Right At the Beginning

Joan Didion, who died on the eve of Christmas Eve at 87, penned screenplays, such as the 1976 version of A Star Is Born; pioneered, along with Tom Wolfe and Norman Mailer, the literary nonfiction of New Journalism; and settled into a cottage industry of writing about grief in her later years. But her eulogists, in fixating on her political journalism, tell us more about themselves than their subject—fitting, perhaps, for a woman whose critics often accused her of writing about herself when ostensibly writing about others.

David Masciotra in Salon, for instance, contends that Didion’s “political commentary and journalism fails to elicit attention equal to her cultural correspondences, novels, and the harrowing personal writing she published after the deaths of her husband and daughter. Given the ideological and mercurial biases of the corporate press, there are ground[s] for suspicion that book critics, journalists and obituary writers have reason to overlook Didion’s political work that goes beyond popular reputation.”

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