Joan Didion had a deep, complex, insider-outsider relationship with Hollywood, living in LA and Malibu for over three decades. She famously captured the vacuum and bleak glamour of the film industry in her 1970 novel Play It as It Lays. Considered one of the pioneers of New Journalism along with the likes of Hunter S Thompson and Tom Wolfe. Didion wrote numerous essays for Life, Esquire, The New York Review and The New Yorker among others. Her writing during the 1960s through to the late 1970s engaged audiences in the realities of the 60s counterculture, the Hollywood lifestyle, and the history and culture of California.

Her work has been described as the pinnacle of New Journalism, using novel-like writing to cover the non-fiction realities of hippie counterculture. Her finest work, ‘The White Album’ is a collection of essays centred around the abrupt end of the 1960s focusing on the cultural effect of the Manson Family murders; One of Didion’s most quoted lines: “We tell ourselves stories in order to live”, explains that humans survive the confusion and brutality of life by trying to find connections between events and extract meaning from those connections. We’re constantly trying to force seemingly random happenings into the framework of a story that might teach or show us something.

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