In 2007, she and Scott Rudin tailored the book for the stage as a one-lady demonstrate starring Vanessa Redgrave. Anguish modified into one amongst the defining parts of Didion’s public profile, as mighty a allotment of her persona as that enviable sentence structure, these darkish sun shades, that Corvette. In 2011, Didion printed Blue Nights, about getting older and the loss of her daughter—a tome that the Unusual York Times described as a piece by which she comes to grips with “the dismaying incontrovertible truth that against lifestyles’s worst onslaughts nothing avails, no longer even art work; especially no longer art work.” In 2012, Didion got the National Humanities Medal from President Barack Obama. “I’m surprised she hasn’t already gotten this award,” Obama told reporters on the day.
For many, by her writing about bask in and loss, innocence and deception, nostalgia and memory, Didion invented a system of being on this planet: an observer, judiciously above the fray, defending all of it at an tidy bewitch. “There could be something tomboyishly lovely about her, nonetheless additionally flinty and far away, and severely unnerving, the system any individual who is both peaceable and radiant could well additionally be,” Susan Orlean wrote of Didion in a profile for Vogue in 2002, by which Nora Ephron praised her cooking and her sense of humor, and Calvin Trillin her familial, personable heat. She became as soon as both vivid and driven, and continued to gain incomparable work in spite of her well-cataloged awe, her paralysis, her irritability, and her “neurotic inarticulateness.”
Perhaps her most renowned line is: “We characterize ourselves tales in roar to live.” And what tales! “Many writers write haunted introspection, or detail-oriented reporting, or counterintuitive cultural commentary, or lifestyle journalism. However up to now handiest Didion has performed all four in most provocative synthesis, a prose that, at its supreme, can fire on each cylinder and work on a pair of fields of the imagination in an instant,” Nathan Heller wrote for Vogue in 2014 in an essay that praised her talent for composition as “Mozartian.” She regarded, in an excellent deal of words, to be fully as a lot as traipse of herself, the general time, even when elegantly explaining each single system that she became as soon as fully previous reach. (Now not each person became as soon as impressed: the film critic Pauline Kael famously seethed in a Unusual Yorker evaluation of one amongst Didion’s novels that “the last princess myth is to be so glamorously sensitive and elegant that it’ll be most primary to be regarded after…you belief the truth, and so that you undergo better than fashioned of us and could’t aim.” However even Kael concedes about a traces later, “Indubitably, I admit that Leave out Didion can write.”)
Didion stored to herself for the later years of her lifestyles, writing infrequently ever and turning down requests for biography projects and documentary motion photographs—until her nephew, the actor and director Griffin Dunne, proposed one. He crowd-raised the an valuable funding to shoot it in a topic of weeks. Joan Didion: The Center Will Now not Protect became as soon as released in October 2017; in it, Didion retained what the Unusual Yorker dubbed the reporter’s “perpetual straddle between empathy and detachment.” Experiences of the project tended to accommodate the documentary’s enviable intimacy and its last lack of killer instinct—as a movie, it became as soon as never as unflinching as its discipline. To appear the documentary became as soon as to feel that Didion could well maintain been below the lens, nonetheless continued to pull the strings in the abet of it, well attentive to the vitality she’d so continually held: the particular particular person that looks to characterize all the issues and affords fully nothing away. When Dana Spiotta asked Didion for Vogue what of us tend to receive coarse about her, she answered: “I’m no longer as fragile as of us believe me to be.” She never became as soon as.
