It's 'the texture of the thing'

 

“What's so hard about that first sentence is that you're stuck with it. Everything else is going to flow out of that sentence. And by the time you've laid down the first two sentences, your options are all gone.” – Joan Didion

 

Born in California on this date in 1934, Didion said writing was not on her radar screen in her early years.  “I didn’t want to be a writer,” she said.  “I wanted to be an actress.  I didn’t realize then that it’s the same impulse.  It’s make-believe.  It’s performance.“

As a senior at UC-Berkeley she entered an essay-writing contest for Vogue magazine (on a dare) and won the national top award – a job after graduation at the magazine.  In just two years at Vogue, she worked her way up from promotional copywriter to associate feature editor, and wrote her first novel, Run, River, published in 1963.

 

She married writer John Gregory Dunne.  She and Dunne co-wrote a number of screenplays, including an adaptation of her novel Play It As It Lays and the biography of journalist Jessica Savitch Up Close & Personal.   Didion’s novel A Book of Common Prayer was widely lauded, but her most celebrated work was her heart-wrenching The Year of Magical Thinking, which won the National Book Award and chronicled the year of her husband’s death and daughter’s battle with cancer.

 

Didion, who died in 2021, said she enjoyed writing nonfiction and fiction both.  “Writing nonfiction,” she said, “is more like sculpture, a matter of shaping the research into the finished thing.  Novels are like paintings, specifically watercolors. Every stroke you put down you have to go with. Of course you can rewrite, but the original strokes are still there in the texture of the thing.”