Joan Didion (b. 1934)  On Morality LINKS The Salon Interview: Joan Didion http://www.salon1999.com/oct96/interview961028.html This piece by Dave Eggers from 1996 is prefaced by some background information on Didion and impressions of her personality, while the interview itself focuses on Didon's novel, The Last Thing He Wanted, as well as other topics. BIOGRAPHY Joan Didion (b. 1934)  A fifth-generation Californian, Didion was born in Sacramento and raised in the great central plain of California, an area she often describes nostalgically in her work. As an undergraduate English major at the University of California, Berkeley, she won an essay prize sponsored by Vogue magazine. As a result, Vogue hired her, and for eight years she lived in New York City, while she rose to associate features editor. She published her first novel, Run River, in 1963 and in the same year, married the writer John Gregory Dunne. In 1964 the couple returned to California, where they remained for twenty-five years. Although Didion wrote four more novels, her reputation rests on her essays collected as Slouching toward Bethlehem (1968) and The White Album (1979). In addition to her work as a columnist, essayist, and fiction writer, she has collaborated with her husband on a number of screenplays. She has focused her trenchant powers of observation in two documentary, book-length studies: Salvador (1983) and Miami (1987). Her most recent book is the novel The Last Thing He Wanted (1996). Her reputation as a prose stylist is reflected in a comment by one critic who asserts that "nobody writes better English prose than Joan Didion. Try to rearrange one of her sentences, and you've realized that the sentence was inevitable, a hologram." Didion characterizes herself as uneasy with abstractions: "I would try to think about the Great Dialectic and I would find myself thinking instead about how the light was falling through the window in an apartment I had on the North Side. How it was hitting the floor."