Key Highlights
- To live in Los Angeles is to live in Joan Didion’s world.
- On what would have been the writer’s 91st birthday, Didion’s thorny and tangled vision of the city endures.
- A philosopher, historian, songbird of grief and prophet, Didion foretold the city’s future with startling accuracy. Of writing, Didion once said, “I’m totally in control of this tiny, tiny world right there at the typewriter.” The same might be said of Los Angeles — a universe she continues to narrate to us long after her death.“Los Angeles weather is the weather of catastrophe, of apocalypse,” Didion wrote.
- In January 2025, when fires ravaged neighborhoods across the region, her former home of Malibu was again bathed in ash.
- On social media, the late writer’s words went viral for their startling poignancy.
