Literary Icon and Quintessential Los Angeles Writer Joan Didion Is Dead at 87

The feminist and literary icon and author Joan Didion, whose 1970 novel Play It As It Lays put Los Angeles on the literary map, has died at 87 years-old.

The cause was complications of Parkinson’s disease, according to an email sent by Paul Bogaards, an executive at Knopf, Ms. Didion’s publisher.

The New York Times: Didion, whose mordant dispatches on California culture and the chaos of the 1960s established her as a leading exponent of the New Journalism, and whose novels Play It as It Lays and The Book of Common Prayer proclaimed the arrival of a tough, terse, distinctive voice in American fiction.

Ms. Didion came to prominence with a series of incisive, searching feature articles in Life magazine and The Saturday Evening Post that explored the fraying edges of postwar American life. California, her native state, provided her with her richest material. In sharp, knowing vignettes, she captured its harshness and beauty, its role as a magnet for restless settlers, its golden promise and rapidly vanishing past, and its power as a cultural laboratory.

In two early groundbreaking essay collections, “Slouching Towards Bethlehem” (1968) and “The White Album” (1979) she turned her cool, apprehensive gaze on the hippies of Haight-Ashbury, on eccentrics and searchers like Bishop James Pike and Howard Hughes, on the film industry in the post-studio era, and on the death-tinged music of the Doors.

Movie Maker: The author whose cooly brilliant works included The White Album, Slouching Toward Bethlehem, Play It As It Lays and The Year of Magical Thinking has died at 87. She had already completed 1968’s Slouching Toward Bethlehem — classic reportage on 1960s Californian culture and counterculture — as well as 1970’s stark and stunning novel Play It As It Lays, when she and husband John Gregory Dunne took up screenwriting. Their collaborations included 1971’s The Panic of Needle Park, a breakout for Al Pacino; a 1972 adaptation of Play It As It Lays; the 1976 version of A Star Is Born; and 1996’s Robert Redford and Michelle Pfeiffer journalism drama Up Close & Personal. Dunne’s book Monster: Living Off the Big Screen, is an essential read on moviemaking, recounting his and Didion’s constant fights with Up Close and Personal producer Jon Avnet as the couple jetted from Malibu to Hawaii to New York City to write. At the 13:30 mark below, Avnet talks about how the fighting with Dunne and Didion turned into mutual admiration, and eventually a loving friendship.

The Center Will Not Hold: Joan Didion was also the subject of the 2017 documentary The Center Will Not Hold, directed by her nephew, actor-director Griffin Dunne.

Her Influence: Was endless. One of her most obvious admirers was Bret Easton Ellis, who took inspiration from Didion’s numb, deadpan prose to write his debut novel, Less Than Zero. In an interview we just posted just yesterday with The Scary of Sixty-First director Dasha Nekrasova, she answered one question by simply referencing the title of Didion’s first novel: “Play it as it lays.”

One Time: What I always think about when I think of Joan Didion was being in Bocas del Toro, Panama, trying to sort out what to do with my life after a big career move went hilariously poorly. I was hoping to write a lot, but my $12-a-night accommodations were incredibly sweaty, and outside was even hotter, and I couldn’t think straight. I found a little bar where I could drink iced coffee, and its little bookshelf included a worn paperback copy of Play It as It Lays. The coldness of the prose settled me into an illusion of comfort.

She established a distinctive voice in American fiction before turning to political reporting and screenplay writing. But it was California, her native state, that provided her with her richest material.