Joan Didion

She documented the mayhem of the ’60s, survived the unimaginable loss of her husband and daughter and became an icon along the way. Alexandra English looks back on the life of the literary legend

It’s 1975, and the head of the English Department at the University of California, Berkeley is waiting for Joan Didion to arrive for dinner. He doesn’t know much about the magazine writer and novelist who spent her formative years at Berkeley, trudging around in a dirty raincoat and eating nuts from her pockets. Twenty years after graduating, she has been offered a prestigious teaching appointment at the university, and so this formal faculty dinner is in her honor.

Eventually, Didion walks in five-foot-two at an exaggeration, dressed in a Chanel suit and white-knuckling a purse that she won’t set down the entire evening. She’s 41, but the vibe she’s giving off is of someone trying their best to look like an adult, but who might duck under the table any second. Once she leaves, the faculty decides this woman – ostensibly miserable, inarticulate, unsure of herself, and wearing the entirely wrong thing (who wears Chanel to a dinner party? Apparently, no one in the ’70s) – will be eaten alive in the classroom.

The department secretary, seeing an opportunity to humiliate Didion, books the university’s largest theatre for her public address, thinking she won’t be able to fill it. Then, suddenly, it’s a madhouse. Women are crying as they’re turned away from the door; others stand on tiptoes in the back or sit on the floor, happy just to catch a glimpse of their tiny idol whose voice barely registers above a whisper. “There’s something weird going on with Joan Didion and women,” the faculty head declares, realizing this sparrow of a woman doesn’t just have readers, she has fans.

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