Joan Didion’s Thanksgiving: Dinner for 75, Reams of Notes

Across six decades as a writer and cultural barometer, Joan Didion persuaded her public to face all kinds of things they might rather not: the crumbling of social norms, the failures of democracy. Boredom. Aging. Mortality.

Even Thanksgiving.

“It has always seemed like such an awful holiday,” a friend wrote her after one dinner, “but you made it something quite wonderful.”

Yes, Joan Didion, the cool-eyed minimalist who savored hard truths and looked as if she subsisted on crudités and aperçus, embraced the great American feast day of food and sentiment. And she staged it the same way she conjured her essays, novels, screenplays and memoirs, with an almost military mustering of planning and ambition.

She hosted Thanksgiving buffets for as many as 75 guests, a who’s who of notables from the shiny Venn diagram she moved in: literary circles (Philip Roth, Edna O’Brien), the New York media (Jimmy Breslin, Jann Wenner), Hollywood (Liam Neeson, Claire Bloom) and the intersection of all three (Nora Ephron). Years before Friendsgiving came along, she filled her Manhattan apartment with cronies and colleagues, including Thanksgiving skeptics like the writer Calvin Trillin, who has long campaigned to replace the turkey with spaghetti carbonara.

Subscribe to The Times to read as many articles as you like.