Joan Didion

The Year of Magical Thinking, by Joan Didion, is an account of the year following the death of the author's husband John Gregory Dunne. Published by Knopf in October 2005, The Year of Magical Thinking was immediately acclaimed as a classic book about mourning. It won the 2005 National Book Award for Nonfiction and was …

Slouching Towards Bethlehem is a 1968 collection of essays by Joan Didion and mainly describes her experiences in California during the 1960s. It takes its title from the poem "The Second Coming", by W. B. Yeats. The contents of this book are reprinted in Didion's We Tell Ourselves Stories in Order to Live: Collected …

Play It as It Lays is a 1970 novel by the American writer Joan Didion. Time magazine included the novel in its TIME 100 Best English-language Novels from 1923 to 2005. The book was made into a 1972 movie starring Tuesday Weld as Maria and Anthony Perkins as BZ. Didion co-wrote the screenplay with her husband, John …

The White Album is a 1979 book of essays by Joan Didion. Like her previous book Slouching Towards Bethlehem, The White Album is a collection of works previously published in magazines such as Life and Esquire. The subjects of the essays range widely and represent a mixture of memoir, criticism, and journalism, …

Where I Was From is a 2003 collection of essays by Joan Didion. It concerns the history and culture of California, where Didion was born and spent much of her life. Where I Was From combines aspects of historical writing, journalism, and memoir to present a history of California as well as Didion and her family's own …

A Book of Common Prayer is a 1977 novel by Joan Didion.

Inez Victor knows that the major casualty of the political life is memory. But the people around Inez have made careers out of losing track. Her senator husband wants to forget the failure of his last bid for the presidency. Her husband's handler would like the press to forget that Inez's father is a murderer. And, in …

Salvador is a 1983 book-length essay by Joan Didion on American involvement in El Salvador.

The Last Thing He Wanted is a novel by Joan Didion. It was published by Alfred A. Knopf in 1996. The story centers around Elena McMahon, a reporter for the Washington Post who quits her job covering the 1984 Presidential primaries to care for her father after her mother's death. In an unusual turn of events, she …

We Tell Ourselves Stories in Order to Live: Collected Nonfiction is a 2006 collection of nonfiction by Joan Didion. It was released in the Everyman's Library, a series of reprinted classic literature, as one of the titles chosen to mark the series' 100th anniversary. The title is taken from the opening line of …