Joan Didion’s handwritten list of her 19 favourite books
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(Credits: Far Out / Kathleen Ballard, Los Angeles Times)
With an unflinching pen and an unwavering curiosity, Joan Didion chronicled American culture’s most pivotal moments across political and cultural shifts.
Across her amassed volume of essays, she dissected the niche facets of culture that particularly struck her. She explored religious sects in California, cult-like happenings in San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury, investigated the intentions behind the Manson family murders and profiled icons of youth culture from Joan Baez to The Doors. In all of her writings, regardless of subject, Didion sought out the “why”: why, for instance, would a young Linda Kasabian and her cohort be compelled to murder innocent people? Why were underage children abandoning their families and flocking to San Francisco?
No mere reportage, Didion fully studied her subjects as a means of understanding the world in which she existed. She was, all at once, fascinated and horrified with what America had become, and persisted in finding out how society had gotten there. Her approach proved not only to produce some of journalism’s finest investigations, but also achieved a sense of personal reconciliation. She once told The Paris Review, “Obviously I listen to a reader, but the only reader I hear is me. I am always writing to myself. So very possibly I’m committing an aggressive and hostile act toward myself.” There is always a personal investment in the stories Didion pursued, raising the stakes of her writing even higher.
This element of the personal transcended Didion’s journalism and essays and translated into her memoirs. In her later years, she recorded her grief over the sudden, simultaneous losses of her husband, John Gregory Dunne and their daughter, Quintana. Writing became a necessity for Didion, not to investigate but to survive. She studied life’s most existential questions as a means of reconciling with tragedy, producing raw displays of emotion that continue to identify with generations of readers, who did not have the language to communicate their sorrow until Didion put pen to paper.
Didion’s brilliance is so singular that it is nearly impossible to believe that she was influenced by anyone. But, like all great writers, Didion was always a voracious reader, and the books she inhaled from a young age prompted her to write with a similar purge of emotion and intent. Luckily, she left us a handwritten list of her favourite books (almost like a sacred text for those who have had the privilege of being hit like a truck by the goddamn weight of her writing).
At the top, to no surprise, is Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms, a writer and work that Didion said on many occasions was pivotal to her development as a writer. In an essay for The New Yorker in 1998, she wrote of the 1929 novel’s opening paragraph, “the arrangement of which remains as mysterious and thrilling to me now as it did when I first read them, at 12 or 13, and imagined that if I studied them closely enough and practiced hard enough I might one day arrange 126 such words myself”.
Hemingway also influenced Didion’s approach to sentence structure, teaching her how the art of construction worked and how it could be evolved. For Didion to hold Hemingway in such high regard, as many readers of her own would do, in time, shows an admiration for the craft of writing and its ability to stick in one’s mind for a lifetime.
The famed memoirist also includes a favourite memoir of her own: George Orwell’s Down and Out in Paris and London. Orwell’s first published work, released in 1933, is a two-part story centred on poverty in the two cities. Her seminal New York Times essay ‘Why I Write’, which later appeared in her final essay collection, Let Me Tell You What I Mean, took its title from Orwell. The two shared respective individual outlooks on the world.
A simple scribble of the name “Henry James” on Didion’s list suggests that she endorses all of his novels. Ranging from his early Victorian classic The Portrait of a Lady to the gothic horror novella The Turn of the Screw, Didion found a great thrill in reading his works.
“He wrote perfect sentences, too, but very indirect, very complicated. Sentences with sinkholes. You could drown in them,” she told The Paris Review. “I wouldn’t dare to write one. I’m not even sure I’d dare to read James again. I loved those novels so much that I was paralysed by them for a long time. All those possibilities. All that perfectly reconciled style. It made me afraid to put words down.”
Once you have devoured all of Didion’s works, consult her list of favourites for a further understanding of her unique voice.
Joan Didion’s favourite books:
- A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway
- Victory by Joseph Conrad
- Guerrillas by VS Naipaul
- Down and Out in Paris and London by George Orwell
- Wonderland by Joyce Carol Oates
- The Good Soldier by Ford Madox Ford
- Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë
- One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez
- Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
- Appointment in Samarra by John O’Hara
- The Executioner’s Song by Norman Mailer
- Speedboat by Renata Adler
- Go Tell It on the Mountain by James Baldwin
- Notes of a Native Son by James Baldwin
- The Berlin Stories by Christopher Isherwood
- The Novels of Henry James: Washington Square, Portrait of a Lady, The Bostonians, Wings of the Dove, The Ambassadors, The Golden Bowl, Daisy Miller, The Aspern Papers, The Turn of the Screw
- Collected Poems by Robert Lowell
- Collected Poems by WH Auden
- The Collected Poems by Wallace Stevens
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