“We tell stories in order to live,” she said, and wrote the best stories of her own. Reporter and world-famous essayist Joan Didion died in New York at the age of 87.
Obituary from
Willi Winkler
William Faulkner, who wrote such sweeping novels, wanted the obituary for a writer to be as short as possible: “He wrote books, then he died.” Joan Didion’s husband chose the phrase as the motto for his fifty-year high school reunion, and she quotes it again in “The Year of Magical Thinking,” the book about his writing and his sudden death: “He wrote books, then he died.” But it’s not that easy with her.