Erik Visits an American Grave, Part 1,942

This is the grave of Joan Didion and John Gregory Dunne.

Born in 1934 in Sacramento, California, Joan Didion grew up middle class, the daughter of an Army Air Corps officer who was really more of an accountant, so they moved around all the time. Didion was a shy girl and became a great listener and chronicler of what she saw. She never moved from these characteristics. She ended up at the University of California for college, and graduated from Berkeley in 1956. She won an essay contest from Vogue that year, which led to her being hired by the magazine. That started just as a copywriter, but over the next eight years, she rose rapidly, as her incredible writing talent was obvious to all who could read. And unlike today, people did things such as read magazine articles and books. Today, they just scroll for stupid shit on Reddit and Tik Tok.

In 1963, Didion published her first novel, titled Run, River. It’s minor and few have read it, including me. But while writing it, she relied on her friend John Gregory Dunne to edit it. They fell in love and married soon after. Dunne was born in 1932 in Hartford. He grew up wealthy, the son of a leading heart surgeon. He became a writer to overcome a stutter as a child, but being artistic was encouraged in the family anyway, as his brother was Dominick Dunne, the film producer and writer. John Gregory went to Princeton, graduated in 1954, and moved to New York. He met Didion soon after.

In 1964, Didion and Dunne moved to California. Didion became the bard of southern California life in the next decade, while Dunne wrote Delano, one of the greatest pieces of labor journalism ever written, about the United Farm Workers grape strike. But soon it would be Didion who became the real powerhouse of this amazing couple of letters. They became stalwarts of the Los Angeles arts scene. They wrote screenplays together, including Panic in Needle Park, a very good picture which also introduced the world to Al Pacino. She especially would become well-known for her journalism, which she collected in 1968’s Slouching Toward Bethlehem, one of the foundational books of the so-called “New Journalism,” a literary style to nonfiction which included other figures such as Truman Capote, Hunter S. Thompson, and Gay Talese.

In 1966, they adopted a daughter, naming her Quintana Roo, after the Mexican state. This did not go well. The child had psychological issues her entire life and they were not very good parents, as Didion herself freely admitted later in life. I think it would have been nearly impossible to grow up to be a functional adult in that milieu anyway, with all the parties and drugs and stardom around you, the ambivalence of so many of these folks in actual parenting, etc. Then you add in mental instability that probably was just in her anyway. It’s a sad story. She became an uncontrollable alcoholic as she grew up and as you can see from the stone, died at the age of 39, drinking herself to death.

Remember back in the ye olde days when people read books? It’s no coincidence that the decline of reading books and the rise of American fascism happened at the same time. These days, you can’t assign much reading to college students or they really balk. When I took a modern American lit class in college, it was a novel a week and you really did have to do if you wanted to do well. They weren’t long novels, but there were a lot of them. One of them was Joan Didion’s Play It As It Lays, which remains one of my favorite novels thirty years later. To me, this is the peak all-time California book, the ultimate story of malaise and driving in what one could see as a paradise and yet never really was such a thing. Pair it with Nathaniel West’s The Day of the Locust to really get at the myths and realities of LA in our literary history. Didion and Dunne wrote the screenplay for the movie adaptation that starred Tuesday Weld and Anthony Perkins, but I haven’t seen it and no one seems to think it is good, except for Roger Ebert and he usually had a pretty sharp eye, so maybe I should watch it. Hard book to film though. They also wrote the screenplay for A Star is Born, the 1976 version. I haven’t seen that either, which is kind of surprising to me.

Still, I never really got into Didion’t other works much, and I’ve wanted to like them and have read many of them two or three times without really being able to dig them. That’s especially true of 1977’s A Book of Common Prayer, which works in one sense that you have this white woman in a disastrous Central American country and she knows it’s a problem but can’t get out of her own ass enough to care that much about why things are so messed up. But while diffidence is Didion’s thing, it’s hard for me to care much when there was so much as stake in the geopolitical background. Not surprisingly, the real takeaway is the character’s freakout about her daughter running off with the Marxist rebels, a clear analogy for the bad relationship with her own daughter, who was still just a kid.

I feel much the same way about 1984’s Democracy, also with the politics of Central America perhaps a bit too much in the background. But Didion was a smart reporter on social issues, including Central America, which she wrote about extensively. She also wrote bravely about the Central Park Five and the bogus prosecution of these boys for a crime they did not commit, for which of course Donald Trump wanted the death penalty, including after their exoneration.

Just as Quintana Roo’s body was falling apart over her drinking, Dunne had a heart attack and died in 2003. He was 71 years old. She dealt with these losses in her 2005 book The Year of Magical Thinking, which I haven’t read and probably should. It was overwhelming beloved and won all the awards. She turned it into a one-woman play for Broadway, with Vanessa Redgrave playing the lead when it went to the stage in 2007. She went back to memoir to discuss the relationship with her daughter in 2011’s Blue Nights. She spent her last years as a senior figure in American letters, though her final years saw her affected with the horrors of Parkinson’s. She died of that in 2021. She was 87 years old.

Joan Didion and John Gregory Dunne are buried in Cathedral Church of Saint John the Divine, Manhattan, New York.

Didion was one of the first living writers to be anthologized by the Library of America, beginning with Volume 325 of that august series. If you would like this series to visit other writers collected in the LOA, you can donate to cover the required expenses here. Constance Fenimore Woolson is in Rome, in case anyone has some extra Euros in their drawers and needs to offload them….. John Updike is in Plowville, Pennsylvania and Jonathan Schell is in Chilmark, Massachusetts. Previous posts in this series are archived here and here.