Joan Didion

May 15, 2022
Candid interviews with a literary icon. In nine interviews that span nearly 50 years, novelist, essayist, screenwriter, and memoirist Didion (1934-2021) responded to questions with thoughtful openness. Although Didion was not, as one interviewer noted, "what one would call a virtuoso conversationalist," several interviews read like comfortable exchanges, notably with New Yorker theater critic Hilton Als and "Fresh Air" host Terry Gross. Talking with Als in 2006, Didion reflected on the trajectory of her career; her early aspirations; her self-doubts as a writer; the influences of Hemingway, Conrad (she reread Victory every time she began a new novel, she said), and the plays of Eugene O'Neill; and the challenges of fiction and nonfiction. "Writing fiction is for me a fraught business," she told Als, "an occasion of daily dread for at least the first half of the novel, and sometimes all the way through." Nonfiction, though, felt less threatening, "more like sculpture, a matter of shaping the research into the finished thing." Talking about Didion's memoir, The Year of Magical Thinking, Gross gently led the author into a conversation about grief after the deaths of her husband and daughter. Several interviews focus on Didion's political stance, revealed in essays and novels such as Salvador and Miami. Describing herself once as libertarian, Didion explained that she was raised in "a western frontier ethic. That means being left alone and leaving others alone." The politics she wanted, she told novelist Sara Davidson, "are anarchic. Throw out the laws. Tear it down. Start all over. That is very romantic because it presumes that left to their own devices, people would do good things for one another. I doubt," she added ruefully, "that that's true." Although her last interview, conducted shortly before her death, was terse, the collection portrays a woman acutely sensitive "to the anguish of being a human being." Other interviewers include Hari Kunzru, Dave Eggers, and Sheila Heti. A gift for Didion's many fans.

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