Joan Didion – författare

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • NATIONAL BOOK AWARD WINNER • From one of America’s iconic writers, a stunning book of electric honesty and passion that explores an intensely personal yet universal experience: a portrait of a marriage—and a life, in good times and bad—that will speak to anyone who has ever loved a husband or wife or child.Several days before Christmas 2003, John Gregory Dunne and Joan Didion saw their only daughter, Quintana, fall ill with what seemed at first flu, then pneumonia, then complete septic shock. She was put into an induced coma and placed on life support. Days later—the night before New Year’s Eve—the Dunnes were just sitting down to dinner after visiting the hospital when John Gregory Dunne suffered a massive and fatal coronary. In a second, this close, symbiotic partnership of forty years was over. Four weeks later, their daughter pulled through. Two months after that, arriving at LAX, she collapsed and underwent six hours of brain surgery at UCLA Medical Center to relieve a massive hematoma.This powerful book is Didion’ s attempt to make sense of the “weeks and then months that cut loose any fixed idea I ever had about death, about illness ... about marriage and children and memory ... about the shallowness of sanity, about life itself.

First published in 1979, Joan Didion's The White Album records indelibly the upheavals and aftermaths of the 1960s. Examining key events, figures, and trends of the era—including Charles Manson, the Black Panthers, and the shopping mall—through the lens of her own spiritual confusion, Joan Didion helped to define mass culture as we now understand it. Written with a commanding sureness of tone and linguistic precision, The White Album is a central text of American reportage and a classic of American autobiography.

Anteckningarna som låg på Didions skrivbord efter hennes död beskriver regelbundna möten med en psykiatriker och är riktade till hennes make, John Gregory Dunne.

Anteckningar till John inleds i december 1999, strax efter att Didion började träffa en psykolog. Under flera månader dokumenterade hon sessionerna i detalj. De första samtalen kretsade kring alkoholism, adoption, depression, ångest, skuld och de hjärtskärande svårigheterna i relationen med hennes dotter, Quintana. Ämnena utvecklades senare till att inkludera hennes arbete, som hon hade svårt att upprätthålla under längre perioder.

Det förekom även samtal om hennes egen barndom, hennes vana att alltid räkna med det värsta – och om skrivandet: "vad det har varit värt." Dessa samtal var centrala för Didions förståelse av de teman hon senare återkom till i sina sena verk: Kalifornien: min historia, Ett år av magiskt tänkande och Blå skymning.

Boken utkommer över hela världen den 22 april.

Celebrated, iconic, and indispensable, Joan Didion’s first work of nonfiction, Slouching Towards Bethlehem, is considered a watershed moment in American writing. First published in 1968, the collection was critically praised as one of the “best prose written in this country.”More than perhaps any other book, this collection by one of the most distinctive prose stylists of our era captures the unique time and place of Joan Didion’s focus, exploring subjects such as John Wayne and Howard Hughes, growing up in California and the nature of good and evil in a Death Valley motel room, and, especially, the essence of San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury, the heart of the counterculture. As Joyce Carol Oates remarked: “[Didion] has been an articulate witness to the most stubborn and intractable truths of our time, a memorable voice, partly eulogistic, partly despairing; always in control.”

A ruthless dissection of American life in the late 1960s, Joan Didion's Play It as It Lays captures the mood of an entire generation, the ennui of contemporary society reflected in spare prose that blisters and haunts the reader. Set in a place beyond good and evil---literally in Hollywood, Las Vegas, and the barren wastes of the Mojave Desert, but figuratively in the landscape of an arid soul---it remains more than three decades after its original publication a profoundly disturbing novel, riveting in its exploration of a woman and a society in crisis and stunning in the still-startling intensity of its prose.

Joan Didion föddes i Sacramento, Kalifornien 1934 och dog i New York 2021. Hon inledde sin journalistiska bana på Vogue och debuterade som författare med romanen Run River 1963. Mest känd är hon för sina reportage och essäer. Flera samlingar har publicerats i USA; Slouching towards Bethlehem och The White Album hålls idag som klassiker.

Att lära sig själv att leva är en samling av hennes mest minnesvärda texter, i urval av journalisten Jan Gradvall som också har skrivit ett efterord. Samlingen utkom för första gången på svenska 2008.Översättning: Ulla Danielsson. 

”Oavsett om hon ansåg sig vara en del av en "kvinnorörelse" eller inte, spelade hennes sätt att skriva en avgörande roll i den. Jag fick aldrig tacka henne för det, förutom genom imitation, medveten och omedveten. Även om hon utan tvekan skulle ha funnit idén sentimental och onödigt banal, är jag en del av en stor armé av kvinnliga författare som står i skuld till henne.” – Zadie Smith

”Det är enkelt att beskriva Joan Didion som essäist: hon håller huvudet kallt. Eller som Jan Gradvall skriver i sitt efterord till Didions greatest hits-samling på svenska:  Hon tittar skeptiskt på när flocken reagerar med instinkt och översvallande känslor.

Didion är, bland mycket annat, en av de främsta uttolkarna av amerikansk kultur – hennes texter handlar om allt från John Wayne till hippierörelsen och Irakkriget, om ovanligt vanligt folk med vanligt ovanliga drömmar.”

--- Aase Berg, Expressen

An extraordinary work from the author of The Year of Magical Thinking and Blue Nights

In November 1999, Joan Didion began seeing a psychiatrist because, as she wrote to a friend, her family had had ?a rough few years? She described the sessions in a journal she created for her husband, John Gregory Dunne.

For several months, Didion recorded conversations with the psychiatrist in meticulous detail. The initial sessions focused on alcoholism, adoption, depression, anxiety, guilt, and the heartbreaking complexities of her relationship with her daughter, Quintana. The subjects evolved to include her work, which she was finding difficult to maintain for sustained periods.

There were discussions about her own childhood misunderstandings and lack of communication with her mother and father, her early tendency to anticipate catastrophe and the question of legacy, or, as she put it? what it's been worth? The analysis would continue for more than a decade.

Didion's journal was crafted with the singular intelligence, precision, and elegance that characterize all of her writing. It is an unprecedently intimate account that reveals sides of her that were unknown, but the voice is unmistakably hers questioning, courageous, and clear in the face of a wrenchingly painful journey.