Joan Didion, R.I.P.

When I wandered into a bookstore in Palm Beach, Fla., a few weeks ago, I found a collection of modern Christmas short stories. It included an entry by Joan Didion. “That’s funny,” I thought. “I didn’t know she celebrates such things.” And, sure enough, the story ends in tears. I wasn’t surprised when Didion celebrated this Christmas early in her own, rather morbid way: She succumbed to Parkinson’s disease on Thursday in her Manhattan apartment.

That news came as a shock to no one else, either. Didion was 87 years old and wispy. She’d been effectively retired since 2011, when she released Blue Nights, a memoir of her daughter’s freak death and a sequel to The Year of Magical Thinking, which covered her husband’s own untimely demise. For the next decade afterward, she’d written little, but frequently made clear that she was done with this world and wanted out of this life. Over the past five years, her publishers — no doubt sensing the end — had rushed to publish as many old, sub-par essays in new collections as they could. These are no doubt the first entries in a massive library of posthumous Didioniana.

NR

About the Author

Nic Rowan

Nic Rowan is the managing editor of The Lamp.

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When I wandered into a bookstore in Palm Beach, Fla., a few weeks ago, I found a collection of modern Christmas short stories. It included an entry by Joan Didion. “That’s funny,” I thought. “I didn’t know she celebrates such things.” And, sure enough, the story ends in tears. I wasn’t surprised when Didion celebrated this Christmas early in her own, rather morbid way: She succumbed to Parkinson’s disease on Thursday in her Manhattan apartment.

That news came as a shock to no one else, either. Didion was 87 years old and wispy. She’d been effectively retired since 2011, when she released Blue Nights, a memoir of her daughter’s freak death and a sequel to The Year of Magical Thinking, which covered her husband’s own untimely demise. For the next decade afterward, she’d written little, but frequently made clear that she was done with this world and wanted out of this life. Over the past five years, her publishers — no doubt sensing the end — had rushed to publish as many old, sub-par essays in new collections as they could. These are no doubt the first entries in a massive library of posthumous Didioniana.