“Grammar is a piano I play by ear” – says Joan Didion. As a little girl she was a bookish child who types out Hemingway’s stories to learn how to deal with the sentences.
Now Joan Didion was 87 years old and she is the iconic novelist, memoirist, essayist, style icon and the face of the new journalism – way to communicate facts through narrative storytelling and literary techniques.

It’s true that her writing has pushed the boundaries of the human.

The chronicler of the cruel world who presented the cold reality with a style, from the realities of the counterculture of the 60’s and the lifestyle in Hollywood.

Her career was launched after winning an essay sponsored by Vogue.

The award was a research assistant job at the magazine where she worked for more than a decade.

“All I know about grammar is its infinite power.”

“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.

Many people know about camera angles now, but not so many know about sentences,” Joan Didion writes in “Why I Write”.

During this early period she has written essays and reviews on American politics, media, pop culture, feminism, as well as columns on the private life for “Life”, “Esquire”, “The New York Times”…

 She published her first novel, a tragic story about murder and betrayal, called “Run River” in 1963. The same year Joan married writer John Gregory Dunne and they moved to Los Angeles.

The couple adopted a daughter whom they named Quintana Roo.

Wherever she lived, famous novelist created a small writing room with no view, where she went every morning:

 “ I mean you don’t want to go through that door, but once you’re in there, you’re there and it’s hard to go out.” Her starting point in writing is in the picture in the mind.

 “The picture dictates whether this will be a sentence with or without clauses, a sentence that ends hard or a dying-fall sentence, long or short, active or passive.”

Like Andy Warhol in his diaries, Joan Didion has written as an observer, not a witness.

 She attracted public interest with the journalistic essay “ Slouching Towards Bethlehem” in which she describes the events in California in the 60’s followed by decadence like meeting a preschool child who consumes LSD through play.

 A homage to her work was given by Johnny Mitchel in 1991 with a song with the same name.

Didion documented the world around her in a specific way in the book of essays  “White Album” named as Beatles record.

She wrote through the prism of their musical experiment, following their amplitudes, which she “translated” in the form of a verbal record of the time.

“We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images, by the ‘ideas’ with which we have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience,” she wrote.

“The White Album” is an extraordinary essay; Didion’s reflections on writing yield to a description of her mental health and its treatment, and recollections of meeting Black Panther leaders, student protests in San Francisco and the murderers of the Manson Family.

During her stay in Los Angeles, she also has written the screenplays – “The Panic in Needle Park”, “True Confessions”, “Up Close&Personal” and “A Star is Born”, a screenplay from 1976, which got the modern adaptation by Bradley Cooper and won Oscar for it.

Many cult, iconic and controversial persons have been seen at their house parties as Janice Joplin, Steven Spielberg, Jim Morrison, Natalie Wood, Martin Scorcese…

They remember Joan going down to breakfast every morning wearing black sunglasses, and then sitting in silence at a table, drinking cold Coca-Cola that was her coffee, nibbling only on almonds.

It is well known that Warren Beatty always asked to sit next to her at a party because he was very interested in her.

The most amusing story is that young Harrison Ford, while not yet an actor, was building a terrace on their flat in Malibu.

In the documentary about her “The Center Will Not Hold” we could see that she cooked for the wife of the Charles Manson immediately after the murder of Sharon Tate, the wife of Roman Polanski.

Didion wrote about the grief she felt at her husband’s death in “The Year of Magical Thinking”. 

It is  “a masterpiece of two genres: memoir and investigative journalism,” and won the National Book Award in 2005.

In 2005 Didion lost her daughter Quintana Roo

and she wrote a memoir about her loss  called “Blue Nights”, which was published in 2011.

 “Grief turns out to be a place none of us know until we reach it. We anticipate (we know) that someone close to us could die, but we do not look beyond the few days or weeks that immediately follow such an imagined death.

We misconstrue the nature of even those few days or weeks.

We might expect if the death is sudden to feel shock.

We do not expect this shock to be obliterative, dislocating to both body and mind. We might expect that we will be prostrate, inconsolable, crazy with loss.

We do not expect to be literally crazy, cool customers who believe their husband is about to return and need his shoes.”

Her style is also evidenced by the fact that Phoebe Philo, the former creative fashion house Celine in 2015, has chosen Didion as her face.

She has always performed on the stages of her life with big glasses in the style of Jackie Kennedy and Audrey Hepburn.

Nowadays Joan “has closed the box and put it in a closet”. She is ready to “tell stories in order to live because ” a single person is missing  for you, and the whole world is empty.”