Come to Dinner

“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 saw: 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, Sontag: 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 Biography

Sara Davidson first captured America’s imagination with her N.Y. Times bestseller, Loose Change, about three women growing up in the Sixties. In her many books, articles, TV shows, and radio interviews, she’s earned a reputation as a social observer who does cutting-edge pieces about the way we live. She was born in Los Angeles and went to the University of California at Berkeley. While participating in the student revolution, she was also elected to Phi Beta Kappa, majoring in English and writing for the Daily Cal. 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 freelance journalist for magazines ranging from Harper’s, Esquire, The Atlantic, and the New York Times Magazine 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. In 1975, Davidson 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. Davidson 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.