![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() As Tracy Daugherty reports in his 2015 biography The Last Love Song, sometimes Life didn’t even run the columns she filed, so she broke the contract after six months. “Some of the guys are going out,” her editor told her. Didion had been writing a column for Life that exposed her sometimes very personal writing to a mass audience (“We are here on this island in the middle of the Pacific in lieu of filing for divorce,” she wrote in the winter of 1969), but Life wouldn’t send her where she wanted to go: Vietnam. But the Saturday Evening Post - the magazine that had sustained the couple through the late 1960s and the original home of most of the essays collected in Slouching Towards Bethlehem (1968) - had gone belly up. In the Times John Leonard called it “just about perfect according to its own austere terms” and compared her to Nathanael West it would be nominated for the National Book Award and garner a hefty advance for paperback rights after several precarious years she and her husband John Gregory Dunne had spent freelancing. Play It As It Lays, her second novel, was published to rapturous reviews. In the summer of 1970 Joan Didion was 35 years old, truly famous for the first time, and professionally adrift. ![]()
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