A moment to salute Joan Didion’s legacy

Six writers remember the author on what would have been her 91st birthday.

- BY MADDIE CONNORS

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 smolIt’sdered, 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.