Joan Didion, Writer Who Captured Turbulent Times, Dies at 87

As an author, she will be remembered for writing about the most turbulent moments of her time, from the civil-rights movement to the war in Vietnam,

Tracy Daugherty,

author of the 2015 book “The Last Love Song: A Biography of Joan Didion,” said in an earlier interview.

“What’s fascinating is that she began her career writing for fashion magazines,” said Mr. Daugherty. “She learned to look around the corner and see what was coming domestically earlier than others. She knew that when you change how things look and sound, you might be changing long-held values, sexuality, and how people lived their lives.”

That Ms. Didion had a star turn in 2015 in an ad for the fashion label Céline reflected both her own fashion know-how and her emergence as a feminist icon. “She was the image of the survivor,” Mr. Daugherty said.

A meticulous reporter and tough self-critic, Ms. Didion anchored her work in her interest in chronicling the changes in American culture. She prided herself on providing a level of detail that others failed to notice.

“Her reflective essays and portraits have always been astute and sharply observed, but what makes them sing is their recurrent air of Chekhovian wistfulness,” book reviewer

Michael Dirda,

who won the 1993 Pulitzer Prize for criticism, said in an earlier interview. “While the louder New Journalists have come and gone, after half a century Joan Didion still whispers to us about society, politics and life’s sorrows. And like Coleridge’s mesmerized wedding guest, we cannot choose but hear.”

In the preface to “Slouching Towards Bethlehem,” her 1968 collection of essays and her first published book of nonfiction, Ms. Didion wrote an explanation of her methods that inspired a generation of reporters and would help explain the broader fascination and distrust of media among celebrities and politicians alike.

“My only advantage as a reporter is that I am so physically small, so temperamentally unobtrusive, and so neurotically inarticulate that people tend to forget that my presence runs counter to their best interests. And it always does,” she wrote. “That is one last thing to remember: writers are always selling somebody out.”

Born in Sacramento, Calif., on Dec. 5, 1934, she graduated from the University of California, Berkeley and spent much of her life in Southern California, where she and her husband,

John Gregory Dunne,

collaborated on a number of film scripts.

Among her major novels was 1970’s “Play It As It Lays,” a work narrated by an actress whose life has been in steady decline. Director Frank Perry made a film version starring Tuesday Weld, with Ms. Didion co-writing the screenplay with Mr. Dunne. In his review, Roger Ebert described the film as “an astringent, cynical movie that ultimately manages to spin one single timid thread of hope. Its happiest moment—the moment of deepest human understanding and mutual love—comes during a suicide.”

One of Ms. Didion’s most commercially successful books was 2005’s “The Year of Magical Thinking,” in which she recounted the year that followed the death of her husband in late 2003. The memoir, told in the matter-of-fact voice long familiar to her readers, was a bestseller and the 2005 National Book Award winner for nonfiction. A stage adaptation starred Vanessa Redgrave.

In a 2005 interview with The Wall Street Journal, Ms. Didion explained that writing the book was her form of grieving. Asked why she had retraced her husband’s behavior in the days leading to his death, she replied: “I thought I would discover something of importance. And I did. I discovered his death was inevitable and that it wasn’t my fault.”

She added this observation on loss: “As time passes, you get beyond the immediately replaying of the immediate death. You then remember, and people told me this, you start remembering happier times. I don’t know if it was happier times, but you do remember other times.”

Ms. Didion suffered another tragedy the year that book was published: the death of her daughter,

Quintana Roo Dunne,

at age 39. Ms. Didion described that experience in 2011’s “Blue Nights.” Novelist

John Banville,

writing in the New York Times Book Review, concluded that the book is most profound when Ms. Didion “comes fully to realize, and to face squarely, the dismaying fact that against life’s worst onslaughts, nothing avails, not even art; especially not art.”

Write to Jeffrey A. Trachtenberg at jeffrey.trachtenberg@wsj.com