As she was in life, Joan Didion (1934-2021) in death is a subject of fascination. Evelyn McDonnell (Women Who Rock) indulges her own fascination in The World According to Joan Didion, an impressionistic tour of Didion's life, written with a feminist's eye, a poet's command of language, and a fan's yearning.
McDonnell breaks her narrative into 14 chapters that could succeed as stand-alone essays. Each chapter is named for something that "figured large" in Didion's life. "Snake" is about the land of Didion's California forebears as well as her fear of the reptile that gives the chapter its title. "Stingray"--named for Didion's Corvette, against which she famously posed--is about her iconic style and her life as half of a Hollywood screenwriting power couple. "Girl"--"the hardest chapter to write"--is a gut punch about Didion and husband John Gregory Dunne's daughter, Quintana, who struggled with alcoholism and whose death at 39 prompts uncomfortable questions bravely considered by McDonnell.
The World According to Joan Didion is a work of detection: McDonnell examines Didion's sentences for clues about her essence, and her essence for clues about her sentences. Mindful that place "was not just a setting in her writing; it was a character," McDonnell visits some of Didion's haunts, among them a Hawaiian hotel and Manhattan's Upper East Side, where the writer lived out her days. Adding particularized insights are McDonnell's interviewees, many of whom knew Didion well. By book's end, McDonnell's readers will feel they do, too. --Nell Beram, author and freelance writer