“It is easy to see the beginnings of things,” Joan Didion once wrote, “and harder to see the ends.” That author, journalist, style icon, and north star for a certain type of literary young person died today after a prolonged illness. She was 87 years old.

Didion may have been famous since the late 1960s, but hers was the rare sort of celebrity that never dampened her respectability. Not even modeling in fashion advertisements (for Gap, in 1989, and for Celine, in 2015) could shake her status within the literary world, nor affect the particular influence she held for the millions of readers who attempted to ape her style over the years. That meant everything from adopting a working wardrobe of leotards, suede wrap skirts, and long, unassuming silhouettes, to shaping their own habits after what they could glean of hers—whether via her bourbon-filled packing lists, her journal entries, or her surgically precise journalism. And why wouldn’t they? It was Didion, after all, who once wrote of Georgia O’Keeffe: “Style is character.”

Didion studied English literature at the University of California, Berkeley and worked at Vogue from 1956 to 1964, where she was an assistant features editor and wrote such seminal essays as “On Self Respect” (1961) in order to fill some unexpectedly empty pages. “I think we are well-advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not,” she wrote. “Otherwise, they turn up unannounced and surprise us, come hammering on the mind’s door at 4 a.m. of a bad night and demand to know who deserted them, who betrayed them, who is going to make amends. We forget all too soon the things we thought we could never forget. We forget the loves and the betrayals alike, forget what we whispered and what we screamed, forget who we were.”

She came to Vogue “in lieu of going to graduate school,” she wrote in the magazine in 1992, having received the Prix de Paris, an essay contest for college seniors for which first prize was a position at the magazine. This career shift was considered unusual at the time, Didion wrote in 2000, and was “a move treated by most of the faculty members to whom I mentioned it as a temporary aberration, since the appropriate move from the English Department at Berkeley was to graduate school at Berkeley.”

“Vogue was an eccentric and in some ways an exotic education, but there was about it an invigorating strictness,” Didion wrote in 1992. “We did not miss deadlines, we did not make mistakes, we learned fast, or we did not stay, how to put a couple of unwieldy dependent clauses through the typewriter and roll them out transformed into one simple sentence of precisely thirty-nine characters. I did stay… I counted characters during the day and wrote a novel at night, and until I got married and moved to California, it never seriously occurred to me to work anywhere else.” The novel was 1963’s Run River, and the husband was her fellow magazine writer John Gregory Dunne. The marriage, she would later write, was “a very good thing to do but badly timed.” She was afflicted by migraines and was frequently depressed, even wearing dark glasses through the wedding ceremony. The couple adopted a daughter in 1966 and named her Quintana Roo, after the Mexican state on the Yucatán peninsula.

Family life brought its own complications. The first sentence of her first column for Life magazine, in 1969, sent from the Royal Hawaiian in Honolulu, was: “We are here on this island in the middle of the Pacific in lieu of filing for divorce.” This was a period of larger self-doubt, heavily influenced by the chaotic events of 1968—both in the broader and more personal sense. “Everything I was taught seems beside the point,” she wrote in Life. “The point itself seems increasingly obscure.” Dunne, suffering from a protracted case of writer’s block, decamped alone during the summer of 1968 and lived for 18 months off the Strip in Las Vegas among prostitutes, card sharks, and comedians; he published a novel called Vegas: A Memoir of a Dark Season in 1974. “Didion,” the New York Times later reported, “bought him three sets of clean sheets and a wastepaper basket; she did not see the apartment until the day he headed home.” It did not seem to be a major point of contention in the marriage. “They were, in the best sense of the word, enmeshed in each other’s lives,” a friend of the couple told the Los Angeles Times in 2005: “As writers and people, they were one of those rare couples in which both people really appreciated in the other the things they appreciated in themselves.”

In California, “on my own, turned loose in the world,” Didion published Slouching Towards Bethlehem (1968), a collection of her magazine pieces that The New York Times called “a rich display of some of the best prose written today in this country.” Time magazine sent the photographer Julian Wasser to capture her that year, perched on her “Daytona yellow” Corvette, dangling a cigarette. (She told Vogue in 2014 that the now-iconic pose—hair limp, eyes bright, cooly impassive, and that car—must have been a whim of Wasser’s; the photographer told Vogue that it wasn’t, and moreover, that “you don’t tell a woman like that what to do.”) She wrote her second novel, Play It As It Lays, in 1970, and the screenplay for it in 1971. She and Dunne then became in demand as script doctors, and wrote screenplays together, including The Panic in Needle Park, in 1971, and the Barbra Streisand and Kris Kristofferson version of A Star Is Born, in 1976.

In 1972, she was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, after experiencing periods of blindness in alternate eyes that lasted for up to six weeks at a time. “I had, at this time, a sharp apprehension not of what it was like to be old but of what it was like to open the door to the stranger and find that the stranger did indeed have the knife,” she would write of the diagnosis. “In a few lines of dialogue in a neurologist’s office in Beverly Hills, the improbable had become the probable, the norm: things which happened only to other people could in fact happen to me.” She lived with the disease in remission for most of her life, and told the Los Angeles Times that she never went to get further testing to prove or disprove the diagnosis when such technology became widely available, because “I hadn’t had a symptom since the early ’70s and it didn’t seem worth it to have an MRI to prove something I didn’t want to prove.” (“Mortality seems to be one of those things you confront over and over again without quite getting it,” she added.) In 1979, she published The White Album, another collection of her journalism from Life, Esquire, The New York Times, and the New York Review of Books; Martin Amis called her “the poet of the Great Californian Emptiness” in his (not altogether glowing) review of it for the London Review of Books.