To live in Los Angeles is to live in Joan Didion’s world. On what would have been the writer’s 91st birthday, Didion’s thorny and tangled vision of the city endures. A philosopher, historian, songbird of grief and prophet, Didion foretold the city’s future with startling accuracy.
Of writing, Didion once said, “I’m totally in control of this tiny, tiny world right there at the typewriter.” The same might be said of Los Angeles — a universe she continues to narrate to us long after her death.
“Los Angeles weather is the weather of catastrophe, of apocalypse,” Didion wrote. In January 2025, when fires ravaged neighborhoods across the region, her former home of Malibu was again bathed in ash. On social media, the late writer’s words went viral for their startling poignancy. “Horses caught fire and were shot on the beach, birds exploded in the air,” she wrote in “Quiet Days in Malibu.” Of the Santa Ana winds — “devil winds,” as she called them — she warned, “The city burning is Los Angeles’s deepest image of itself.” As parts of the city smoldered, many turned to Didion’s aching, poetic rendering of a paradise lost. And as the city rebuilt, she reminded readers of the resilient, pioneering spirit inherent to California and its people: “In California we did not believe that history could bloody the land, or even touch it,” she wrote in “Where I Was From.” For many, these words rang out as an affirmation — even a prayer.
“There is no real way to deal with everything we lose,” she observed in “The Year of Magical Thinking.” Her writing, shrouded in grief, took on a new sharpness in post-fire Los Angeles.
The city continues to live in both the wreckage and the wisdom of Didion’s work. This year, a series of reportedly violent ICE raids unsettled Los Angeles, drawing national attention to immigration shaped by political violence abroad. These strains echo a longstanding preoccupation in Didion’s reporting on Latin America. In her indicting book “Salvador,” she describes the political terror that engulfed El Salvador in 1982 and examines how U.S. intervention exacerbated it. In her nonfiction book “Miami,” Didion chronicles the world of Cuban exiles, portraying a conflict-ridden community with grace and her trademark clarity. Her fascination with Latin America loomed large in her reporting. The consequences of Didion’s critiques of neoliberalism and American intervention remain ahead of their time, playing out today on the streets of Los Angeles, where immigrants are detained by federal agents — propelled by the policies and hypocrisies Didion once exposed.
As the city faces unparalleled challenges, we can rest assured that Joan Didion will be with us each step of the way. For the writer’s 91st birthday, six writers with work published on Didion spoke on the writer’s legacy from their favorite Didion anecdote to her work that still resonates decades later.
Lili Anolik
What is an anecdote about Joan Didion that resonates with you?
It’s 1967, one year before “Slouching Towards Bethlehem” is published, so one year before Joan Didion is Joan Didion. Joan and [husband] John [Gregory Dunne] are both writing for the Saturday Evening Post, and making pretty good money. They get cocky, buy a new car — a Corvette Stingray, banana yellow. They’ve just driven it home, and then they hear a rumor that the Saturday Evening Post is folding. John starts to sweat. He says, “Oh, God, maybe we should take back the car.” Joan looks at him and says, “Don’t think poor.”
What is your favorite piece of Joan Didion writing?
My favorite piece of Joan Didion writing is the opener to “Slouching Towards Bethlehem,” “Some Dreamers of the Golden Dream.” It’s trashy noir yet elevated and totally dead-eyed — as if Flannery O’Connor took a crack at writing a James M. Cain story.
“Didion & Babitz” (Scribner)
Hilton Als
What is an anecdote about Joan Didion that resonates with you?
I don’t have a favorite anecdote about Joan; her influence and love is of a piece. But what I adored most was making her laugh.
What is your favorite piece of Joan Didion writing?
The more I read Joan, the more I understand that without realizing it, perhaps, she was a philosopher of sorts — largely about the American arrival myth, and what that dream looks like, or doesn’t look like. It’s hard to extrapolate one book or piece from that monumental body of work, but sometimes I dream of the colors and perfect shape and ideas she put forth in “A Book of Common Prayer,” which strikes me as a feminist text, ultimately, beginning with the first line: “I will be her witness.” How marvelous for a female narrator to say that about another woman.
“Joan Didion: What She Means” (Delmonico Books)
David Ulin
What is an anecdote about Joan Didion that resonates with you?
When I was 18 and living in San Francisco, I first read her. I read “Slouching Towards Bethlehem” and then “The White Album.” The complex, even doom-stricken bleakness of her point of view really resonated with me. I tend to share that point of view in terms of my thinking about the world and humanity. It echoed for me, a dimension I was sensing while living in California for the first time that I hadn’t really seen anywhere else. I subsequently saw it in a lot of other writers, but she was really the first who taught me that California was a complex, complicated, multivaried landscape — a place with a lot of contradictory history.
What is your favorite piece of Joan Didion writing?
There’s a piece called “On the Morning After the Sixties,” which ends with this beautiful line: “If I could believe that going to a barricade would affect man’s fate in the slightest, I would go to that barricade.” That essay in particular should be better known because the writing is so beautiful and her sensibility so sharp and contrarian. It’s very brief; it’s an impression, almost like a sketch. I love that kind of writing in general. She was a writer who taught me that I could write in long form and in short form, with the form dictated by the content. “On the Morning After the Sixties” is a beautiful encapsulation of her aesthetic and point of view in a very brief format.
“Joan Didion: The 1980s & 90s” (Library of America)
Evelyn McDonnell
What is an anecdote about Joan Didion that resonates with you?
Joan Didion went to Sacramento City College for a brief time. As she wrote, she only applied to Stanford. She was just shooting for the stars. And as we all know, you’re supposed to have your first choice, your medium choice, and then your backup. It was a combination of arrogance and naivete. Her parents weren’t directing her correctly about how to apply for college, so she put all her eggs in one basket — and that basket denied her. That was a lesson in humility for Didion, and she took it very hard. She actually said she thought she would kill herself, which also demonstrates her tendency to dramatize. She had originally wanted to be an actor. Later, she took the rejection as a lesson and pinned the letter to her wall, where she kept it for many years. Then she applied to Berkeley and was accepted. It was too late to start in the fall, so she completed a summer and a semester at Sacramento City College, which was actually good for her because it connected her to Sacramento as an adult, not just as a child. Later in life, when she talked about her Sacramento roots — the river parties, the beer parties, and her boyfriend Bob — much of that came from the time she spent there.
What is your favorite piece of Joan Didion writing?
“Why I Write” resonates with me because her reasons for writing are very similar to my own. It felt validating. She wrote in order to figure out what she thought. The process of putting words on the page helped her understand herself and the world. As a writer, I completely relate to that. I tell my students not to use AI — there is something about that process, about formulating one’s thoughts by writing them, that is essential. I think much of her resonance comes from the way she was instructional in her writing. She gave many speeches that are now part of her lore. Even though she was never formally a teacher, I feel she was a teacher to many of us and a mentor to countless writers.
“The World According to Joan Didion” (HarperOne)
Cory Leadbeater
What is an anecdote about Joan Didion that resonates with you?
Some of the most intelligent and talented people would come to dinner with her and spend hours arguing their case about some current event or writer or film or whatever, and Joan would sit in silence the entire time. Eventually, someone would get around to asking Joan, “Well, what do you think?” And Joan would let out a long exhale through her nose, and then say very quietly, “I don’t know.”
What is your favorite piece of Joan Didion writing?
My favorite piece she ever wrote is a small essay in “The White Album” called “At the Dam.” It’s about visiting the Hoover Dam. It’s not a piece I often see discussed when people talk about her enormous and overwhelming body of work. If you want to understand her worldview and the feeble attempts human beings make to bring order to a chaotic universe, that essay is the best place to start. It focuses on the massive effort to rein in nature and bring the works of humankind to bear on a landscape that is completely indifferent to us. In the essay, she reflects on her own smallness, the smallness of humankind, and our collective efforts to create something lasting or meaningful. It ends with her thinking about the Hoover Dam after humanity is gone. It’s a quintessential Joan Didion image: She imagines the day after the human race is gone, capturing both apocalyptic self-annihilation and wonder at the tremendous efforts we make to do something meaningful with our time. On a craft level, that last sentence — “transmitting power and releasing water to a world where no one is” — shows her at the peak of her artistic powers.
“The Uptown Local” (Ecco)
Steffie Nelson
What is an anecdote about Joan Didion that resonates with you?
I love the story Didion tells of going to Ralphs in a bikini on a 105-degree day. It’s just such a funny image to me. To imagine this woman we all revere — it’s impossible to imagine her doing it. It seems so out of character. Yet she did it with her reserved way of speaking and her buttoned-up manner. The woman who confronted her was completely outraged, banging her shopping cart into her and saying, “What a what a thing to wear to Ralphs.” I love that image because it reveals a person who could always surprise everyone. To me, Didion remains full of surprise.
What is your favorite piece of Joan Didion writing?
My favorite piece is still the first piece of hers that I ever read: “Some Dreamers of the Golden Dream,” which is the opening essay of “Slouching Towards Bethlehem.” It’s not just the story of the murderer, Lucille Miller, who burned her husband alive, that I find so compelling. But it’s the concept of the golden dream and the promise of California, which has taken on a life of its own in my brain. It continues morphing as our cultural ideals change, and I actually interpret the golden dream differently than Didion presents it. Her definition includes the inevitable fall and the ultimate disappointment when you reach for this golden dream. But I believe the potency of the golden dream is in the aspiration and the wish for something greater. This envisioning and reaching is an experience of the golden dream that we all can have, as opposed to something that nobody can ever have.
“Slouching Towards Los Angeles: Living and Writing by Joan Didion’s Light” (Rare Bird Books)
Connors is a writer living in Los Angeles. She hosts the literary reading “Unreliable Narrators” at Nico’s Wine every month.
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