10 Perspectives on Joan Didion

I first read Joan Didion back in college, when her novel Play It As It Lays shook me up like a SoCal temblor. They really ought to measure her books on a Richter scale.

I knew all about existentialist novels back then, but I thought they were only set in France and featured gloomy people in Parisian cafes. But Didion showed me that existentialist angst also existed in my own home town of Los Angeles.

You felt it every time you merged on to the freeway.

I’ve continued to read Didion’s work over the decades. In both her fiction and non-fiction, she taught me ways of perceiving my own milieu on the West Coast that I’d have never learned on my own.

Below are 10 perspectives on Joan Didion—whom I call (borrowing from her friend Eve Babitz) the “only sensible person in the world.”