An elegant writer’s tragic life has finally come to a close.

Two nights before Christmas, Joan Didion died.
Didion was an iconic American author. I’ve read four of her books so far, but I first found her through a tragedy.

In late December 2003, just days before Christmas, Didion’s daughter Quintana suddenly fell ill and was rushed to intensive care. The Didions spent the holiday shuttling between home and the hospital. The night before New Year’s Eve, after returning from a visit with their daughter, Didion and her husband John had just sat down to dinner when he went into cardiac arrest. In an instant, she lost the partner with whom she’d shared forty years of life.

For the next year, Didion kept turning back to the previous year’s calendar, retracing what she and John had been doing on that same date. Out of that year came The Year of Magical Thinking: a record of memory and mourning, the helplessness that follows catastrophe, and the hard, uneven work of coming back to oneself. Beyond its aching recollections, the book is full of clear-eyed reflections on life—moving, unsentimental, and bracing.

I loved that book. After finishing it, I went looking for more and read her earlier novel A Book of Common Prayer. These days fiction isn’t my favorite form; too many novels seem determined not to tell a story straight, and this one leans that direction too, so it didn’t strike me as remarkable.

Then an even greater calamity arrived.

While she was writing Magical Thinking, Didion was still caring for the gravely ill Quintana. No sooner had she finished the book than her daughter—just thirty-nine—also died.

So Didion wrote Blue Nights. Like The Year of Magical Thinking, it’s a work of memoir and meditation, centered on her daughter’s life and loss, and shadowed by time’s passage and her own aging. The Didions hadn’t had children of their own; Quintana was adopted. Their only child, so deeply cherished, nevertheless faced formidable challenges, including long-running struggles with alcohol and prescription drugs. Her sudden illness and death were likely bound up with those troubles. In Blue Nights, you feel a mother’s lifelong fear pressing through the pages: Did I do what a mother should? Did I protect her? Did I love her enough?

Right around then, I read a piece on Joan Didion in The Atlantic. She was born in 1934 in California’s Central Valley and studied English at UC Berkeley. The writer’s father had once chaired Berkeley’s English department, and Didion had been to dinner at their home. She was painfully shy—aloof, ill at ease, unsure what to do with herself all evening—and that awkwardness left a deep impression.

I also began to understand why Didion became so famous. Long before The Year of Magical Thinking, she was already a literary star; tragedy didn’t make her, it merely reframed her. She was one of those New Journalists who braided fiction’s tools into reportage, writing with more heat and feeling than most straight news. A quick dip into the online lore about her turns up a kind of rakish, bohemian chic: Berkeley, stilettos, cigarettes, sweeping dresses, those enormous sunglasses. The look helps explain her iconic status.

Her breakout was Slouching Towards Bethlehem, which of course I hunted down. The collection gathers more than twenty essays, many about the counterculture—the collapse of inherited values beneath the glittering surface of American prosperity. A number of the pieces fix on the hippies who filled San Francisco’s streets in the sixties: it’s the record of an era. Her prose is superb; her command of the sentence is complete. The lines are clean, musical, alive.

More than the novels or the sixties dispatches, though, what’s most hypnotic is her own life. There’s a Netflix documentary, Joan Didion: The Center Will Not Hold, which I watched one day in the early months of the pandemic. Made by her nephew, it traces a life shot through with joy and calamity. What struck me most was how old she looked—no longer the woman in a long dress and blackout shades. Her husband gone, her daughter gone before her, she had been living alone for fifteen years. If grief had a face, it might be that gaunt, deeply lined one on the screen—and yet there’s an uncanny calm about her.

Didion was lucky enough to be gifted with talent, but in the face of heavy losses, talent can feel like a trick of light, something that flickers and fades. To get through a life safely is luck enough. People reach for comparisons—pairing her with other women writers who buried a husband and then a child, and carried on with quiet fortitude. Labels aside, the truth is simple: she outlived the two people she loved most and then met the rest of her years alone.

So when I heard she had died, I wasn’t especially desolate. Death is where we’re all headed; it isn’t necessarily a tragedy. What’s tragic is when it comes out of season, too soon. That part had already happened to Didion. By the end, there was very little left in this world to frighten her.