A Writer's Life

At 82, Joan Didion is as influential—and idolized and obsessed over—as ever. On the eve of an intimate new documentary by her nephew Griffin Dunne, novelist Dana Spiotta meets the literary icon who set her on her path.

Joan Didion sits on the edge of her large white sofa. She is small and very slim, as she has always been. She’s had the same fine, pale, blunt-cut bob since the eighties. She wears a bright plaid shirt dress with a white cardigan covering her arms. Her legs are bare, and she keeps them together, uncrossed, her black loafers on the floor. She peers at me through large, round tortoiseshell glasses as I reach down to shake her hand. Her gaze is clearly still the sensitive instrument it has always been, sharply attuned to the local particulars and the broader implications.

A confession: It is impossible for me to be objective about Joan Didion. Because I began reading Didion when I was young, living in Southern California, and still discovering my identity as a writer, her work and her person will always have a mysterious resonance for me, the way certain formative influences become outsize and indelible. I remember reading her novel Play It As It Lays, with its white spaces and omitted transitions making a kind of strobe-light effect, as fragmented and elliptical as the world it depicted. I read and reread her two seminal essay collections, Slouching Towards Bethlehem and The White Album, because no one wrote better about California and how place shapes our identities. But ultimately it was the sentences that astonished me: the cadences, the hard surfaces, the precise revisions of previous formulations, the jolts of tangible detail. In fact, as I take my seat across from her, I can’t help imagining what she would notice about this room. The stacks of books on the coffee table between us, the pile of toile print pillows to her left? The antique tea service on the wood sideboard? No, the details to note are the four orchids in bloom on the table behind the sofa and the lone orchid on a table by the wall. Because I know from reading her that flowers matter, and orchids are favored above all others.