“Survivors look back and see omens, messages they missed.They remember the tree that died, the gull that splattered onto the hood of the car.They live by symbols. They read meaning into the barrage of spam on the unused computer, the delete key that stops working, the imagined abandonment in the decision to replace it.”

American writer and journalist

Joan Didion was an American writer and journalist. She is known as one of the figures associated with New Journalism. Her work is linked with the movement that brought literary techniques into reporting, alongside writers such as Gay Talese, Truman Capote, Norman Mailer, Hunter S. Thompson and Tom Wolfe. Her writing is often remembered for that journalistic style and for the influence she had on modern nonfiction.