Netflix documentary on joan didion biography essays

How do you make a documentary about one of the literary world's most searingly personal figures?

Keep it in the family.

For more than five decades, Joan Didion has gifted readers with her lyrical prose, wry wit and soul-baring meditations on grief.

Netflix documentary on joan didion biography essays

She wrote about the death of her husband, writer John Gregory Dunne, in The Year of Magical Thinking, and the loss of her daughter, Quintana, two years later in Blue Nights.

Netflix in October:Everything new and expiring

It was around Blue Nights' publication in that the essayist's nephew, filmmaker Griffin Dunne, approached her about making Joan Didion: The Center Will Not Hold (streaming Friday on Netflix).

"I know her about just as well as anybody," says Dunne, though "I hardly approached it with the most balanced perspective. The movie is a love letter to her." 

Five things we learned from the film: 

1.