![]() Her ominous, valley-flat style channelled the Pacific terrain, with its beauty and severity and restless turns. Though Didion spent half her life in New York (first as a junior editor at Vogue, then, in a later stint, as a short-statured lioness of letters), much of her best-known work was done in California, where she’d grown up in mid-century Sacramento. She helped expand the landscape of what matters on the page. Through her efforts, the craft of journalism changed. ![]() Didion was a pattern-seeker-a writer with an uncanny ability to scan a text, a folder of clippings, or an entire society and, like a genius eying figures, find the markers pointing out how the whole worked. It was easy to see, as she did in her daughter’s lethal illness that same season, larger gears at work. ![]() It was tempting to note that, like her husband, the writer John Gregory Dunne, whose passing shaped “ The Year of Magical Thinking” (2005), she died during the Christmas holiday. When Joan Didion died, on Thursday, at eighty-seven, she left behind sixteen books, seven films, one play, and an impulse to make sense of what remained. ![]()
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