She is considered one of the pioneers of New Journalism, along with Gay Talese, Truman Capote, Norman Mailer, Hunter S. Thompson, and Tom Wolfe.

[4] With her husband John Gregory Dunne, Didion wrote screenplays including The Panic in Needle Park (1971), A Star Is Born (1976), and Up Close & Personal (1996).

She identified as a "shy, bookish child," an avid reader, who pushed herself to overcome social anxiety through acting and public speaking.

[11] In 1943 or early 1944, her family returned to Sacramento, and her father went to Detroit to negotiate defense contracts for World War II.

[12] During her senior year, she won first place in the "Prix de Paris" essay contest, sponsored by Vogue,[13] and was awarded a job as a research assistant at the magazine.

"Their [Saturday Evening] Post rates allowed them to rent a tumbledown Hollywood mansion, buy a banana-colored Corvette Stingray, raise a child, and dine well.

[21] She wrote from a personal perspective, adding her own feelings and memories to situations, inventing details and quotes to make the stories more vivid, and using metaphors to give the reader a better understanding of the disordered subjects of her essays: politicians, artists, or just people living an American life.

[26] They also spent several years adapting the biography of journalist Jessica Savitch into the 1996 Robert Redford and Michelle Pfeiffer film, Up Close & Personal.

[15] In a prescient New York Review of Books piece of 1991, a year after the various trials of the Central Park Five, Didion dissected serious flaws in the prosecution's case, making her the earliest mainstream writer to view the guilty verdicts as miscarriages of justice.

[11] On October 4, 2004, Didion began writing The Year of Magical Thinking, a narrative of her response to the death of her husband and the severe illness of their daughter.

[34] Documenting the grief she experienced after the sudden death of her husband, the book was called a "masterpiece of two genres: memoir and investigative journalism" and won several awards.

[34] Visiting Los Angeles after her father's funeral, Quintana fell at the airport, hit her head on the pavement and required brain surgery for hematoma.

[33] After progressing toward recovery in 2004, Quintana died of acute pancreatitis on August 26, 2005, aged 39, during Didion's New York promotion for The Year of Magical Thinking.

[35] Didion began working with English playwright and director David Hare on a one-woman stage adaptation of The Year of Magical Thinking in 2007.

[34] Didion wrote early drafts of the screenplay for an untitled HBO biopic directed by Robert Benton on Katharine Graham.

[38] In 2012 New York Magazine announced “Joan Didion and Todd Field are co-writing a screenplay.”[39] The project titled As it Happens was a political thriller that never came to fruition, as they couldn’t find a studio to properly back it.

He paid tribute to her in a scene for his movie Tár wherein the title character returns to her childhood bedroom and peers at “little boxes" labeled precisely the way Didion describes Quintana’s in Blue Nights[40][41] A photograph of Didion shot by Juergen Teller was used as part of the 2015 spring-summer campaign of the luxury French fashion brand Céline, while previously the clothing company Gap had featured her in a 1989 campaign.

[43] In it, Didion discusses her writing and personal life, including the deaths of her husband and daughter, adding context to her books The Year of Magical Thinking and Blue Nights.

"[51] For several years in her 20s (1957-1962), Didion was in a relationship with Noel E. Parmentel, Jr., a political pundit and figure on the New York literary and cultural scene.

As he later recalled, when they shared a celebratory lunch after Dunne finished reading the galleys for her first novel, Run, River, "while [h]er [significant] other was out of town, it happened.

Breaking a long-held silence on Didion, whose work he had championed and for which he found publishers, Parmentel was interviewed for a 1996 article in New York magazine.

Curated by The New Yorker contributor and writer Hilton Als, the group show was on view from 2022 and is scheduled to travel to the Pérez Art Museum Miami in 2023.

Joan Didion: What She Means pays homage to the writer and thinker through the lens of nearly 50 modern and contemporary international artists such as Félix González-Torres to Betye Saar, Vija Celmins, Maren Hassinger, Silke Otto-Knapp, John Koch, Ed Ruscha, Pat Steir, among others.