Come to Dinner : Fifty Years of Food and Friendship with Joan Didion

“An icon, unmasked. A friendship, unforgettable.”
Didion, like you’ve never seen her―this memoir could have easily been titled EAT. PRAY. JOAN.

A rare, revelatory portrait of Joan Didion―told not through her essays or fame, but through fifty years of unshakable friendship... and food!

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 told through a rich menu of radical love, creativity, and survival.

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.

Elissa Altman is the author of the acclaimed hybrid memoir Permission: The New Memoirist and the Courage to Create, an examination of the role that permission, story ownership, fear, and shame play in the creative process. She is the award-winning author of the memoirs Motherland, Treyf, and Poor Man's Feast, and the bestselling essay substack of the same name; she is also winner of the James Beard Award for narrative food writing, a finalist for the Pushcart Prize, Lambda Literary Award, Connecticut Book Award, Maine Literary Award, and the Frank McCourt Memoir Prize, and her work has appeared in publications including Orion, The Bitter Southerner, On Being, O: The Oprah Magazine, LitHub, the Wall Street Journal, The Guardian, and the Washington Post, where her column, "Feeding My Mother," ran for a year. Altman writes and speaks widely on the intersection of permission, storytelling, and creativity, and has appeared live on the TEDx stage and at the Public Theater in New York. She teaches the craft of memoir at Truro Center for the Arts, Fine Arts Work Center, Maine Writers & Publishers Alliance, Kripalu, Truro Center for the Arts, Rutgers Community Writing Workshop, and beyond, and lives in New England with her wife, book designer Susan Turner.