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5 unusual facts about Joan Didion


Domestic terrorism in the United States

These cases of terrorism were documented extensively in the book Miami by Joan Didion.

Jerry Saltz

Saltz has cited Manny Farber's "termite art" and Joan Didion's "Babylon" as well as other wide ranging systemic metaphors for the art world.

John Gregory Dunne

His wife, Joan Didion, published The Year of Magical Thinking in October 2005 to critical acclaim, a memoir of the year following his death, during which their daughter, Quintana Roo Dunne, was seriously ill.

He met Joan Didion in New York in the 1950s, where she was an editor at Vogue.

Uta Barth

Essays by Uta Barth, Pamela Lee, and Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe; interview with Matthew Higgs; and selected writings by Joan Didion.


Collier Young

In 1969 Young planned a film called The Todd Dossier, based on a story by Joan Didion and John Gregory Dunne and novelised by Robert Bloch.

Miles Marshall Lewis

His debut essay collection, Scars of the Soul Are Why Kids Wear Bandages When They Don't Have Bruises (2004) – a book described as “an observant and urbane B-boy’s rites of passage” – established Lewis as a prose stylist observing American culture in a style directly influenced by Joan Didion, mixing personal reflection with social analysis and humor.

O Street

O Street makes you think of great writers in strange combinations: Dreiser and Welty; Wright and McCullers; Joan Didion and Stephen Crane.

Santa Ana winds

Some of the more well-known literary references include the Philip Marlowe story "Red Wind" by Raymond Chandler, and Joan Didion's Slouching Towards Bethlehem.

Vroman's Bookstore

Vroman's has hosted many author readings, including celebrities like Goldie Hawn, Margaret Cho, Jimmy & Rosalynn Carter, Courtney Love, Salman Rushdie, Anne Rice, Joan Didion, Nick Hornby, Bret Easton Ellis, Neil Gaiman, David Sedaris, Chuck Palahniuk, and President Bill Clinton.


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