Who was Joan Didion's daughter Quintana Roo Dunne? Writer's daughter died at 39
Acclaimed American essayist and novelist Joan Didion died at 87 on December 23, 2021. Her death closes the chapter on one of America's most iconic writers, who captured amongst other things America's postwar life, and the rise of the West Coast counterculture. But perhaps she is best known for her work on grief, coming from a deeply personal space of a life mired in tragedy. The cause of death was Parkinson’s disease, according to Paul Bogaards, an executive at Didion’s publisher Knopf.
Didion lost her husband John Gregory Dunne and daughter Quintana Roo Dunne in a span of two years, leading to two acclaimed pieces of work - 'Blue Nights' and 'The Year of Magical Thinking'. While the tragedies came well after she established herself as a leading writer, they firmly became part of her legacy, which was examined in part in the 2017 Netflix documentary 'The Center Will not Hold'.
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Now, in the aftermath of her death, those tragedies have come back into focus. Here's everything we know about Quintana, and her tragic death that led Didion to question her weakness as a mother with 'Blue Nights'.
Who was Quintana Roo Dunne?
Unlike her mother, Quintana lived a more low-key life and didn't make the news much until her tragic death in 2005. Born in 1966, she was adopted by Didion and Dunne a year later. Quintana frequently had nightmares about The Broken Man', an evil repairman who told her "I'm going to lock you here in the garage." Didion revealed that "she described so often and with such troubling specificity that I was frequently moved to check for him on the terrace outside her second-floor windows," in her memoir 'Blue Nights'.
The nightmare was linked to Quintana's fear of abandonment, as a result of a failed reunion with her biological family. It was an issue that haunted Quintana her whole life and something that constantly weighed heavily on Didion. In fact, Quintana reportedly had a "fascination" with meeting her biological mother, leading to an attempted reunion in 1988. Unfortunately for her, it ended in tears because it was "too much to handle".
That led her birth mother to cut ties and Quintana never saw her or heard from her again. Then in December 2003, she was hospitalized after contracting pneumonia. Her condition led Quintana to end up comatose after the disease left her in septic shock. It came just months after she got married in July. Quintana did recover, but only after Dunne died of a heart attack. While attending the funeral in Los Angeles, Quintana fell and hit her head at the airport, leading to a massive hematoma.
The mystery of Quintana's death
While recovering, she suffered acute pancreatitis in August 2005 during a promotional event for 'The Year of Magical Thinking'. This time, there was no coming back. Quintana died on August 26, at the tender age of 39. A cause of death was never made public, leading many publications to speculate on what exactly happened. From viral infection to "a number of chronic and acute illnesses", the media speculated for months on end what exactly killed Quintana.
By the time she died, Quintana suffered from a series of medical issues, but the disease that killed her remained a fascination for the press. In her book 'Blue Nights', Didion never explicitly mentioned what killed Quintana, but some speculated it may have been alcoholism, which led to pancreatitis. With Didion now too gone, it's a mystery that may perhaps never be solved.