Joan Didion in 1996. Photo: The Los Angeles Times

Vintage Books has provided Joan-Didion.info with the particulars of Joan Didion’s upcoming book tour promoting Blue Nights. In turn, we have added the information to our Readings and Events page.

The full details of some events are not yet available, so we recommend that readers bookmark the page and check back for the latest updates.

Didion will appear at nine events in six cities across the United States, and at one event in Toronto, Canada. The first scheduled event, a reading at the Barnes and Noble on Union Square in New York, will coincide with the American release of the book on the 1st of November, 2011.

British and Irish fans of Didion’s work will have to wait until November 4th, 2011 to buy a copy. This will be followed by the publication of the memoir in Australia on November 8th, 2011. No tour dates are planned for these markets.

As a result of this development, Didion’s planned appearance at the University of Minnesota campus on April 13 has been cancelled. She was scheduled to give the 10th Anniversary Esther Freier Endowed Lecture at the Ted Mann Hall.

A spokesperson for the university said it was unlikely that the event would be rescheduled this year.

On February 12, Joan Didion will present the first Quintana Roo Dunne Award for Visual Achievement in memory of her late daughter, a Columbia Spectator alumna.

On February 12, Joan Didion will present the first Quintana Roo Dunne Award for Visual Achievement at the Columbia Spectator‘s Annual Awards Dinner at the Columbia University Club in New York. The award is named for Didion’s daughter who died in 2005.

Quintana Roo Dunne graduated from Columbia’s Barnard College in 1989, having served as the Spectator‘s photo editor in 1988. She later worked as a photographer for Elle Decor magazine.

The event is being held to raise money for the Spectator, which is a daily student newspaper. Arianna Huffington, the founder of the Huffington Post, will deliver the keynote address. The cost of a ticket is $250 for the complete dinner, or $50 to attend the speeches and award presentation ceremony. See here for tickets.

Vanessa Redgrave will reprise her starring role from the 2007 Broadway play “The Year of Magical Thinking” at a performance on Monday to benefit programs run by United Nations charities.

The play is based on Joan Didion‘s 2005 memoir chronicling the deaths of her daughter and husband. When Redgrave performs Monday at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, it will be the first time she has played the role since the death of her own daughter, actress Natasha Richardson, in March.

“The message of this play is so important to me that I want to make sure that it can be heard by as wide an audience as possible,” Redgrave said in a statement. “This is an experience we all go through, young and old alike. It would be wonderful to see the Cathedral filled with both those whose lives are fully ahead of them, as well as those who know fully what that road is like.”

Source.

YEAR OF MAGICAL THINKING – Debut October 10, 2009, Saturday at 21:30 at Teatro Bibi Ferreira. Season: Fridays and Saturdays at 21:30 and Sundays at 19 hours, until 1 November 2009.

Author: Joan Didion. Direction: Caio de Andrade. Cast: Imara Reis. Translation: Erica de Almeida Rego Migon and Ursula de Almeida Rego Migon. Set and costume design: Célia Alves. Soundtrack: Caio de Andrade. Lighting: Hiram Ravache. Photographer: Jefferson Martins. Design: Emmanuel Della Nina. Production Manager: Luque Daltrozo. Director: Daltrozo Produções Ltda. Indication group: 14 years. Tickets: £ 40.00 (Fridays and Sundays) and $ 60.00 (Saturday) – half price for students and seniors. Indication group: 14 years. Duration: 60 minutes.

TEATRO BIBI FERREIRA – Avenida Brigadeiro Luís Antônio, 931 – Bela Vista. Phone: (11) 3105-3129. Conveniado Parking: $ 7.00. Capacity: 300 seats. Box office: From Tuesday to Sunday from 14.30. Accepts cash, check and cards Visanet. Join Fast: 4003-1212 www.ingressorapido.com.br Air Conditioning. Access for disabled people. www.teatrobibiferreira.com.br

Teatro Sérgio Cardoso – Sala Paschoal Charlemagne. Reestréia November 13, at 21h30 (Fridays at 21h30 on Saturdays at 21h, Sunday, at 19 hours, tickets, $ 20.00 and $ 10.00 a half). Rua Rui Barbosa, 153. Bela Vista. Tel: 3288 0136. Close to subways and San Joaquin Brig. Accessibility for people with special needs. Box Office: Wednesday to Sunday from 15h to 19h (advance sales). Sale through the site entrance fast: www.ingressorapido.com.br. Capacity – 144 seats. Season – Fridays at 21h30, Saturdays at 21 pm and Sunday at 19 hours. Tickets – $ 20.00 and $ 10.00 (half). Cards – Visa. Until December 20.

‘The Year of Magical Thinking: The Play’ (TYoMT: P), a self-adapted staging of Joan Didion’s non-fiction book of the same name, was first performed by Vanessa Redgrave on Broadway in the summer of 2007. Though Didion did the writing; the director, David Hare, and Redgrave herself were intimately part of the production process.  Recently, we have seen a steady supply of alternative productions, with each actress taking the work in a different direction, some more successfully than others. In May 2009, Analee Jefferies inhabited the role in a TheatreWorks production in Hartford Connecticut, earning strong reviews from The New York Times, who praised her “earthier, less reserved” approach.

Now another actress is preparing to play the part of ‘Didion’ – a writer coping with grief and waking up the audience to its unsubtle methods. The Intiman Theatre in Seattle is preparing for its run from August 21st until September 20th, with Judith Roberts as the sole performer. Roberts’ stage credits have a solid Shakespearian flavour, including Richard 111 at Classic Stage Company. Such experience should serve her well as she endeavours to communicate a character entirely in extremis. “In the midst of life we are in death,” Didion wrote, recalling the words Presbyterians say at the graveside. Done correctly, the play can stun an audience by articulating the simple burden of this reality.

If you missed the original, you’ll get another chance to see Vanessa Redgrave this October when she reprises the role to raise money for UNICEF. Joan Didion and David Hare will be special guests at this performance in St. John The Divine, Manhattan. This event had been scheduled for April 2009, but was postponed following the sudden death of Natasha Richardson, Redgrave’s daughter. When asked by a reporter if Didion thought that Redgrave’s previous involvement with the work would help her with the grieving process, Didion replied, “I don’t think there’s any comfort… [Or if there is], it’s cold comfort.”

The Year of Magical Thinking, adapted by Joan Didion from her memoir, directed by Sarna Lapine and starring Judith Roberts. Performances will begin at Intiman Theatre, 201 Mercer Street at Seattle Center, on Friday, August 21 and continue through Sunday, September 20. The opening night performance is Wednesday, August 26 at 7:30 pm. For more, click here.

A benefit performance by Vanessa Redgrave of “The Year of Magical Thinking: The Play” in support of UNICEF on Monday, October 26th, 2009. Click here.

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Monday evening, Didion’s brother-in-law, producer, writer, and victim’s rights activist. Dominick Dunne was joined by Jason Tyrrell of IndiePix Films and co-director Kirsty de Garis at the Borders Bookstore in Columbus Circle to discuss the newly-released documentary, DOMINICK DUNNE: AFTER THE PARTY, following an exclusive sneak peek of the film.

The packed house applauded the short but candid scene, in which Dominick discussed the death of three of his children — two just after birth, and one at the hands of a murderer during her 22nd year. A Q&A session with Dominick and Kirsty went on for a solid hour, with no holds barred and no questions left unanswered. As in the film, Dominick is utterly candid in his recounting of the most amazing, unending string of stories. Telling tales that spanned from the battlefields of World War II to the early days of television and the golden age of Hollywood, through personal tragedies and his rebirth as a celebrity and crime writer, Dominick had the crowd on the edge of their seats.

More amazing than the list of personal relationships with some of the biggest stars in cinema is the unending energy of the man himself. Dominick is currently battling cancer, but continues to edit a new novel while periodically enduring chemotherapy and stem cell transplants. And after the long conversation, he still stayed until everyone who wanted an autograph had received one. Though the film is subtitled AFTER THE PARTY, the party seems to be rolling right along for Dominick!

DOMINICK DUNNE: AFTER THE PARTY is now available online, for rent at Netflix, and in Borders and other retailers across the country. 

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The write-up was paraphrased by contributer Kolleen Whitley from an article on the Indie Pix blog, written by Jason Tyrrell.  The blog entry can be found here.

In the film, Vanity Fair’s more notorious celebrity journalist considers his life from childhood and heroism in World War II to his rise and ultimate fall in Hollywood, as well as the total reincarnation that followed when Dunne redeveloped as a writer in his fifties. 

On Monday, June 22nd at 7p.m., Dominick Dunne will be signing copies of the DVD at Borders bookstore located at 10 Colombus Circle (Manhattan). There will also be a round-table discussion with Dominick, co-Director Kirsty de Garis and other key cast. All DVDs will be marked down to $19.99 for this exclusive event!

Thanks to Kolleen Whitley for the above post. Visit here for more. 

The reports are in on Joan Didion’s reading in Cleveland:

Writer Joan Didion, whose spare, piercing sensibility has colored American culture for 40 years, talked about her craft Tuesday evening at the Ohio Theatre in Cleveland.

At age 74, Didion’s fierceness in print contrasts with her fragility in person; she stumbled as she stepped up to the Cleveland stage.

“No matter how many times somebody says watch the step, I still trip,” she said without preamble, her voice deeper than expected, carrying a faint flatness that she has attributed to a girlhood in California.

Her fiction, she said, flowed invariably from her nonfiction reporting, and she compared journalism to sculpting a material already there while writing a novel was more akin to attempting a watercolor. She dismissed Wallace Stegner’s work as too polite and “Orlando,” by Virginia Woolf as “irritating.”

The daughter of a librarian and a financial officer who loved playing craps said her parents gave her free rein as a child in the Sacramento library, but “I wasn’t allowed to listen to the radio because there were scary things on it.”

She had wanted to be an oceanographer — “I was interested in how deep things were; as a child, that was always my question: ‘How deep is it?’¤ ” –and much of her work has pivoted around tensions of what was disclosed and hidden.

“It took me a long time to realize I was trying to come to terms with my failure to understand,” she said. “There was a lot I didn’t get.”

Famously immune to political fads and Hollywood power, Didion wrote essays about the cultural upheaval collected into “Slouching Toward Bethlehem” and “The White Album,” and a novel, “Play It As It Lays,” that host Charles Michener described as “the most shocking Hollywood novel since ‘The Day of the Locust.’ “

Didion, who sat very still, wearing a long lavender scarf, white top and dark slacks, said once she grasped the freeway metaphor in “Play It As It Lays,” the novel unlocked itself for her.

Freeways have long been an obsession of Didion’s. “It’s a novel about driving all day and going nowhere, about speed as an aesthetic experience. I saw that I could have very short chapters and very short sentences.”

When Michener asked her for comment on the presidency of Barack Obama, Didion said, “I’m sick of domestic politics. I couldn’t share in the narrative that this was a different election. The process was pretty much the same.”

Many of the audience questions went to “The Year of Magical Thinking,” Didion’s 2005 memoir of grief over the abrupt death of her husband, the writer John Gregory Dunne, as it entwined with the grave illness of their daughter.

“I decided the only way to structure it was to replicate the experience,” Didion said. “With grief, you go over it and over it and over it again — it’s a trauma that you relive every time you go over it, seeing it from a slightly different angle. That’s what one does with grief. You can’t let it go.”

In her 1968 book of essays called “Slouching Towards Bethlehem,” Joan Didion wrote: “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.”

As one creator of “New Journalism,” a style of reporting that allows the writer to be seen in the work, Didion had it all: a deadpan wit, a cool detachment, a piercing observational intelligence and chiseled, perceptive sentences.

“She is really a distinctive American voice,” said Charles Michener, an acquaintance and former Newsweek arts editor. “There is nobody quite like her.”

Michener will interview Didion Tuesday evening on stage as the finale to this season’s Writers Center Stage series. The program, run by the Cuyahoga County Library Foundation, brought in Didion when it became clear John Updike was too ill to fulfill his commitment.

Didion, 74, brings her own brand of courage to Cleveland, in that her husband of 40 years, John Gregory Dunne, died suddenly in 2003, followed by their only child, Quintana Roo, eight months later. “The Year of Magical Thinking,” a book about grief and loss, won Didion the National Book Award in 2005.

 

Although not her best writing, the rawness of that memoir resonated with readers. It became a best seller, with 511 customer reviews posted onAmazon.com.

“That’s a book that shouldn’t work — written in the moment, breaking all the rules — and it does,” said Dinty W. Moore, who teaches Didion’s craft as director of creative writing at Ohio University. “She’s had a long career and done amazing work at both ends, from ‘Slouching Towards Bethlehem’ and ‘The White Album’ to ‘The Year.’ ”

Michener said he was rereading Didion’s fiction — “Play It As It Lays” and “A Book of Common Prayer” — and was struck by how differently it reads from her nonfiction, reminding him in its dread and menace of Don DeLillo’s books.

“She is a very compelling writer; she has her own music, the rhythms, repetitions,” Michener said. “Hers is a very despairing vision. I’ve known Joan for a long time. She’s a mysterious person. It will be interesting to see how voluble she is in public. In private, she is so quiet as to be almost inaudible.”