She bought a bed and borrowed two French garden chairs and these items furnished a few of her new four rooms. Didion didn’t bring these things with her to the apartment she rented next, about twenty blocks downtown, or her winter clothes, or the map in her bedroom she’d looked at everyday as a reminder of her home in California.

Then, she found a place of her own and filled it with furniture found in storage-remnants of another life lead by another woman who had since left. Hers was a New York defined by facades it wasn’t home.ĭuring her first year there, she’d lived with other people in their apartments and she marked time as people do, with holidays and long weekends. From the White Rose bar, she watched man go to the moon. There were the Chinese laundromats and elevators that she cried in, and there were the taxis. There were the women walking their Yorkshire terriers on upper Madison Avenue, and there was Times Square. After spending eight years in the city, the idiosyncrasies that had once been a source of inspiration had become cliché.

“In order to remember, of course, but exactly what was it I wanted to remember? How much of it actually happened? Did any of it? Why do I keep a notebook at all?” Joan Didion, ‘ Slouching Towards Bethlehem’ (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008), 132ĭidion left New York in 1964. “Why did I write it down?” She asks in one of her essays in reference to a habit that started when her mother gave her a notebook at five years old. On the eleventh of October of this year, a documentary about her life and work Joan Didion: The Center Will Not Hold premiered at the 55th New York Film Festival and, made using her words, epitomises her authorial intent to capture the transience of existence in an attempt to understand it-and to then make it permanent.The documentary will premiere on Netflix on 27th October, 2017. Didion has penned works of political reportage, mastered the essay, authored screenplays and five novels. She took the bus into Manhattan to commence a writing career at Vogue -the beginning of a journey that would come to define her as one of the most prolific writers of her generation. It rained that day, which was strange because it was summertime and it didn’t normally rain during the summer in California-where she was from. When Joan Didion first traveled to New York she was wearing a dress that soon seemed dowdy.

Joan didion west and south