Until the 1960s, journalism was all about reporting facts, organized in a methodical and impersonal way. Then, New Journalism happened, and along with it, Joan Didion. Read on to learn more about this incredible author and the movement she was part of.
New Journalism
If you’ve ever been moved by a news story or documentary, feel free to thank New Journalism. Tom Wolfe, Truman Capote, and Gay Talese are known as true pioneers who revolutionized traditional, cold journalism.
The difference these authors brought was that we could feel more connected to the news and, therefore, to the author. They were no longer robots who replicated facts in objective words, now they brought irony, humor, and an emotional lens to capture humanity through news.
A Star Is Born
An invisible string was woven on December 5th, 1934, in Sacramento, respectively, Joan Didion’s date and place of birth. Dozens of publications shared pieces of her mind with the world, defining a new meaning of what Journalism could be.
Her name does not commonly appear first when searching for New Journalism, but she sure became a legend in political and cultural journalism, spreading her magic in sophisticated and ironic writing through The New Yorker and Vogue, just a few of her many publications.
At first and immediate glance, Didion is enchantingly ahead of her time, associating herself and reporting social fights, diversity, and also, mundane surroundings. Some of its iconic progressive events that Joan infiltrated are the Marcha de La Paz, the Hippie movement and Counterculture.
In a nutshell, we can better understand Joan’s essence in writing:
“To shift the structure of a sentence alters the meaning of that sentence as definitely and inflexibly as the position of a camera alters the meaning of the object photographed”.
The legacy of one of the biggest writers in New Journalism is yet to end, even if not alive anymore. Journalists, writers, activists and humanity lost Joan on December 23rd, 2021, due to complications of Parkinson’s Disease.To learn more about Joan Didion, check out these 3 books written by her. If the title caught your eye, just click on the image to buy on Amazon!
Where I Was From
Going back to a retrospective analysis of Joan’s childhood home and ancestors, the author shares her story along with historical and journalistic elements of California, joining the narrative with pieces of her essence.
“These women in my family would seem to have been pragmatic and in their deepest instincts clinically radical, given to breaking clean with everyone and everything they knew. They could shoot, and they could handle stock, and when their children outgrew their shoes, they could learn from the Indians how to make moccasins.”
The Year of Magical Thinking
The sudden and numbing feeling of grief is shared through Joan’s experience of losing a 40-year-old partnership with her husband, John Gregory Dunne, and dealing with her daughter’s illness.
“This is my attempt to make sense of the period that followed, weeks and then months that cut loose any fixed idea I had ever had about death, about illness, about probability and luck, about good fortune and bad, about marriage and children and memory, about grief, about the ways in which how people do and do not deal with the fact that life ends, about the shallowness of sanity, about life itself.”
Blue Nights: A Memoir
If you aim a deep dive into Joan’s mind, Blue Nights is your answer. A deeply personal report about memories from her childhood and married life with her husband, John Gregory Dunne, and daughter, Quintana Roo, permeates this book, along with maternity and aging crises.
“This book is called “Blue Nights” because at the time I began it I found my mind turning increasingly to illness, to the end of promise, the dwindling of the days, the inevitability of the fading, the dying of the brightness.
Blue nights are the opposite of the dying of the brightness, but they are also its warning.”
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The article above was edited by Giovanna Rodrigues.
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