A list of her published works:

Fiction:

• Run, River (1963)
• Play It as It Lays (1970)
• A Book of Common Prayer (1977)
• Democracy (1984)
• The Last Thing He Wanted (1996)

Nonfiction

• Slouching Towards Bethlehem (1968)
• The White Album (1979)
• Salvador (1983)
• Miami (1987)
• After Henry (1992)
• Political Fictions (2001)
• Where I Was From (2003)
• Fixed Ideas: America Since 9.11 (2003; preface by Frank Rich)
• Vintage Didion (2004; selected excerpts of previous works)
• The Year of Magical Thinking (2005)
• We Tell Ourselves Stories in Order to Live: Collected Nonfiction (2006)
• Blue Nights (2011)
• South and West: From a Notebook (2017)
• Let Me Tell You What I Mean (2021)

Screenplays + plays

• The Panic in Needle Park (1971) (with John Gregory Dunne and based on the novel by James Mills)
• Play It as It Lays (1972) (with John Gregory Dunne and based on her novel)
• A Star Is Born (1976) (with John Gregory Dunne)
• True Confessions (1981) (with John Gregory Dunne and based on his novel)
• Up Close & Personal (1996) (with John Gregory Dunne)
• As it Happens (2012) (with Todd Field)

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This time next year this trim )

John McCrae, In Flanders Fields

My friend Victoria sent me this poem twice. After reading it the second time, I knew I had to publish it. For not only did it personify Ithaka as female; it referred to her as perhaps the initiative or resolve underlying one’s need for adventure or change.

Laistrygonians, Cyclops,
angry Poseidon—don’t be afraid of them:
you’ll never find things like that on your way
as long as you keep your thoughts raised high,
as long as a rare excitement
stirs your spirit and your body.
Laistrygonians, Cyclops,
wild Poseidon—you won’t encounter them
unless you bring them along inside your soul,
unless your soul sets them up in front of you.

Hope your road is a long one.
May there be many summer mornings when,
with what pleasure, what joy,
you enter harbors you’re seeing for the first time;
may you stop at Phoenician trading stations
to buy fine things,
mother of pearl and coral, amber and ebony,
sensual perfume of every kind—
as many sensual perfumes as you can;
and may you visit many Egyptian cities
to learn and go on learning from their scholars.

Hope your road is a long one.
May there be many summer mornings when,
with what pleasure, what joy,
you enter harbors you’re seeing for the first time;
may you stop at Phoenician trading stations
to buy fine things,
mother of pearl and coral, amber and ebony,
sensual perfume of every kind—
as many sensual perfumes as you can;
and may you visit many Egyptian cities
to learn and go on learning from their scholars.

Keep Ithaka always in your mind.
Arriving there is what you’re destined for.
But don’t hurry the journey at all.
Better if it lasts for years,
so you’re old by the time you reach the island,
wealthy with all you’ve gained on the way,
not expecting Ithaka to make you rich.

Ithaka gave you the marvelous journey.
Without her you wouldn’t have set out.
She has nothing left to give you now.

And if you find her poor, Ithaka won’t have fooled you.
Wise as you will have become, so full of experience,
you’ll have understood by then what these Ithakas mean.

C. P. Cavafy, “The City” from C.P. Cavafy: Collected Poems. Translated by Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard. Translation Copyright © 1975, 1992 : Princeton University Press.