From the way people talk about Joan Didion, you’d think she had died and gone to writers’ heaven years ago.

She was the kind of writer whose saintly legend overshadowed her. The original ice queen of journalism, she spent decades hovering in corners and commenting dispassionately on the crises of the day: hiding behind sunglasses and reporting on acid-tripping toddlers in her famous essay “Slouching Towards Bethlehem,” meeting a member of the Manson cult in The White Album, delving dry-eyed into her own grief after the deaths of her husband and daughter in The Year of Magical Thinking and Blue Nights.