“An icon, unmasked. A friendship, unforgettable.” Joan Didion like you’ve never seen her—generous, wry, and deeply human. A rare, revelatory portrait of Joan Didion—told not through her essays or fame, but through fifty years of unshakable friendship. When journalist and novelist Sara Davidson met Joan Didion in the 1970s, neither could have predicted the decades of dinners, deep conversations, and quiet rituals that would follow. In Come to Dinner, Davidson opens the door to their private world, offering an intimate memoir of literary sisterhood—one filled with tenderness, wit, and the kind of wisdom exchanged only across time and trust. From Malibu beach walks to Manhattan suppers, shared grief to unguarded hilarity, Davidson captures the Joan few ever fiercely loyal, disarmingly funny, and unwavering in her support of other women writers. What emerges is not a biography, but a deeply human portrait—of Joan as a friend, mentor, and kindred spirit. For fans of The Year of Magical Thinking, 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 as a radical act of love, creativity, and survival.
Author
Sara was born in 1943 and grew up in California. She went to Berkeley in the Sixties, where the rite of passage was to "get stoned, get laid and get arrested." 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 free-lance journalist for magazines ranging from Harpers, Esquire and the New York Times 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. Sara 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. She 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. In television, she created two drama series, Jack and Mike, and Heart Beat, which ran on A.B.C. She was later co-executive producer of Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman, wrote hundreds of hours of drama episodes, movies and miniseries, and in 1994 was nominated for a Golden Globe. In the year 2000, her life began to unravel. She was divorced, her children were leaving for college and she couldn't find work in television. Following her intuition, knowing nobody, she drove to Boulder, Colorado for three months to be a visiting writer at the University of Colorado. She never drove back, and is piecing together a different life which she writes about in Leap Her current passions are: singing with friends, the "Shady Angels," learning piano, skiing and hiking in the Rockies.
