‘Didion and Babitz’
By Lili Anolik
Scribner, 352 Pages

‘Joan Didion: Memoirs and Later Writings’
David L. Ulin, Editor
Library of America, 856 Pages

‘We Tell Ourselves Stories: Joan Didion and the American Dream Machine’
By Alissa Wilkinson
Liveright, 272 Pages

‘Notes to John’
By Joan Didion
Knopf, 224 Pages

‘The World According to Joan Didion’
By Evelyn McDonell
HarperOne, 256 Pages

“Most of us have a Joan Didion origin story, the article or book, or photograph or quote that first made us want to know more about this quiet oracle,” Evelyn McDonell begins. She mentions one of an “unsmiling woman.” Exactly. It is difficult to think of another writer of Didion’s generation who did less to ingratiate herself with readers or the subjects she wrote about.

She is the same way when writing about herself and her husband, no matter whether she is dealing with alcoholism, depression, or being a parent, as she does in “Notes to John.” Biographers of subjects like Didion look for that other self that the public prose conceals. That unsmiling face is the evidence of a writer who spared no one, not even herself.

Didion went her own way, and that might result in her scornful treatment of Bob Woodward, a poor writer notwithstanding all his scoops, or championing the work of Norman Mailer — not only his masterpiece, “The Executioner’s Song,” but also novels others dismissed like “The Deer Park,” which portrayed a scarifying Hollywood that she knew so well from her own work there.

Hemingway liked to think he was one of those great writers who, he said, have a good “bulls— detector.” Well, he wrote a fair amount of what might be called the very dreck he deplored.  He thought he was tough. Mailer wanted to be tough. Joan Didion was tough. Although Didion wrote plenty about herself, she achieved, nonetheless, what Lili Anolik terms an opaqueness, so impenetrable she appears “almost a ghost. Not a person so much as a presence. (By design, I believe. She’s emotionally secretive to the point that she’s very nearly rendered herself emotionally invisible).” 

Didion’s friendship with Eve Babitz “went bad,” Ms. Anolik notes, “amity turning to enmity.” Her book begins with an odd “To the Reader” section that is really only about one side of the story, Didion, which makes Babitz a foil, the sort of counter-subject that Plutarch had in mind in his parallel lives approach. Both had their conservative strains and wrote about themselves as denizens of Hollywood. You’ll find some photographs of Babitz smiling and looking cool. My impression is that Didion never had a particular look in mind, and yet her look was always what you would expect from her.

For Alissa Wilkinson, her subject is the focal point of a cultural shift: “Joan Didion lived among Hollywood stars. They were guests at her table, actors in her movies, friends to her daughter, figures in her dreams. Then she watched show business seep into America’s public square, which evolved into a celebrity worshipping star machine of its own. This category confusion, this overlap of spheres, intrigued and dismayed her. But having been a recognizable icon—a celebrity, really—for decades, she recognized what it took to be a star, and what it took from you, too.”

Back to the smile: I’m sure Didion had one, but she wasn’t about to let you take it away from her. The astringency of her writing protected her as a person. She reminds me of one of my Scotties, Mr. Holmes. I took to addressing him as Mr. because he seemed so formal — friendly, yes, but he seemed to understand the peril of too much human contact. Didion never lost her sense of decorum and was old-school Hollywood comparable to, say, Ronald Colman.

The Library of America volume is an excellent sampler of Didion’s writing on politics between the 1980s and the early 2000s, the George W. Bush years in the wake of 9/11, her take on growing up in California and how its water wars and corruption caught her attention, her year of “magical thinking” as narrative and play, her “Blue Nights,” in which she does not smile while her heart is breaking, and a jaunty 2017 road trip narrative. 

Mr. Rollyson has written about Joan Didion for the multivolume series “Great American Authors: Twentieth Century. He is also the author of “Ronald Colman: Hollywood’s Gentleman Hero.”