Five things we learned about Joan Didion from Netflix documentary by Griffin Dunne
Want to know which famous US actor had a crush on Didion? Or what she did when she had writer’s block? Netflix documentary Joan Didion: The Center Will Not Hold reveals an author who has gifted readers for over 50 years
How do you make a documentary about one of the literary world’s most searingly personal figures? Keep it in the family.
For more than five decades, Joan Didion has gifted readers with her lyrical prose, wry wit and soul-baring meditations on grief. She wrote about the 2003 death of her husband, writer John Gregory Dunne, in The Year of Magical Thinking, and the loss of her daughter, Quintana, two years later in Blue Nights.
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It was around the time when Blue Nights was published in 2011 that Didion’s nephew, filmmaker Griffin Dunne, approached her about making Joan Didion: The Center Will Not Hold (streaming Friday on Netflix).
“I know her about just as well as anybody,” says Dunne, though he says he “hardly approached [the documentary] with the most balanced perspective. The movie is a love letter to her.”
Five things we learned from the documentary: