Come to Dinner: Fifty Years of Friendship with Joan Didion
About this ebook
"An icon, unmasked. A friendship, unforgettable."
Didion, like you've never seen her—this memoir could have easily been titled EAT. PRAY. JOAN.
""An intimate, affectionate memoir of friendship and craft.""—A Publishers Weekly Editor's Pick
""Loving, funny, and generous.""—Susanah Moore, Author of In the Cut
An invitation. A table. A friendship that lasted fifty years.
When bestselling author Sara Davidson first sat down to dinner with Joan Didion, neither woman could have imagined that a shared meal would mark the beginning of a lifelong literary friendship. What began as conversation over food became, over decades, a bond that sustained them through ambition and doubt, marriage and motherhood, grief and reinvention.
Come to Dinner reveals Joan Didion not as icon or oracle, but as friend-wry, exacting, unexpectedly funny, and fiercely loyal. Told through meals, letters, travels, and intimate moments, the book unfolds like a chef's tasting menu, offering many ""flavors"" of Joan across time: the sharp observer, the generous mentor, the private woman behind the public voice.
For devoted Didion readers and for a new generation discovering her sensibility for the first time, Come to Dinner is an invitation to the table and a reminder that some of the most enduring literary legacies are built not only on words, but on shared meals, time, and trust.
For fans of The Year of Magical Thinking, Sontag: Her Life and Work, and Let Me Tell You What I Mean, this is a story not just of Didion's legacy, but of female friendship wrapped in a rich menu of radical love, creativity, and survival.
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About the author
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Sara Davidson first captured America's imagination with her N.Y. Times bestseller, Loose Change, about three women growing up in the Sixties. In her many books, articles, TV shows, and radio interviews, she's earned a reputation as a social observer who does cutting-edge pieces about the way we live.
She was born in Los Angeles and went to the University of California at Berkeley. While participating in the student revolution, she was also elected to Phi Beta Kappa, majoring in English and writing for the Daily Cal. After Berkeley, she headed for New York to attend the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism. Her first job was with the Boston Globe, where she became a national correspondent, covering everything from the election campaigns of Bobby Kennedy and Richard Nixon to the Woodstock Festival and the student strike at Columbia.
Returning to New York, she worked as a freelance journalist for magazines ranging from Harper's, Esquire, The Atlantic, and the New York Times Magazine to Rolling Stone. She was one of the group who developed the craft of literary journalism, combining the techniques of fiction with rigorous reporting to bring real events and people to life. Her work is collected in the textbook, The Literary Journalists, by Norman Sims.
In 1975, Davidson moved back to California, where for 25 years she alternated between writing for television and writing books. The books tend to fall in the gray zone between memoir and fiction. Davidson uses the voice of the intimate journalist, drawing on material from her life and that of others and shaping it into a narrative that reads like fiction.
