To a certain set of young women Joan Didion is something of an intellectual godmother. These women (they are almost always women) are attracted to her knife-like prose and her cool “disassembling of overprecious myth,” as the New Yorker staff writer Jia Tolentino put it at Didion’s memorial service in 2022. They want to sound like her, look like her, be her. 

But they don’t write like it. In The World According to Joan Didion, the feminist pop culture writer Evelyn McDonnell demonstrates the limits of the tribute biography. She sets herself up as her subject’s admiring Boswell, tracing her footsteps and imitating her prose—but Didion is no Samuel Johnson. She’s not the effusive center of a world class intellectual club who tolerates pesky scribbling hangers-on in part to cement a legacy as a giant of English literature. She is, simply put, a loner, and about the worst tactical mistake someone could make in trying to understand her work is to try to emulate her. 

A biographer’s interest in Didion is easy to understand. However different Didion may be from Johnson in personality, she is, like Johnson, quotable. “We tell ourselves stories in order to live,” from the title piece on The Doors in The White Album (1979), is one of the best known—and worst interpreted —opening lines of all of journalism. (It doesn’t mean we really like bookstores. It means any attempt at understanding one’s circumstances is a construction, a fabrication.) “I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking,” from her 1976 essay “Why I Write,” is even more revealing of her self centered method—and has suffered similar abuse among novice writers.

And, like Johnson, Didion reshaped her genre’s prose in her own image. Boswell devotes entire pages in his Life of Johnson to tracking imitations of his subject’s dense, erudite, Ciceronian style, which became the quintessence of elegance and the source of poor emulations among his many admirers. One could perform the same exercise with Didion. She was the master of the sweeping statement, issued flatly with such infinite confidence that it reads as precision: “Love was sex and sex was death and therein lay  salvation” (her summary of The Doors in the title essay of The White Album). She describes her personal observations using infinitives that take the character of divine decrees: “To spend time in Miami is to acquire a certain fluency in cognitive dissonance” (from Miami). “To look down upon Honolulu from the high rain forest that divides windward Oahu from the leeward city is to see . . . a place so still and private that once seen it is forever in the mind” (from “In the Islands,” Hawaii described from the vantage point of God). And she recast the magazine writer’s rhythm: first she spools out a long, lyrical sentence, portraying a scene in striking, cinematic detail. Then a short one: the punchline. And a kicker.

Didion was one of those fortunate journalists who found her way from typing out Hemingway sentences at her childhood home in Sacramento to an internship and staff position at Vogue (and freelancing for William F. Buckley Jr. at National Review on the side), and from there in relatively short order to a rave New York Times review of her first collection Slouching Toward Bethlehem in the late 1960s and a career that had broken wide open by the time The White Album, a collection of high-profile magazine pieces from Esquire, Life, and elsewhere, appeared in 1979. She produced successful novels, along with the screenplays for their film adaptations (Play It As It Lays), and co-wrote the screenplay for A Star Is Born and many other films with her husband, John Gregory Dunne. 

The New York Review of Books, her main publishing outlet, turned her toward politics, and she spent years informing an increasingly adoring public that she, an increasingly liberal writer raised in a Rockefeller Republican family, was not impressed with the 1980s New Right (Reagan’s California governor’s mansion was classless; Nancy was a vicious climber) or with George H. W. Bush (who used the Middle East as one massive photo op) or Michael Dukakis, either (who staged fake-folksy baseball tosses on the tarmac between campaign stops). By the end of her career Didion was claiming as her subjects the political conflicts of entire cities and countries in book-length reports (Miami, Salvador) and upending major national stories such as the court cases of the Central Park Five, who, she was the first to argue, were wrongfully convicted.

That’s the c.v. side of a woman who was one half (and probably more than one half) of a journalistic power couple with Dunne, the mother of an adopted daughter named Quintana, and hostess and head chef in a home whose guests included stars such as Harrison Ford, Nora Ephron, Gay Talese, and Janis Joplin. She was a tiny, soft-spoken bookworm—and she became California royalty.

That one of magazine journalism’s most powerful legends would arise from this life is not surprising. The genre was in need of remaking, with results that today—and post-Didion—can read as exhibitionist or otherwise bizarre. Didion was distinct among the New Journalists. When Hunter S. Thompson was losing his mind on drugs at the Kentucky Derby and Tom Wolfe was dancing around Manhattan in a white suit scribbling in his own invented language, Didion was—nowhere. She was five feet tall and maybe a hundred pounds, and when covering a story she could vanish. She was so awkwardly quiet in interviews that people confessed their secrets out of pure discomfort. She involves herself in her stories, sure, but just enough to assure the reader that she is in control, and by extension the reader is too. This is all very relatable (one of McDonnell’s choice words), especially if you’re a young writer who wants to believe that you can turn your bad case of nerves into fame, or fortune, or just good journalism.

McDonnell assumes an audience that wants to relate to its subject, and for this reason she frequently reassures the reader about concerns personal and political. This is likely because she believes that most of her readers are already fans and have picked up this biography simply to come to love their heroine better. “Most of us have a Joan Didion origin story,” the book begins. “She’s a writer?! I want to be a writer.” Throughout the book, she reads Didion’s work, visits her home and other storied spots, and interviews friends and family, all in an attempt to get into Didion’s head.

In interviewing people about “Joan,” McDonnell says, “I sometimes feel like she can be a Rorschach test: Everyone sees in her what they want to see; she is a screen on which we project ourselves.”

But she consistently makes the same mistake herself, first by consciously emulating Didion’s prose: “One of the ways Didion taught herself to write was by typing pages of Ernest Hemingway’s writing. I did the same with her books,” McDonnell writes. “You’ll see those tricks here, some of them conscious gimmicks on my part, some of them so woven into the fabric of my writing I don’t know they are stolen goods. While our maps sometimes aligned, I could never imitate Joan Didion’s gait.” 

This is not a promising start. While it is technically possible to weave fabric with stolen goods (if the goods happen to be pilfered thread, that is), it’s more difficult to align one’s map with one’s gait, and it’s impossible to imagine Didion coming even close to mixing metaphors with such cheerful cluelessness.

Didion didn’t type out Hemingway to use “conscious gimmicks” in her writing, but “to learn how the sentences worked.” A biographer who writes that Didion “chose every word with machinelike precision”—an imprecise adjective, since McDonnell’s whole point about Didion is that nothing about her prose is mechanical—hasn’t learned how her subject’s sentences work.

McDonnell also reads her own feminist political concerns onto Didion. In her telling, Didion struggles to have it all as the demands of motherhood clash with her girl boss career: “Let’s just pause for a moment to consider the image of Didion in a linen dress holding a parasol over her newborn in the middle of a war zone. We appreciate her commitment to her journalistic mission above all else, but perhaps the years at Vogue had gone a bit to the writer’s head.” But, McDonnell assures her readers, even world-class celebrity writers have the same child-care troubles as the typical working class mom. She quotes Quintana listing her mother’s favorite phrases: “Brush your teeth, brush your hair, shush I’m working.”

McDonnell’s account of Didion’s lifelong anxiety about the tension between work and motherhood comes as close as anything in the book to a cogent criticism of Didion: there was a painful competition between the traditional family life she seemed to want and the fame she pursued. And yet, she could have afforded a nanny. Something that’s hard to see when you approach a subject as an adoring admirer is your hero’s desire for a life quite different than her legend. 

But that complication doesn’t seem to matter as much for McDonnell as the importance of making Didion palatable for those who, like her, “find her politics sometimes blindered by privilege.” Those blinders turn out just to be more offenses against McDonnell’s own late-feminist pieties: Didion had a taste for macho men, she sometimes used her husband’s last name, and she wrote a “mean-spirited” essay in 1972 attacking second-wave feminism that revealed yet more “blindered privilege.”

So McDonnell does her best to claim Didion as an instinctual feminist—or at least an egalitarian—blinded by her upbringing and her heteronormative life style. To do so, she reaches back wishfully all the way to Didion’s writing about “gender inequity” in the early days at Vogue: “The writer may have later distanced herself from the women’s movement, but at age twenty-five, she had no delusions about the reality of sexism.” Delusions, note, not illusions. The delusions came later.

In the end, McDonnell is forgiving of these sins, acknowledging that even the enlightened elite at Didion’s New York memorial service managed to be appreciative: “Even those who question her politics acknowledge her artistry.”

This is all very gracious, but it’s also deeply inconsistent. If she truly admired Didion’s craft and her signature “honesty,” McConnell would have had no mercy. (Didion is, after all, a writer who saw a California kindergartener tripping on LSD and called it “gold.”) Didion was sexually regressive, she should say: she married a man who yelled at her and then engaged in awful power struggles—about their relationship, about their careers, about everything—that nearly ended their marriage. She was heartless and cruel about her subjects. She was (probably) anorexic. She voted for Goldwater. She profited off of both old Sacramento society and new California money. She adopted a child and then worked all the time, partied, dragged her kid around the world for her work, and contributed to her anxiety about being adopted and ultimately to her mental health problems. She wrote infinitely disdainful things about feminism, and she should be treated with the same disdain. That would have been a fitting tribute to the paragon of honesty Didion’s fans claim to admire. 

Instead of taking on her hero, though, McDonnell makes a pilgrimage to one of the holy places of Didion lore. In the climax of the book, she empties her savings on a stay at the Royal Hawaiian Hotel, where Didion wrote the famous opening passage of “In the Islands,” published soon after a mental breakdown in 1968: “We are here on this island in the middle of the Pacific in lieu of filing for divorce.” 

“I’m staying in a high-ceilinged room at the Royal Hawaiian Hotel in Honolulu listening to an annoying man on a microphone hustling tourists in lieu of filing the book I am writing about Joan Didion,” McDonnell writes in a play off of Didion—one of those conscious gimmicks she warned readers about. “I came here because Joan came here.”

She goes there to swim in Didion’s ocean, order Didion’s room service, read by Didion’s pool, and interpret for Didion’s disciples how her “privilege” allowed her to engage in this kind of escapism. Given all her relatable mental struggles and strivings to have it all, Didion counts as a feminist of the heart: “Didion wanted more for the starlets, more for the surfer-girl characters, more for her daughter, more for herself. All her life she took chances, sought adventure, wanted to see where the next wave would take her.”

This, of course, is the sort of clichéd interpretation of a subject that Didion would have found offensive. It stems from the mistake of thinking that as biographer McDonnell can and should enter her subject’s mind and voice her desires, in order to become more like her.

Instead of trying to transform her subject into a friend and ally through the sheer force of her admiration, Didion would have served her on ice. If Didion had profiled Didion, she would have described what she actually saw: a small, frail woman, in many ways conventional wife and mother pretending in her writing to be invincible—and someone who, to maintain that illusion, always kept a certain distance from anyone who came too close. She would have been honest.

“Her subject was the American empire,” McDonnell writes of Didion. That’s true, but beneath that was something even closer to her heart: it was herself. As she wrote in her journal, “Remember what it was to be me: that is always the point.” 

This is something the fandom doesn’t seem to understand about itself or its heroine. There’s no point in trying to be like Joan Didion. The whole point of Joan Didion was being Joan Didion—the one and only. As she writes from Hawaii on the brink of losing her marriage and possibly her sanity: “I tell you this not as aimless revelation but because I want you to know, as you read me, precisely who I am and where I am and what is on my mind.” 

Seen one way, in writing this essay Didion was rebuilding her strength and sanity out of language, a humane and even heroic act. Seen another way, she was carving for her self an adamantine legend that no one else could alter: a grand monument to the life of Joan Didion. 

There is truth in both. But her fans often see only the first—partly, perhaps, because they share her narcissistic view that all writing is ultimately about yourself.