‘The whole world is empty'

Joan Didion was a fearless writer who understood the power of stories, not just to describe our lives but to shape them

- KEVIN E G PERRY

Joan Didion was a writer all her life. Her work, whether fiction or journalism, was clear-sighted, precise and perceptive, and always peppered with her signature bone-dry wit. “Had I been blessed with even limited access to my own mind there would have been no reason to write,” she explained in her 1976 essay Why I Write. “I write entirely to find out what I'm thinking, what I'm looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear.”

Born on 5 December 1934 in Sacramento, California, Didion was just five years old when she wrote her first story, at her mother's encouragement. As a teenager she obsessively typed out the works of Ernest Hemingway, learning the rhythm and simplicity of clear, declarative writing. At 21, while studying for a degree in English at Berkeley, she wrote an essay about the San Francisco architect William Wilson Wurster and entered it into a competition sponsored by Vogue. She won first place, and her prize was a job as a research assistant at the magazine and the start of a new life in New York.

Didion spent seven years at Vogue, working her way up to the position of associate feature editor, but found herself homesick for California. In 1963, she published her first novel, Run, River, which centres on the lives of the great-grandchildren of California's pioneers. Looking back at the novel later, in her 2003 essay collection Where I Was From, Didion saw the book as a work of false nostalgia, portraying an idyllic version of California that may never have existed.