How did Joan Didion use personal experience in narrative journalism?

Joan Didion was a prominent voice of New Journalism, a movement that pushed the boundaries of traditional reporting by incorporating the author's subjective responses and literary techniques to dramatize events.12

In her nonfictional prose, Didion utilized personal experience as a foundational element of her narrative strategy. Rather than maintaining a detached, objective stance, she often positioned herself as a witness, using first-person accounts to provide ethnographic realism. By blending thick observational data with her own internal reflections, she transformed factual reporting into intimate narratives that explored broader societal shifts, such as the 1960s counterculture in California, as well as deeply personal experiences of grief and loss.341

Didion famously noted that writers live by the "imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images," using their own interpretations to freeze the "shifting phantasmagoria" of actual experience. This approach allowed her to move beyond simply chronicling events to addressing what those events meant and how they felt, ultimately using her own perspective to give form and meaning to experiences that might otherwise seem chaotic.153