American novelist, journalist and essayist Joan Didion died on Thursday at her home in New York at the age of 87 from Parkinson’s Disease, according to Knopf publicist Paul Bogaards. The best-selling writer began describing her home state, California, for magazines in the 1960s and broadened her subjects over the decades in nonfiction, fiction and films.
Didion spoke about the act of writing more astutely than pretty much anybody else. “I write entirely to find out what is on my mind; what I’m thinking,” she said.
The writing itself was a path to understanding and clarification. Her definition of a writer was “a person whose most absorbed and passionate hours are spent arranging words on pieces of paper.” She said that in a 1976 speech at her alma mater, the University of California, Berkeley. By then, Didion had published Slouching Towards Bethlehem, a collection of reportage about life in the chaos of 1960s America. She’d also published two novels: Play It as It Lays, which could have been subtitled “Lost in Las Vegas and Most Other Places,” and Run River, her first novel. Here’s an excerpt from the latter:
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