Farewell to Joan Didion: the writer who exorcised pain through art

In that list drawn up every year by the most prestigious newspapers with the names of all the writers deserving of the Nobel Prize for Literature, Joan Didion it has always occupied an important position. His ability to tell an intimate story and, in some ways, forbidden as grieving in years – it was 2006 – in which facing one’s personal pain openly was not the conviction of a sentence but the ostentation of a condition that should have been private, transformed it into an icon of literature that moved the first you pass in that world several years earlier, first as a reporter and then as a writer. Unfortunately Didion, that Nobel Prize, will never withdraw it: in fact, at 87, one of the most active and fascinating exponents of the so-called New Jornalism dies, icon of a romantic, effective and unmistakable style, emblem of a porcelain elegance which, despite its small physique, has carried enormous boulders on its shoulders, always coming out with its head held high.

Like that time, in 2012, then US President Barack Obama awarded her the prestigious National Humanities Medal at the White House for his “works of surprising honesty and ferocious intellect”, illuminating apparently peripheral details that are, in fact, central to our lives. On that occasion Joan Didion paraded with a blue shawl resting on her shoulders and with a powder pink dress to frame the small and skinny figure, so fragile yet so strong, so lean and hunched and yet so capable of overcoming obstacles on our own that most of us would be unable to handle without help. The traumatic events of the last part of Didion’s life were, in fact, two: the disappearance of her husband John Gregory Dunne, also a writer, in 2003, struck down by a heart attack on the evening of December 30 in their New York home, and of his daughter Quintana, who at the time of her father’s death was hospitalized in a comatose state following severe pneumonia, who died at just 39 years old two years later, on August 26, 2005, from acute pancreatitis. To these two leading figures of his life, Didion dedicated two books: The year of magical thinking, his best and most successful book (Il Saggiatore publishes it in Italy), e Blue Nights.

It would be unfair, however, to limit Joan Didion’s life to just these two masterpieces. Born and raised in Sacramanto, Joan began writing at the age of five until, in the 1950s, she won a non-fiction competition sponsored by Vogue starting to collaborate for the magazine. In those years he publishes Run, River, his first novel, followed by Towards Bethlehem, his first and beautiful work of non-fiction, and the equally wonderful The White Album, a collection of articles previously published in journals such as Life, New York Times ed Esquire in which he reveals for the first time that he suffers from multiple sclerosis. Several other works follow such as Democracy, Miami, but also a romantic thriller like The Last Thing He Wanted. The nice thing about Didion, however, is that she has never pulled back in the face of challenges: together with her husband, in fact, she signs several screenplays for the cinema, including the remake of A star was born (the version with Barbra Streisand and Kris Kristofferson) e Something personal (with Michelle Pfeiffer and Robert Redford). However, above all the so-called New Jornalism is remembered, that is the current to which all the journalistic articles structured as if they were literary essays belong. Current that still sees Didio as one of the most educated and competent exponents, a symbol of a sensitivity and elegance that today we find it increasingly difficult to trace.