The power of Didion’s prose lay in what she didn’t say.
Joan Didion, the writer whose reporting on the California of the 1960s was a landmark of New Journalism, died on Thursday in her Manhattan home at 87 years old. With this death, America is losing one of its greatest prose stylists in living memory. Didion wrote prose as clean and precise as a steel blade: It cut, but only what she meant to cut. As a child, she used to retype Hemingway’s chapters so that she could see how his sentences worked (Bret Easton Ellis later did the same thing with Didion’s work), but she had an austere elegance all her own. She was a master of argument through style; she rarely built out a formal thesis and supporting points, but would instead put her ideas across through a series of anecdotes, so carefully observed and beautifully rendered that the argument seemed to emerge from the negative space created by what Didion didn’t actually say. She didn’t need to say it. One of the most striking examples of Didion’s sparse and evocative prose comes in her 1966 essay “ On Keeping a Notebook.” Didion begins characteristically, with an anecdote drawn from her notebook — a woman in a “dirty crepe-de-Chine wrapper” complaining to a bored bartender about another woman named Estelle on an August morning in Wilmington. “Why did I write it down?” she asks.
