Social Media Ideas for Joan Didion

Read Joan Didion’s Previously Unreleased Grateful Dead Essay From the Summer of Love

“Didion1970” by Kathleen Ballard, Los Angeles Times is licensed under CC BY 4.0. In 1967, a 32-year-old Joan Didion received an assignment from the Saturday Evening Post. Tasked wi...

Read Joan Didion’s Lost Interview with the Grateful Dead (1967)

Without wanting to make too broad a generalization, it’s safe to say that Saturday Evening Post readers probably didn’t understand much about what was going on in San Francisco dur...

Why Joan Didion’s Daily Routine Always Started and Ended With a Drink

Discover the rigid, eccentric daily routine of literary icon Joan Didion, from her morning beverage to her strict 5:00 PM workflow boundary.

How the Manson Murders and Dominique Dunne Case Transformed LA True Crime

“Many people I know in Los Angeles believe that the Sixties ended abruptly on August 9, 1969, at the exact moment when word of the murders on Cielo Drive traveled like brushfire th...

Jesmyn Ward on the Power of Detail in an Age of Distraction

The acclaimed author articulates the value of attention in her new essay collection, On Witness and Respair.

Richer than Musk: Joyce Carol Oates on her 88 years of watching, writing, feeling and loving

The writer made headlines when she accused the world’s wealthiest man of lacking joy, culture, a sense of beauty … Meanwhile, her own life has been an attempt to understand and exp...

No One

My Scheme to Honor My Father’s Legacy

My dad loved obituaries. I thought that unless the New York Times announced your death on the front page, you hadn’t really lived.

The Bookkeeping of Memory: Judgment and Justice in True Grit

LuElla D'Amico on the final word.

The Twenty-Year Novel: Harriet Clark on The Hill

If you’re deprived of a home, deprived of access to your family, you learn that, actually, being bound to others is the significant thing.

Joyce Carol Oates Can’t Quit

T​he octogenarian is on her 50th short-story collection and 15th year as an X power user.

What Jack Kerouac Left Behind

More than half a century after “On the Road,” Jack Kerouac is still a literary celebrity. But fame undid the man I knew.

It’s Joan Baez, Babe, and She’s Got a Bone to Pick With the Pop Girls

Why do they refuse to denounce what’s going on in our country? “Because they’re already richer than God.”

A Kiss, a Memory, and the Long Road Between Then and Now

Jean has always believed that memory has a mischievous streak — especially the kind triggered by music. One moment she’s driving to the grocery store, minding her own business, and...

Norma Jeane’s Still Got It!

Some continue to like it hot.

The Day Sinatra Made Me Cry in Public

In this week’s installment from Jean’s corner of CCC life, what starts as a simple outdoor concert — the kind you attend mostly because it’s on the calendar and the weather’s decen...

Great American Memoirs Worth Returning To

These tales of resilience, grit and hope each reflect part of the American experience.

The Distant Star Theory of Blogging

The legendary 1930’s essay ‘In Awe of Words’ often circles back to the quiet reasons we write — the rhythms that steady us, the connections that surprise us, and the memories that...

Julia Alvarez on Aging, Mortality, & Why She’ll Never Stop Writing

The author reflects on legacy, getting older, and why writing remains the way she makes sense of the world.

The Innocents Abroad

“One of my guiding principles as a white American writing about the US is that it’s important to include yourself in your analysis, to acknowledge your own complicity or at least i...

“Stories,” by Annie Ernaux

I believed that, when it came to words, everything was allowed.

Women’s Work: My Barrier-Breaking Early Years at Mother Jones

As I page through colorful old copies of the magazines from my eight years at Mother Jones, memories start firing. I came on board as an editor in 1979, just as we were moving into...

At the Threshold of a New Story

Leena Wilde Ryan hadn't written anything she felt proud of in years. An old life burned down and a new life still rooting, words seemed held hostage by questions of their worth in...

The Socialite New York Never Forgave for a Crime That May Not Have Happened

A very American tragedy, just in time for the Fourth of July.