“We began that trip in New Orleans and spent a week there. New Orleans was fantastic. Then we drove around the Mississippi Coast, and that was fantastic too, but in New Orleans, you get a strong sense of the Caribbean. I used a lot of that week in New Orleans in Common Prayer. It was the most interesting place I had been in a long time. It was a week in which everything everybody said was astonishing to me.”

“Writing fiction is for me a fraught business, an occasion of daily dread for at least the first half of the novel, and sometimes all the way through. The work process is totally different from writing nonfiction. You have to sit down every day and make it up. You have no notes—or sometimes you do, I made extensive notes for A Book of Common Prayer—but the notes give you only the background, not the novel itself. In nonfiction the notes give you the piece. Writing nonfiction is more like sculpture, a matter of shaping the research into the finished thing.”

INTERVIEWER

“And the pieces on El Salvador were the first in which politics really drive the narrative.”

DIDION

“Actually it was a novel, Common Prayer. We had gone to a film festival in Cartagena and I got sick there, some kind of salmonella. We left Cartagena and went to Bogotà, and then we came back to Los Angeles and I was sick for about four months. I started doing a lot of reading about South America, where I’d never been. There’s a passage by Christopher Isherwood in a book of his called The Condor and the Cows, in which he describes arriving in Venezuela and being astonished to think that it had been down there every day of his life. That was the way that I felt about South America. Then later I started reading a lot about Central America because it was becoming clear to me that my novel had to take place in a rather small country. So that was when I started thinking more politically.”

-The Paris Review, Spring 2006

“You have to pick the places you don’t walk away from.”

– A Book of Common Prayer (1977)

“Before I’d written movies, I never could do big set-piece scenes with a lot of different speakers—when you’ve got twelve people around a dinner table talking at cross purposes. I had always been impressed by other people’s ability to do that. Anthony Powell comes to mind. I think the first book I did those big scenes in was A Book of Common Prayer.”

WWJD?

What Would Joan Do? When you’re adapting a novel by a legendary literary icon like Joan Didion (is there anyone else like her, really?), this is a logical question to ask. To presume you know the answer, on the other hand, is a foolhardy act of pure hubris. Our approach to adapting A Book of Common Prayer was to treat the text with all the respect it obviously deserves, preserving as much of Joan’s inimitable voice as possible, and augmenting it, when necessary with our own voices, our own ideas, which — like countless other writers — have been profoundly influenced by the keen eye, sharp ear, sharper wit and immaculate sentences of Joan Didion. We wish we knew what Joan would do. We wish she were still here so we could ask her. But the question we find ourselves asking more and more these days is, What Would Joan Not Do? The title of one of her non-fiction books, We Tell Ourselves Stories In Order To Live has been endlessly quoted on social media. People seem to think it means storytelling is essential to human existence. Maybe it is. But what Joan was referring to is the human tendency to tell ourselves lies when the truth is more than we can bear. Or just inconvenient. Would Joan Do That? We don’t think so. Avoiding the truth, the pain, the ugliness that make up the human experience — Joan would have none of that. Love, family, blood, death, sex, ambition, injustice, politics, colonialism, revolution — it’s all there in the book and it will be there in the series. Beauty and terror are everywhere. As is humor. What Would Joan Do? We can’t be certain. But we’d like to think she would approve.

— Gina Jarrin & Andy Keir

“There's still rabid millennial hunger for everything Didion.”

— Philippa Snow

….Always in her fictional work there were what Elizabeth Hardwick called the “disastrous surprises in the mother, father, child tableau,” and those surprises, it seems to me, always ran parallel to politics, with its cronyism, makeshift families, fictions and disasters.

— Hilton Als The New York Review, Oct 6 2022