Joan Didion photographed in her Corvette Stingray at her ramshackle mansion just at the base of Runyon Canyon in the Hollywood Hills in 1968.

Photographer Julian Wasser was commissioned by Time Magazine to take photos of Didion upon the release of her first book of essays, “Slouching Towards Bethlehem,” that captured some of her experiences living in LA during the 1960s.

Speaking to Vogue magazine in 2014, Wasser described the photoshoot as “a big event in my life” as he was an admirer of Didion’s earlier fiction. “It was very LA. She didn’t miss a thing. She was such a heavyweight person.” In the same Vogue article Didion recalled her own memories of the day. “What do I remember? I had a baby. I was living in a rented house in Hollywood. It was kind of a wonderful period of my life actually. Not because I was in a rented house in Hollywood. But just in general,” she said. Didion didn’t remember why they took photos of her with her car, thinking it must have been “a whim of Julian’s. Wasser however refuted that claim, “You don’t tell a woman like that what to do.”

Didion did however remember the car. “I very definitely remember buying the Stingray because it was a crazy thing to do. I bought it in Hollywood,” she said. “The Stingray was Daytona yellow. Which was a yellow so bright, you could never mistake it for anything other than Daytona yellow.”