She’d famously said, “I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear.”From our first meeting there was a connection. We’d both grown up in California, studied English with the same professor at U.C. Berkeley, (seven years apart) loved to laugh, and had gone straight from Berkeley to New York to write for magazines.

I don’t put myself in the same category as Didion, whose prose will be read and studied long into the future. But there are not many people still alive who’ve known her as long as I have, which is why I’ve published a memoir, The Didion Files; Fifty Years of Friendship with Joan Didion.

I hope you’ll read it and let me know your response. But first, some words about my own trajectory with writing.
I composed my first book at age six, called Billy the Climber, about a little boy whose ambition was to be a climber of trees. At no one’s suggestion, I folded some blank white papers together and used a blue crayon for the words and pictures. Note that my first writing was about a boy, probably because when I was six, girls were required to wear skirts to school and almost everywhere, which wasn’t convenient for climbing and swinging from trees, which I loved to do.

Writing and reading were always my favorite subjects, and when I arrived as a freshman at U.C. Berkeley, I started writing for the Daily Cal. In my senior year, I was debating whether to go to grad school and teach English or go to journalism school and become a reporter. I met with my advisor, Prof. Richard Bridgman, who told me there was only one woman tenured professor in the huge and vaunted English department—the poet Josephine Miles. “I can’t tell you there would be a warm welcome here for other women,” he said.

So I applied to the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, where my class was almost half female.
My first reporting job was at the Boston Globe, where I was sent to cover the student protests and burgeoning hippie communities at all the colleges around Boston. I thought of myself as a spy behind the lines, because I had a rapport with these young people—I shared their ideals—and they spoke freely to me because I looked like them, wearing no makeup and long hair to the middle of my back.

After three years, I left the Globe to became a freelance writer in New York for magazines ranging from Harper’s to Life and Rolling Stone. I felt compelled to write a book, but couldn’t come up with a subject, until I had a chance meeting in an elevator with a woman I’ll call Tasha, a legendary beauty who’d been one of my roommates in college. We’d lost touch, and when we reconnected, ten years later, it came to me that I might tell the story of the Sixties through the lives of women I’d known at Berkeley.

I obtained a contract with Doubleday, but it took four years to complete the book, Loose Change, during which I lived on a flimsy budget and qualified for food stamps. When I turned the book in to my editor, I gave myself, as a reward, a trip to Jerusalem, on a cheap flight. While wandering around the old city, I got a telegram from my agent: “Paperback rights sold for $470,000.” That was the equivalent of $2 million today. I sat down on the sidewalk to take it in. My life had changed. The book became a N.Y Times bestseller, sold more than a million copies, and was made into a T.V. mini-series. (which was, predictably, pretty terrible)

I had met Joan Didion, making that fateful call, six years before I wrote Loose Change, never dreaming that we’d be friends for fifty years. She described herself as “shy” (I would call it “tongue-tied”) around people she didn’t know, but she loved to laugh and talk with close friends.

And she was fantastically ambitious. She told me that writing the book was only “fifty percent of the job. Then you have to sell it!”

While her writing could not be called “humorous,” her personal life was filled with laughter—at things she’d observed or heard and ideas we’d toss back and forth. She had strong and original opinions and wasn’t shy about asserting them.

The last time I saw her, the year she would die, 2021, she could barely speak or read, and had an assistant, a young man who’d studied literature at Columbia, who helped her move by walking backwards in front of her, so she could hold onto his outstretched hands. She was tough, though, and even in her most challenging times, told me she wanted to stay alive. “I don’t want to not be.”

I’m grateful for the gift of knowing Joan, and grateful for the life’s work I’ve had:  writing books that were best sellers and books that were not; writing T.V. shows that went on the air and more that did not.

But this year, when I finished writing The Didion Files, I was startled to find that the New York publishing world was closed to me. The book was rejected by my agent of 23 years, who said she was “falling short” of passion for it and didn’t know where she would sell it. The book was rejected by five other agents, for reasons they did not specify. Major publishing houses will rarely consider a book that’s not submitted by an agent, so I sent copies to small publishers and university presses, who all turned it down.

I was puzzled; I mean, my previous eight books had all sold decently—two were N.Y. Times best-sellers—and this book contained new material about one of the most beloved writers of our time, and about whom, I assumed, there would be readers eager for fresh information.

With reluctance, I decided to publish it myself, which has been a challenge. I hope you’ll want to read it, and I’d love to hear your thoughts. Thank you.