Joan Didion, acclaimed writer, dies at 87 of Parkinson's disease

Acclaimed memoirist and novelist Joan Didion has died at age 87.

"We are deeply saddened to report that Joan Didion died earlier this morning at her home in New York due to complications from Parkinson’s disease," said a statement from Paul Bogaards at Knopf Publishing. The New York Times was the first to report the news.

Didion wrote essays such as "Slouching Towards Bethlehem" and "The White Album," and more recently "The Year of Magical Thinking," an instantly essential memoir sprung from the grief that followed the death of her husband.

She was born in Sacramento, California, in 1934. After graduating from the University of California, Berkeley in 1956, she headed to New York and started her first job at Vogue, where she rose from copywriter to a features editor.

'Let Me Tell You What I Mean': New essay collection affirms Joan Didion’s mastery

Didion published her first novel, "Run River," in 1963. She married novelist John Gregory Dunne in 1964 and they moved to California. A few years later, they adopted daughter Quintana Roo.

Didion and Dunne collaborated on many works together, including screenplays for "The Panic in Needle Park" (1971); "Play It As It Lays" (1972), based on Didion’s second novel; "A Star Is Born" (1976); and "Up Close and Personal" (1996).

John Dunne died in 2003; Quintana Roo died less than two years later of acute pancreatitis. Didion wrote of her daughter’s death in the 2011 publication “Blue Nights."

Along with Tom Wolfe, Nora Ephron and Gay Talese, Didion reigned among the pantheon of “New Journalists” who emerged in the 1960s and wedded literary style to nonfiction reporting. Tiny and frail even as a young woman, with large, sad eyes often hidden behind sunglasses and a soft, deliberate style of speaking, she once observed that “I am so physically small, so temperamentally unobtrusive, and so neurotically inarticulate that people tend to forget that my presence runs counter to their best interests.”

Or, as she more famously put it: "Writers are always selling somebody out."

Didion prided herself on being an outsider, more comfortable with gas-station attendants than with celebrities. But she and John Dunne, whose brother was the author-journalist Dominick Dunne, were well placed in high society.

Didion was equally unsparing about her own struggles. She was diagnosed in her 30s with multiple sclerosis, and around the same time suffered a breakdown and checked into a psychiatric clinic in Santa Monica, California, that diagnosed her worldview as “fundamentally pessimistic, fatalistic and depressive.”

Author Susan Orlean called Didion "my idol and inspiration" on Twitter.

"Joan was a brilliant observer and listener, a wise and subtle teller of truths about our present and future," Shelley Wanger, her editor at Knopf, said in a statement. "She was fierce and fearless in her reporting. Her writing is timeless and powerful, and her prose has influenced millions."

Didion's nephew, "This Is Us" star Griffin Dunne, shared his tribute in a statement to USA TODAY.

"In 1961, as a young contributor at Vogue, Joan once wrote, 'People with self-respect exhibit a certain toughness, a kind of moral nerve; they display what was once called character.' As her nephew, I was fortunate enough to witness firsthand Joan’s character, her self-respect, her certain toughness," wrote Griffin, who is the son of the late Dominick Dunne.

Griffin, 66, continued: "These qualities are ones I admire and have tried to learn from all my life. Her voice was that of a writer who saw things as they were before most of us. She wrote about grief to find out what she felt, but ended up giving hope and meaning to those who needed it most. Now I find myself in grief, which I share with so many others who are also mourning this great loss."

Joan Didion first hit the USA TODAY Best-Selling Books list with 2005's "The Year of Magical Thinking." She would hit the list three more times, including her most recent collection of essays, this year's "Let Me Tell You What I Mean," which received ★★★★ out of four from USA TODAY.

Didion won several honors, including the 2005 National Book Award for nonfiction for "The Year of Magical Thinking," the National Book Foundation's Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters in 2007 and the National Medal of Arts from President Barack Obama in 2013. She adapted "The Year of Magical Thinking" as a one-woman Broadway play that starred Vanessa Redgrave and was the subject of a 2017 Netflix documentary, "The Center Will Not Hold."

Didion spent her later years in New York, but she was most strongly identified with her native state of California, “a hologram that dematerializes as I drive through it.”

Mortality was a frequent topic of her writing. "We are not idealized wild things," she wrote in "The Year of Magical Thinking." "We are imperfect mortal beings, aware of that mortality even as we push it away, failed by our very complication, so wired that when we mourn our losses we also mourn, for better or for worse, ourselves. As we were. As we are no longer. As we will one day not be at all."

Contributing: Mary Cadden, USA TODAY; The Associated Press

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This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Joan Didion, writer, dies at 87 of Parkinson's disease