, homophobia, sexism, Naziism or collaboration, along the lines of Jack London, Henry Miller, Thomas Mann or Jean Rhys?

All are writers who are still read.

But these are different times, and so the question arises anew with regard to recently named transgressors, Neil Gaiman and Alice Munro , both celebrated, even beloved figures.

Let’s go over what we know. With Alice Munro , the facts are straightforward and damning . According to an essay by Munro’s daughter Andrea Skinner in The Toronto Star, Munro stayed married to the man who pleaded guilty to sexually abusing her daughter.

With Neil Gaiman, the issue is knottier. The author was recently accused of sex abuse and rape , allegations he has emphatically denied . We don’t know what happened, but recent history shows that for some audiences, accusations alone are too often sufficient evidence. It doesn’t bode well.

The question of whether you can separate the art and the artist is old and vexing, with no clear answer, though the current cultural consensus holds strongly against. As Jean Luc Godard ( alleged to be antisemitic ) once said , “How can I hate John Wayne upholding Goldwater and yet love him tenderly when abruptly he takes Natalie Wood into his arms in the last reel of ‘The Searchers’?”

Even some who argue that, say, Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot or Louis-Ferdinand Celine can still be appreciated despite reprehensible views or acts may also insist that artists whose work is closely tied to their personal lives, like Woody Allen or David Foster Wallace, for example, should be held to account.

In these latter-day cases, the verdict, spiked with envy and resentment, seems preordained. Will there be a double standard between Neil Gaiman, who is a prominent and commercially successful online figure, and Alice Munro, who led a humble, quiet existence in Canada and whose stature among the literati has achieved Joan Didion-level worship?

Most people in the literary world know that writers are flawed humans just like everyone else, only a little more so. Even so, most of us do not really know these people; we know them mostly through their writing.

Great writing is about human complexity, not the black-and-white moralizing of the internet mob. In the eyes of the wise reader, whatever our judgments of the authors, their writing only becomes yet more interesting, more telling, more potent.

Jamelle Bouie

The Anti-Abortion Movement Is Perverting the 14th Amendment

Donald Trump pushed the Republican Party’s platform committee to change its language on abortion, and on the surface it looks like an exercise in relative moderation.

Where the 2016 and 2020 Republican platforms called for a national abortion ban, demanded a constitutional amendment to establish due-process rights for embryos and fetuses and stated that “the unborn child has a fundamental right to life which cannot be infringed,” the 2024 platform simply states the Republican Party’s belief that “the 14th Amendment to the Constitution of the United States guarantees that no person can be denied life or liberty without due process and that the states are, therefore, free to pass laws protecting those rights.”

This change, said NBC News and other outlets , is a “softening” of the party’s position on abortion.

But is it really?

The lodestar for the anti-abortion movement has always been a constitutional guarantee of fetal personhood, which would outlaw abortion and threaten the legality of both IVF and hormonal birth control. (This endorsement of protection for fetal personhood also makes clear that the platform’s ostensible support for IVF is cheap political posturing.) To state, in the context of abortion, that the 14th Amendment guarantees due process and that legislatures are free to pass laws “protecting those rights” is to outright endorse the legal theory that the Constitution already outlaws abortion with or without amendment.

The new platform language may lack the specificity of the old, but it expresses the same basic commitment to vast restrictions on reproductive rights and bodily autonomy. Moreover, the Republican Party coalition is still grounded in the grass roots activity of anti-abortion groups and the ideological ambitions of movement jurists and politicians. The platform makes no real difference in their efforts to ban abortion and limit a woman’s right to live a free life and pursue her own vision of the good.

It should be said as well that in the same way it is perverse for conservative legal activists and Supreme Court justices to use the Reconstruction amendments — written and ratified to assist the formerly enslaved and enshrine a principle of anti-subordination in the Constitution — to dismantle this nation’s halting efforts at substantive racial equality, it is also perverse for the anti-abortion movement to use the 14th Amendment as a cudgel against bodily autonomy in the name of so-called fetal rights.

Animating that amendment, as well as the 13th, was the reality that Black Americans could not be secure in their persons — in their bodies and reproductive capacities — as long as the badges, incidents and vestiges of chattel slavery endured in the nation’s constitutional order. If, in other words, American slavery rested on reproductive enslavement — the forced birth and breeding of men and women for profit — then anti-slavery had to mean reproductive liberation.

What the anti-abortion movement wants is a dark and cruel inversion of what the Reconstruction framers intended.

The Second-Worst Decision Democrats Could Make Right Now

I was an early and enthusiastic fan of Kamala Harris when she first ran for president. She had an inspiring personal story and an impressive résumé. Here was someone who had been a senator, an attorney general and a prosecutor. She had been an advocate for recidivism reduction and other measures of criminal justice reform, and had proved she could be tough in the Senate, where her questioning was described as “prosecutorial.” She seemed gutsy and capable and a fine candidate for national office.

Wow, was I wrong. Look, it’s hard to shine as vice president — as John Adams put it, “the most insignificant office that ever the invention of man contrived or his imagination conceived.” But Harris has also proved how easy it is to sink.

Between her high staff turnover, her ineffectiveness on migration and the border, her chronically low approval ratings and her often embarrassing public experiences — remember, Harris chose to subject herself to the cringe on “The Drew Barrymore Show” — she has not exuded competence or inspired confidence.

Yet despite Joe Biden insisting he can still drive, dagnabbit, talk of anointing Harris as his replacement has started to take hold. Representative James Clyburn of South Carolina said he would support Harris if Biden drops out, also proposing a mini-primary. “The Democratic Nominee in 2024 should be Kamala Harris,” the former congressman Tim Ryan wrote in Newsweek last week. “She is brilliant, compassionate, engaging, funny and totally down to earth,” he wrote, and “more importantly, she deserves a chance to go to the American people and show us her mettle.”

Choosing a presidential candidate should not be about someone proving herself or “deserving a chance.” It should be about who has the best chance. This should not be about advancing women, Black people or people of South Asian descent. It should be about beating back Donald Trump with the most electable and capable candidate possible.

That Harris leads Biden slightly in polls as a possible replacement candidate only shows how low that bar is. Those same polls suggest she would still lose against Trump.

If some racist or sexist Americans wouldn’t vote for Harris based on her ethnicity, race or sex, shame on them. But to argue against Harris is not inherently racist or sexist.

If Democrats are serious about not wanting to lose this election — and most important, preventing Trump from resuming power — they need to stop trying to make Harris happen and allow an open primary. Americans need a candidate who will win.

Michelle Cottle

Opinion Writer

What Primary Voters Didn’t Know About President Biden

Buckle up for another bumpy political week. As Washington lawmakers slouch back from their holiday break, they have been greeted by a defiant letter from President Biden, effectively daring them to try derailing his re-election bid.

Thank you for sharing your concerns, he wrote. “I am not blind to them.” That said, he continued, “I wouldn’t be running again if I did not absolutely believe I was the best person to beat Donald Trump in 2024.”

No matter how many times he repeats it, this assurance remains worthless. What high-ranking politician doesn’t believe in his own exceptionalism? I mean, Ron DeSantis was 100 percent convinced he was the best person to beat Trump this year, and we see where that got him.

But where Biden seems intent on making toxic mischief is with grand pronouncements about preserving democracy.

“We had a Democratic nomination process and the voters have spoken clearly and decisively,” he asserted, ticking through the number of votes, the percentage of the primary vote and the number of delegates he amassed — as if a re-election primary coronation is anything like an open race.

“Do we now just say this process didn’t matter?” he wrote. “That the voters don’t have a say? I decline to do that.” Only the voters decide the nominee, he said, not the press, pundits, donors or other “selected” groups of individuals. “How can we stand for democracy in our nation if we ignore it in our own party?”

So much to unpack. Let’s just go with this piece: While there is an abundance of Democratic pundits, donors and members of “selected” groups, I’m confident it’s not enough to account for the 59 percent of Democrats who, post-debate, fear Biden is too old for the job, according to the latest Times/Siena poll.

What about these voters? Or the 79 percent of independents who expressed similar anxiety? Do they not matter? Are we not concerned about their faith and trust as they grapple with apparently having been misled about the president’s fitness? How do they feel about Biden’s people stage-managing and shielding him to the point that it was almost impossible for voters to assess his fitness until absurdly late in the race? Are the voters who feel betrayed going to punish the entire Democratic Party come November?

Biden aggressively pitching the situation as him and the grass roots versus a bunch of snooty elites may make him feel tough. But it accomplishes little more than fueling discord and division within his own party. He needs to show people he is up to the job, and not just assert as much while pretending this is a crisis manufactured by bed-wetting establishment types.

The president and his team have proved they know how to write a strong and salty letter. If only that were all there was to the job.

Katherine Miller

Opinion Writer and Editor

The Big Decisions Facing Trump and Biden This Week

Every Monday morning on The Point, we kick off the week with a tipsheet on the latest in the presidential campaign. Here’s what we’re looking at this week:

This will be a very full, unpredictable week of politics. In terms of where everyone is: Donald Trump will hold rallies in Miami on Tuesday and near Pittsburgh on Saturday. President Biden will host a NATO summit in Washington beginning Tuesday, and is expected to hold a news conference on Thursday. He will also campaign in Detroit on Friday. Kamala Harris will hold a campaign event in Las Vegas on Tuesday, and Jill Biden will hold a slate of campaign events in the Southeast on Monday.

How strong is Biden’s support with congressional Democrats? This week might answer that. One thing I’ve seen in the last decade that will most likely shape the politics of it, though, is really about what elected officials say publicly; the public pays attention to what politicians say on the record, so if they back him or tell him to leave, voters will take that more seriously than the private commentary.

On Sunday, a number of Pennsylvania Democrats, including both senators, welcomed Biden at the airport, and there have been shows of support from people like Bernie Sanders and Joyce Beatty . A small number of House members, like Minnesota’s Angie Craig, have said publicly that he should step aside; there’s also been reporting on private meetings where additional Democrats have said he should withdraw.

There are elected officials like Senator Chris Murphy of Connecticut, who said Sunday there were still voter concerns about Biden’s 2024 viability that the president needs to address this week. Congress is coming back to Washington on Monday, which might make things more chaotic in the short term, when a few hundred lawmakers, aides and reporters begin interacting. How congressional leaders like Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries approach his candidacy seems likely to shape a lot.

Trump is widely expected to announce his vice-presidential pick this week — maybe J.D. Vance, Doug Burgum or Marco Rubio, though it could be someone else. That pick might not change people’s perceptions of Trump personally, but it might give a real lens to the rest of the campaign.

In 2012, for instance, whether Mitt Romney intended this or not, his selection of Paul Ryan affirmed the idea of their campaign as an ideological, austerity-minded one; in retrospect, that was probably the apex of entitlement-reform politics in America. Vance is now very much a post-Trump figure , and there’s a universe in which his selection makes the rest of Trump’s campaign and potential presidency look different and more ideologically aggressive and populist, compared with, say, Burgum, who is perceived as being more from the corporate, business world.

Republicans are also meeting, privately, about the party’s platform this week. Longtime anti-abortion activists are deeply unhappy with the reported plan to drop the party’s commitment to a national abortion ban in favor of Trump’s “states should decide” position that doesn’t really satisfy anyone, especially people who want abortion to be legal.

Maureen Dowd

On Congenital Liars, Then and Now

In his Friday back-against-the-wall interview with George Stephanopoulos of ABC News, President Biden said of Donald Trump, “The man is a congenital liar.”

That rang some bells with longtime Times readers.

In 1996, when Bill Clinton was running for re-election, William Safire wrote a blistering Times column about Hillary Clinton called “ Blizzard of Lies. ” Citing Whitewater, Travelgate, exponential commodity trading profits and behavior in the wake of her friend Vince Foster’s death, he wrote: “Americans of all political persuasions are coming to the sad realization that our First Lady — a woman of undoubted talents who was a role model for many in her generation — is a congenital liar. Drip by drip, like Whitewater torture, the case is being made that she is compelled to mislead, and to ensnare her subordinates and friends in a web of deceit.”

Then the kerfuffle began. Bill Clinton said he wanted to punch Safire in the face . His spokesman, Mike McCurry, told reporters: “The president, if he were not the president, would have delivered a more forceful response to that on the bridge of Mr. Safire’s nose.”

Safire was presented with a pair of red boxing gloves on “Meet the Press.”

The famous Times wordsmith, who had a column called “On Language” in addition to his conservative political column, was accused by some of choosing the wrong word. Congenital is defined in the Oxford English Dictionary as “Existing or dating from one’s birth,” as in a “congenital disease or defect.” It was harsh.

As the author and journalist Garry Wills wrote in The Washington Post , “It seems a gratuitous, if not cruel, description of a woman who is not accused, or suspected, of such innate deceptiveness during the first 45 years of her life.”

My pal Safire took all the criticism with his usual equanimity. But one day during this donnybrook, I wandered into his office down the hall from mine in the Washington bureau. I wanted to see what he thought. He wasn’t there but in plain view, he had left a list of synonyms for “congenital,” starting with “chronic.” So he may have had his doubts about the word he chose, as well.

But in the latest instance, President Biden probably chose the right word. Donald Trump not only gives the impression that he has been lying since the cradle, but seems proud of it. So “congenital” works pretty well.

Frank Bruni

Contributing Opinion Writer

President Biden and the Lord Almighty

On Friday President Biden named the one scenario by which he’d decide to abandon his re-election campaign:

If “the Lord Almighty came down” and told him to.

Not if Democratic leaders in Congress insisted it was best for the party and country. Not if other prominent Democrats begged. Not if polls showed him losing to Donald Trump in November. (They already do.) Biden essentially said that those leaders would never lose faith and those polls can’t be trusted. Everything will be fine. Everything is fine.

Either Biden genuinely believes that or has decided that a pantomime of unsullied confidence is the best damage control. Neither possibility reassures me, and I suspect that neither will end Democratic worries about his fitness and about voters’ impressions of it.

Biden made his remarks in an interview with George Stephanopoulos of ABC News that was all of 22 minutes long and was broadcast, unedited, in prime time. The interview continued his effort to explain, improve on and erase his shockingly unsteady performance in a debate against Trump over a week ago.

And Biden indeed improved on it. He ably extolled his first-term record, even if some sentences were rickety, with some details incorrect. He wisely emphasized crucial differences between him and Trump and rightly recognized the stakes of defeating Trump.

But Stephanopoulos wasn’t asking Biden about Trump. He was asking Biden about his own health, and Biden deflected many of those questions or answered them tersely. He conceded no physical decline since 2020. He cast this current passage as 2020 all over again — needless panic and predictable underestimations of his strength. He pretty much rolled his eyes at a reference to his supposedly low approval rating. And he scoffed at the suggestion that he have a thorough neurological work-up.

Stephanopoulos kept asking about the future. Biden kept talking about the past.

But this isn’t 2020. The polls, the country, Biden — they’re all different. Does he fully get that?

“I’m the guy,” he said, over and over, and while that phrase typically teed up mention of one of his many legitimate accomplishments, it was also an assertion of his status, in his view, as the best and only Democrat to take on Trump, no matter the evidence to the contrary.

I hope with every fiber of my being that he’s right, because I doubt the Lord is descending anytime soon. And if he’s wrong? Heaven help us.

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On Self-Respect: Joan Didion’s 1961 Essay from the Pages of Vogue
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Joan Didion: Essays and Conversations by Cillian Murphy
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COMMENTS

Read 12 Masterful Essays by Joan Didion for Free Online, Spanning Her
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 ...
Joan Didion dead at 87: Essential books, essays to read now
and Boris Kachka. Dec. 23, 2021 1:24 PM PT. Joan Didion, who died Thursday at 87, produced decades' worth of memorable work across genres and subjects: personal essays, reporting and criticism ...
Joan Didion's Best Books: A Guide
The Joan Didion many people know is constructed from a few artifacts the real writer left behind when she died in 2021.There's her much-imitated (and sometimes parodied) 1967 essay "Goodbye to ...
Beyond the Books: Joan Didion's Essays, Profiles and Criticism
Dec. 23, 2021. Joan Didion, who died on Thursday at 87, is best known for her essay collections — " Slouching Towards Bethlehem ," " The White Album " and " After Henry ," to name a ...
7 Best Joan Didion Books You Need To Read Before You Die
7 Best Joan Didion Books. Image Source 1. Slouching Towards Bethlehem (1968) Slouching Towards Bethlehem is the first non-fiction book written by Joan Didion. It features a collection of essays about the writer's experiences in California during the 1960s. Some of these experiences include meeting a 5-year-old girl whose mother always gave ...
A Guide to Joan Didion's Books
Ms. Didion was a prolific writer of stylish essays, novels, screenplays and memoirs. ... Section A, Page 20 of the New York edition with the headline: Overview of Some of Didion's Best. Order ...
Joan Didion's 7 Best Books, From Essays To Fiction
Here are the best books by Joan Didion: 'The Year of Magical Thinking' (2005) Quintana Roo Dunne leans on a railing with her parents, John Gregory Dunne and Joan Didion, in 1976.
6 Essays By Joan Didion You Should Know
Joan Didion is lauded as one of the best literary journalists to emerge from the New Journalism school in the '60s, among Tom Wolfe, Terry Southern and Hunter S. Thompson, and one of California's wittiest contemporary writers.Best known for her sharply reported stories that service frequently dystopian and despondent cultural commentary, even Didion's more journalistic works are in part ...
Joan Didion: A guide to five of her most influential books
Slouching Towards Bethlehem, 1968. Courtesy. 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 ...
Essential Joan Didion Pieces to Read Now, Later, Forever
She's done it all: fiction, essays, political commentaries, memoirs, journalistic pieces and just about everything in between. Joan, now 83, has never not been relevant, but she's in the headlines again these days, as Netflix recently debuted the long-awaited Joan Didion: The Center Will Not Hold , a documentary-slash-love-letter made by ...
20 Great Articles and Essays by Joan Didion
Great articles and essays by the world's best journalists and writers. ... 20 Great Articles and Essays by Joan Didion Essential essays by a master of the form, all free to read online On Life and Death. Goodbye to All That "When I first saw New York some instinct, programmed by all the movies I had ever seen and all the songs I had ever heard ...
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Here's a list of nine Joan Didion essays every woman should read, ideally while still in her formative years, and a peek into what makes them unforgettable: 1. "On Self-Respect". There is a common ...
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December 23, 2021. Joan Didion, author, journalist, and style icon, died today after a prolonged illness. She was 87 years old. Here, in its original layout, is Didion's seminal essay "Self ...
Joan Didion: Why I Write ‹ Literary Hub
One reason I stole it was that I like the sound of the words: Why I Write. There you have three short unambiguous words that share a sound, and the sound they share is this: Article continues below. I. I. I. In many ways, 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.
10 essays that will get you hooked on Joan Didion
The titular essay of the 1979 collection is a lyrical odyssey through the stormy waters of Didion's life in the 60s. It begins with her meeting Jim Morrison during a recording session for The Doors.
8 Best Joan Didion Books
Below are 8 of Joan Didion's best books, including essay collections and several works of fiction. 1. The Year of Magical Thinking (2005) In what is perhaps Didion's best known work, she details one of the darkest periods of her life, in which she was mourning the loss of her husband caring for her comatose daughter, Quintana Roo Dunne, at ...
Slouching Towards Bethlehem by Joan Didion
At her best, Didion offers astute critiques of the failings and pretensions of the sundry parts of her nation. Favorite essays included "Slouching Towards Bethlehem," "On Keeping a Notebook," "On Self-Respect," and "Goodbye to All That." ... Didion's essays On Self-Respect, On Morality, On Keeping a Notebook reveal the narcissistic compulsions ...
Remembering essayist Joan Didion, a keen observer of American culture
Didion, who died Dec. 23, was known her cool, unsentimental observations. Her books include Slouching Towards Bethlehem and The Year of Magical Thinking. Originally broadcast in 1987 and 2005.
What should I read by Joan Didion? : r/literature
Welcome to /r/literature, a community for deeper discussions of plays, poetry, short stories, and novels. Discussions of literary criticism, literary history, literary theory, and critical theory are also welcome.
List of 10 Must-Read Joan Didion Books
6. Play It as It Lays. One can best describe the character Maria Wyeth's life as decayed, miserable, and desperate. Didion's novel, Play It as It Lays, is not one best ingested on a happy Saturday afternoon among the birds. Still, the often putridity of self-destruction is too interesting to deny.
Where should I begin with Joan Didion? Any suggestions
8 answers. To answer questions about Slouching Towards Bethlehem , please sign up . Iniville The essays are short but immersive. Slouching Towards Bethlehem or The White Album are both good places to start. My favorite is Where I Was From, which is more of a book-length essay about California. I am also a big fan of Play It As It Lays.
Which Joan Didion book should I read first? : r/booksuggestions
Joan Didion is one of my favorite authors! Generally, I would recommend starting with Slouching Towards Bethlehem. It's her most famous, it's many people's favorite (including mine), and it gives a great introduction to her writing style and what kind of topics interest her. It's all essays, most of them not very long, so it's easy to read in ...
The Most Anthologized Essays of the Last 25 Years
Sojourner Truth. "The Clan of One-Breasted Women," Terry Tempest Williams. The Full List. (all essays by writers with at least one duplication or three disparate essays anthologized) "The Great American Desert," Edward Abbey. "The Cowboy and his Cow," Edward Abbey. "Havasu," Edward Abbey. "Superman and Me," Sherman Alexie.
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Drew Barrymore's memoir "Wildflower" comprises of personal essays where the actress reflects on her unconventional upbringing, career in Hollywood, and her journey to becoming a successful actress ...
Opinion
Mr. Eagleton is a journalist and the author of "The Starmer Project." He wrote from London. The outcome seems predestined. The British Conservative Party, moribund after 14 years in office and ...
Conversations and insights about the moment.
According to an essay by Munro ... quiet existence in Canada and whose stature among the literati has achieved Joan Didion-level worship? ... Ron DeSantis was 100 percent convinced he was the best ...