Photo: Joan Didion. Fountain: House of the book.
Joan Didion is one of the greatest American prose writers of the XNUMXth century.. She is known for her journalistic work and her chronicles. Her work is closely connected to literature and storytelling, which is why the narrative character of her journalism stands out. She has written several novels, but the best known and most widely read of hers is The year of magical thinking (2005)
She is an author of the American West, whose work contains all the new features of the new journalism of the 60s, as well as the social and cultural changes that occurred at that time. Joan Didion was a writer and journalist who transformed the art of telling.
Life of Joan Didion
Joan Didion was born in California in 1934.. His father was part of the United States Army Air Corps, so the moves were continuous. Although the family ended up again in Sacramento, Didion's birthplace. Her mother gave her a notebook and urged her to write. Activity that she carried out from a very early age, and that she knew how to combine with a growing interest in reading.
He graduated with a degree in English from the University of California at Berkeley and won a publication award Spindrift that allowed him to start working there. Very quickly he rose and combined his journalistic work with the writing of his essays and novels that anchored in the field of non-fiction. Didion has written various texts in prints of the size of Life, Esquire o The New York Times.
She married the writer John Gregory Dunne in 1964; and lived more than 20 years in Los Angeles. The two authors worked together on many professional projects. They joined their lives beyond the affective part until his death, which happened suddenly due to a heart attack in 2003.
The marriage had adopted a daughter, Quintana Roo Dunne. She died just over a year later. from his father due to a complication of pancreatitis. Joan Didion would express this life lesson through The year of magical thinking. Not only had the two people in his life left in a matter of months, but his only daughter had done so before she was even 40 years old.
Although she had been diagnosed with multiple sclerosis half a century ago, the disease never developed. Didion would die of Parkinson's disease at her Manhattan home at the end of 2021 at the age of 87.
Didion herself produced a stage adaptation of her novel The year of magical thinking, which would be taken to the Broadway tables. On the other hand, she was a member of the Academy of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
She has been compared to Susan Sontag, but Didion did not achieve the recognition or fame of the New York author.
Recognitions and writer character
For his job The year of magical thinking was recognized with National Award for Nonfiction. Therefore, the complexity of his writing must be verified, since this book is classified as a novel. Also for his great contribution to journalism, letters and society in the country recognized with the Medal for Distinguished Contributions to American Letters. Likewise, it is worth noting the honorary degrees that the prestigious Harvard and Yale Universities awarded her as a Doctor of Letters.
Didion was decisive, she was prepared to write about anything, no matter how difficult the issue was. She was, therefore, a great observer of reality, capable of transmuting what she saw into intimate perceptions that, however, moved away from sentimentality. He maintained realism in his work, without losing his humanity.
Joan Didion: narrative journalism
Although within fiction, he wrote novels, he dared with the cinematographic script and with the theater, The author is recognized especially for her narrative journalism, the chronicle and the essay. She was a revolutionary of storytelling and journalism during the second half of the 2000th century, despite the fact that her name in Spanish did not sound until the XNUMXs.
With her work, her vision and her stamp, she made a good part of what she was known, using her character and his knowledge of the world, leaving his country, the power it had become, in the background. He knew the way to develop an external prose and also a more intimate and personal one.
She was an author who wrote with her own voice, who knew how to put her style on track, combining reality and emotions. For this reason, her journalistic work has a narrative bias, which hovers around the fictional, but with realism and very powerful personal experiences. His writing is inserted in the new journalism.
His work emphasizes simplification and delicacy, even talking about the most sensitive issues. But his style can be very heterogeneous. Among his articles and his essay prose we also find neurotic and somewhat opaque texts.
The year of magical thinking
The year of magical thinking, from 2005, was his most read novel. This book is a fiction marked by the misfortune and torture of Didion herself. She was the result of the few months of pain that elapsed between the death of her husband and the illness and loss of her only daughter.
What is curious is that the author tries to escape sentimentality and transforms pain into a highly lucid act of understanding. To keep it under control and that its intensity does not kill you; really admirable for someone who suffers from it in the maximum expression of her. Thanks to this book, he was definitively introduced into the Spanish-speaking market..
Works in Spanish by Joan Didion
- As the game comes (1970). His first novel.
- a common liturgy (1977). Novel.
- Those who dream the American dream (2003). Anthology in Spanish with the author's most distinguished journalistic and personal essays.
- where am i from (2003). Memoirs published in Spanish in 2022.
- The year of magical thinking (2005).
- Blue nights (2011). Autobiographical story.
- your last wish (1996). Novel.
- south and west (2017). Essays on the southern United States resulting from a road trip.
- Troubled river (2018). Novel.
- What I mean (2021). Compilation of articles and chronicles written in its beginnings.