The Last Love Song: A Biography of Joan Didion

by Tracy Daugherty

Overview

In The Last Love Song, Tracy Daugherty, the critically acclaimed author of Hiding Man (a New Yorker and New York Times Notable book) and Just One Catch, and subject of the hit documentary The Center Will Not Hold on Netflix delves deep into the life of distinguished American author and journalist Joan Didion in this, the first printed biography published about her life.

Joan Didion lived a life in the public and private eye with her late husband, writer John Gregory Dunne, whom she met while the two were working in New York City when Didion was at Vogue and Dunne was writing for Time. They became wildly successful writing partners when they moved to Los Angeles and co-wrote screenplays and adaptations together.

Didion is well-known for her literary journalistic style in both fiction and non-fiction. Some of her most-notable work includes Slouching Towards Bethlehem, Run River, and The Year of Magical Thinking, a National Book Award winner and shortlisted for the Pulitzer Prize. It dealt with the grief surrounding Didion after the loss of her husband and daughter. Daugherty takes readers on a journey back through time, following a young Didion in Sacramento through to her adult life as a writer interviewing those who know and knew her personally, while maintaining a respectful distance from the reclusive literary great.

The Last Love Song reads like fiction; lifelong fans, and readers learning about Didion for the first time will be enthralled with this impressive tribute.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781250105943
Publisher:	St. Martin's Publishing Group
Publication date:	10/04/2016
Pages:	768
Sales rank:	973,231
Product dimensions:	5.30(w) x 8.20(h) x 1.30(d)

About the Author

Born and raised in Texas, Tracy Daugherty (he/him) is the author of over ten novels and short story collections, a memoir, a book of personal essays, a collection of essays on writing, a novella collection, and several literary biographies. His 2009 biography of Donald Barthelme, Hiding Man, was a New York Times and New Yorker Notable Book, and his 2015 biography of Joan Didion, The Last Love Song was a New York Times Bestseller. His work has been recognized by the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. At Oregon State University he helped found the MFA Program in Creative Writing.

Editorial Reviews

Compelling.” —Washington Post

“Thoughtful and ambitious.” — Michiko Kakutani, New York Times

“It is rare to find a biographer so temperamentally, intellectually, and even stylistically matched with his subject as Tracy Daugherty.” —Joyce Carol Oates, New York Review of Books

“Intelligent and elegant.” —Louis Menand, The New Yorker

“A-”—Entertainment Weekly

“A comprehensive, absorbing look at the life of th iconic author Joan Didion (our literary girl crush!) by a top-notch biographer.”—Good Housekeeping

“[Daugherty] gets friends talking, and he nails the ways in which history and culture shaped a writer who returned the favor.” —New York Magazine

“Mind-bogglingly well-researched.”—Elle

From the Publisher

For the most part, this thoughtful and ambitious biography remains focused on Ms. Didion's writing, using her life to shed light on her highly autobiographical work. Mr. Daugherty reminds us of the pioneer past of Ms. Didion's family…and how this indelibly shaped her vision of California, and how California, in turn, became, for her, a metaphor for the promises and betrayals of America…Although readers may not agree with all of Mr. Daugherty's assessments of individual Didion books, his biography evinces a deep appreciation of her skills and idiosyncrasies, and an understanding of how writers like Conrad, Hemingway and her college professor Mark Schorer (who sharpened her awareness of textual nuances and the use of point of view) helped her forge her singular style.

The New York Times - Michiko Kakutani

04/06/2015
Daugherty, author of the Donald Barthelme biography Hiding Man, offers a monumental, novelistic examination of Joan Didion’s life and career. The book’s impressively detailed attention to place, beginning with Didion’s California origins, grounds Didion’s development as both a fiction writer and a journalist who served as “our keenest observer of the chaos” of the 1960s and beyond. At times, Daugherty tries too hard to mimic Didion’s own famously cool and elliptical style, as in the passages about her time in Hollywood, but he settles into confident, engrossing prose when focusing on Didion’s literary achievements, from the prematurely world-weary early novels and the groundbreaking essays that cemented her fame to the “extremely political, icily angry” mature works and the heartbreaking late memoirs The Year of Magical Thinking and Blue Nights. Taking a loyal, often protective tone toward his (physically) “famously frail” subject, Daugherty crafts a complex, intricately shaded portrait of a woman also known for her inner toughness and intellectual rigor. This landmark work renders a nuanced analysis of a literary life, lauds Didion’s indelible contributions to American literature and journalism (especially New Journalism), and documents a “style has become the music of our time.” 8-page b&w photo insert. (Aug.)

Publishers Weekly

★ 05/01/2015
From the 1960s through the 1980s, Joan Didion, now 80, was the best recorder of America's traumas, arguably better than Norman Mailer, Hunter S. Thompson, Tom Wolfe, or any other New Journalist. Daugherty (distinguished professor of English and creative writing, Oregon State Univ.), who has penned biographies of Joseph Heller and Donald Barthelme, may be the ideal writer to chronicle her life and achievement. The one flaw that marred Just One Catch, his biography of Heller, was his excessive dwelling on trivia—but the approach works with Didion, whose critical vision is best captured obliquely, in fractured images that convey a feeling of unease without proof of its causes: the real narrative of the times is hidden behind appearance. Where Heller's genius lay in telling the wildest stories ever, Didion is something else completely, an alienated WASP (White Anglo-Saxon Protestant) from the far edge of the United States where fantasies replace honesty and the ugliness of power is conveniently elided. As Daugherty notes, Didion's sensibilities are wholly Californian, describing a land with no discernible past and no future worth saving. Everything is present. VERDICT A strong biography. Who won't want to read this "hot" book?—David Keymer, Modesto, CA

Library Journal

★ 2015-05-06
An eloquent work on the life of Joan Didion (b. 1934), fashioning her story as no less than the rupture of the American narrative. Didion's works of fiction, nonfiction, and journalism relentlessly probed the times in which they emerged. In this wonderfully engaging biography, Daugherty (English and Creative Writing/Oregon State Univ.; Just One Catch: A Biography of Joseph Heller, 2011, etc.) wisely sticks to Didion's near obsession with making sense of an increasingly incoherent narrative during the tumultuous decades of the waning 20th century. Showing the "construction of persona" of the California-raised author, Daugherty examines Didion's exploration of the concept of the Western-moving pioneer, resilient and stoical in the face of any calamity, a trope underscored by her mother's somewhat depressed motto, "what difference does it make?" The author also discusses Didion's journal keeping, which fed her penchant for eavesdropping; her early stylistic training under Berkeley instructor Mark Schorer and his "channeling of [Joseph] Conrad; her "frailty" and devotion to being the outsider; and her maddening "elisions," first honed from reading Hemingway. Didion's early pieces of New Journalism for Vogue—where she spent her early formative years, until the mid 1960s—reveal the "helter skelter" process that shaped her work: the contingency and chance, rather than the deliberation that critics assumed. In book reviews, movie-star profiles, and political reporting, she was struggling to find an "effective American voice." Enter Time writer John Gregory Dunne, whom she married after the publication of her first novel, Run, River, in 1963, and with whom she moved back to California to work in the more lucrative industry of TV and film. Daugherty devotes much of the later pages of his biography to their remarkable literary partnership, which ended with his sudden death in 2003—an event that inspired her haunting memoir The Year of Magical Thinking (2003). A dogged biographer elicits from Didion's life much more than tidy observations of "morality and culture."

Kirkus Reviews