What, then? What did she want? What could she say she needed?
“Acceptance,” Didion said. “Surrender.”
Recalling this moment later, Davidson said Didion seemed to have surprised herself.
“Surrender was never close to my code before. But I don’t mean giving up. I mean … giving yourself to what is.”
She said that lately she’d been rereading Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind, recalling Trudy Dixon and the woman’s serenity in her dying days. The book was a reminder to “let things go … letting go. Of what doesn’t matter … Not much [is] important, not in the way I once thought it was.”
Abandonment. It lay at the heart of the crossing story, the story of the sweeping American continent.
Not much is important. “But,” Didion said, “the feeling of connection is.” And there it was—the worm in the story, the snake in the garden; the problem, all along, with where she was from, with where she found herself now, with where we all seemed to be going. “[I]t’s an enterprise the whole point of which is survival,” she said of the old myth. Survival of the fittest. Capitalist logic. She paused to consider. If you’ve left what you loved behind—your reason for moving in the first place, for dreaming, for working—can you really be called a survivor? Softly, Didion said, “There’s something missing in survival as a reason for being, you know?”
Didion and Dunne in their Malibu home, December 1977, shortly after the publication of A Book of Common Prayer. (AP Photo)
Didion in Malibu, June 1979, having just published The White Album. (AP Photo)
Didion in her New York apartment, in front of a portrait of Dunne, September 2005, upon publication of The Year of Magical Thinking. (AP Photo/Kathy Willens)
Didion in Dunne’s office in their New York apartment, following his death, September 2005. (AP Photo/Kathy Willens)
Didion in front of a painting of Quintana in her New York apartment, September 2007. (AP Photo/ Kathy Willens)
Didion, Dunne, and Quintana on the deck of their Malibu home, October 1976. (© John Bryson/Sygma/CORBIS)
Didion in 1981, just prior to the publication of Salvador. (© John Bryson/Sygma/CORBIS)
Didion in Haight-Ashbury, April 1967. (© Ted Streshinsky/CORBIS)
Didion in Haight-Ashbury, April 1967. (© Ted Streshinsky/CORBIS)
Didion in Alcatraz prison, March 1967. (© Ted Streshinsky/CORBIS)
Didion and Dunne in their New York apartment, 2000. (© Richard Schulman/CORBIS)
Didion and Quintana at home in Malibu, January 1976. (John Bryson/The LIFE Images Collection/Getty Images)
Didion, Dunne, and Quintana at home in Malibu, January 1976. (John Bryson/The LIFE Images Collection/Getty Images)
Didion in her yellow Corvette, Los Angeles, November 1970. (Julian Wasser/The LIFE Images Collection/Getty Images)
Didion and Dunne, October 1972. (Frank Edwards/Archive Photos/Getty Images)
Didion at home in Malibu, 1977. (CSU Archives/Everett Collection/Newscom)
Didion on the street in New York, March 2009. (Nancy Kaszerman/ZUMAPRESS/Newscom)
President Obama presents Didion with a National Humanities Medal at the White House, July 2013. (Polaris)
Didion next to her typewriter in Brentwood, 1988. (Nancy Ellison/Polaris)
Didion with Vanessa Redgrave in Didion’s New York apartment, discussing the stage production of The Year of Magical Thinking, May 2006. (Chester Higgins/The New York Times/Redux)
Dominick Dunne, Didion, and Quintana at John Gregory Dunne’s memorial service at Saint John the Divine. (Don Hogan/The New York Times/ Redux)
Didion, Quintana, and Abigail McCarthy, New York, September 1977. (Don Hogan/The New York Times/Redux)
Didion in New York, September 2012. (Teresa Zabala/ The New York Times/Redux)
Notes
PREFACE: NARRATIVE LIMITS
“I used to say I was a writer”: Didion quoted in Carrie Tuhy, “Joan Didion: Stepping into the River Styx, Again,” Publishers Weekly, September 30, 2011; available at www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/authors/profiles/article/48908-joan-didion-stepping-into-the-river-styx-again.html.
“This book is called Slouching Towards Bethlehem”: Joan Didion, Slouching Towards Bethlehem (New York: Modern Library, 2000), xxv.
“This book is called Blue Nights”: Joan Didion, Blue Nights (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2011), 4.
“generalizing impulse”: Susan Sontag, Where the Stress Falls (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2001), 16.
“It occurred to me”: Joan Didion, Political Fictions (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2001), 19.
“No one who ever passed through an American public high school”: ibid., 215.
“It is a truth universally acknowledged”: Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice (New York: W. W. Norton, 2001), 3.
“All happy families”: Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995) translated by Louise Maude and Aylmer Maude, 1.
“We tell ourselves stories in order to live” and “doubt the premises”: Joan Didion, The White Album (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1979), 11.
“was meant to know the plot”: ibid., 13.
“love was sex”: ibid., 21.
“believe in the narrative”: ibid., 13.
“I watched Robert Kennedy’s funeral”: ibid.
“conservative California Republicans”: Didion, Political Fictions, 7.
“lucky star”: David Beers, Blue Sky Dream: A Memoir of America’s Fall from Grace (New York: Doubleday, 1996), 17.
“John Wayne rode through my childhood”: Didion, Slouching Towards Bethlehem, 27.
“supposed to give the orders” and “I did not grow up”: ibid.
“shocked and to a curious extent personally offended”: Didion, Political Fictions, 7.
“characterized by venality and doubt”: Didion, Slouching Towards Bethlehem, 27.
“I think people who grew up in California”: Barbara Isenberg, State of the Arts: California Artists Talk About Their Work (New York: William Morrow, 2001), 331–32.
“passive” and “strange, conflicted”: quoted in Didion, The White Album, 14, 15.
“I want you to know, as you read me”: ibid., 133–34.
“I belong on the edge of a story”: Joan Didion in conversation with Michael Bernstein, the Revelle Forum at the Neurosciences Institute, University of California at San Diego, October 15, 2002.
She wrote to the magazine’s editor: Joan Didion to Jann Wenner, January 7, 1976. Lois Wallace Literary Agency Records, Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin.
In a letter: Maryanne Vollers to Rolling Stone, January 18, 1979.
On another occasion: Lois Wallace to Morton Leavy, October 13, 1988. Lois Wallace Literary Agency Records, Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin.
“pretty cool customer”: Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2005), 15.
“Clearly, I’d say anything!”: Joan Didion in conversation with Sloane Crosley at the New York Public Library, November 21, 2011.
“I am so physically small”: Didion, Slouching Towards Bethlehem, xxvii–xxviii.
“[W]riting … no longer comes easily to me”: Didion, Blue Nights, 105.
“[T]here is always a point in the writing”: Didion, Slouching Towards Bethlehem, xxvii.
“bound to be friction”: Doug Munro, “Confessions of a Serial Biographer: An Interview with Carl Rollyson,” History Now 9, no. 1 (February 2003): 2.
“perceived,” “accurately reported,” and “get it right”: Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking, 156.
“a drudge” and subsequent quotes from Mark Schorer: Mark Schorer, The World We Imagine (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1968), 221, 224–26, 230, 231, 232–33.
“women we invent”: Joan Didion, “Introduction” in Elizabeth Hardwick, Seduction and Betrayal: Women and Literature (New York: New York Review of Books, 2001), xiv.
“masterpieces”: Joseph
Frank, Dostoevsky: The Miraculous Years, 1865–1871 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1995), xi.
CHAPTER 1
learned of the Donner Party: Didion probably also knew George R. Stewart’s classic account, Ordeal by Hunger: The Story of the Donner Party, published in 1936, two years after Didion’s birth.
“hardened”: George H. Hinkle and Bliss McGlashan Hinkle, “Editors’ Foreword,” in C. F. McGlashan, History of the Donner Party: A Tragedy of the Sierra (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1940), vii.
“I am haunted by the cannibalism of the Donner Party”: Alfred Kazin, “Joan Didion: Portrait of a Professional,” Harper’s magazine, December 1971, 112.
“Its language”: Hinkle and Hinkle, “Editors’ Foreword,” History of the Donner Party, viii–ix.
“too important a part of western American history” and “I have made every effort”: Julia Cooley Altrocchi, Snow Covered Wagons: A Pioneer Epic: The Donner Party Expedition 1846–1847 (New York: Macmillan, 1936), ix–x.
“Foster has eaten”: ibid., 152.
“a problematic elision or inflation,” ‘Just ready to go,’ and “[T]he actual observer”: Joan Didion, Where I Was From (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2003), 30.
“writers are always selling somebody out”: Joan Didion, Slouching Towards Bethlehem (New York: Modern Library, 2000), xxviii.
“their supply of food becoming exhausted” and “Indians would visit”: Diana Smith, “Dr. William Geiger, Jr.,” Oregon Biographies Project, coordinated by Jenny Tenlen; available at www.freepages.genealogy/rootsweb.ancestry.com/~jtenlen/ORBios/wgeiger2.txt.
“with the sensible suggestion”: Didion, Slouching Towards Bethlehem, 118–19.
“a certain predilection for the extreme”: ibid., 119.
“lonely and resistant rearrangers” and “she is a singularly blessed and accepting child”: ibid., 118.
“What difference does it make” and “they just get slept in again”: Didion, Where I Was From, 207.
“passionately opinionated”: ibid., 205.
“The authentic Western voice” and subsequent quotes from Didion’s review: Joan Didion, “I Want to Go Ahead and Do It,” New York Times, October 7, 1979; available at www.nytimes.com/books/97/05/04/reviews/mailer-song.html.
“I have already lost touch”: Didion, Slouching Towards Bethlehem, 124.
“code of the West”: Didion, Where I Was From, 96.
“selling of what I had preferred to think of as heritage”: Joan Didion in conversation with David Ulin in the Los Angeles Public Library’s ALOUD series, November 24, 2011.
“in a minute”: Didion, Where I Was From, 15.
“adult” books: “Telling Stories in Order to Live,” Academy of Achievement interview with Joan Didion, June 3, 2006; available at www.achievement.org/autodoc/page/did0int-1.
“wasn’t allowed to listen to the radio”: Didion quoted in Karen R. Long, “The Uncompromising Joan Didion Speaks Up in Cleveland,” Cleveland Plain Dealer, May 13, 2009; available at www.cleveland.com/books/index.ssf/2009/05/writer_joan_didion_whose_spare.html.
“I think biographies are very urgent to children”: “Telling Stories in Order to Live.”
“In the late summer of what year”: Joan Didion, “Last Words,” The New Yorker, November 9, 1998, 74.
“I was always embarrassed”: Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1957), 177–78.
“magnetic”: Hilton Als, “Joan Didion, The Art of Nonfiction No. 1,” The Paris Review 48, no. 176 (Spring 2006); available at www.theparisreview.org/interviews/5601/the-art-of-nonfiction-no-1-joan-didion.
“I have not wrote you half the trouble we’ve had”: Quoted in Didion, Where I Was From, 75.
CHAPTER 2
“stock of every kind could be seen”: Joseph A. McGowan, The Sacramento Valley: A Students’ Guide to Localized History (New York: Teacher’s College Press, Columbia University, 1967), 24.
viewed Sacramento as a “cold” place: Christian L. Larsen, Growth and Government in Sacramento (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1965), 161.
“when the miners paid for everything in dust”: Mark A. Eifler, Gold Rush Capitalists: Greed and Growth in Sacramento (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2001), 240.
“The area was a streetcar suburb”: William Burg to the author, December 9, 2011.
“My father, when I was first born”: Connie Brod, In Depth interview with Joan Didion, Book TV, C-SPAN 2, 1992.
“fuzzy” about finances: Didion quoted in Susanna Rustin, “Legends of the Fall,” The Guardian, May 20, 2005; available at www.theguardian.com/books/2005/may/21/usnationalbookawards.society.
“full of dread”: Joan Didion, Where I Was From (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2003), 213.
“nervous” and “different”: ibid., 12.
“Childhood is the kingdom where nobody dies”: Edna St. Vincent Millay quoted in Joan Didion, After Henry (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1992), 17.
“Class … is something that we, as Americans”: Didion quoted in Kel Munger, “Where She Was From,” Sacramento News and Review, October 16, 2003; available at www.newsreview.com/sacramento/where-she-was-from/content?oid=1640.
“They were part of Sacramento’s landed gentry”: William Burg to the author, March 25, 2013.
“whose favorite game as a child”: Joan Didion, Run River (New York: Ivan Obolensky, 1963), 100.
“successful impersonation of a non-depressed person”: Didion quoted in Rustin, “Legends of the Fall.”
“I wanted to be an actress”: Linda Kuehl, “Joan Didion, The Art of Fiction No. 71,” The Paris Review 20, no. 74 (Fall-Winter 1978); available at www.theparisreview.org/interviews/3439/the-art-of-fiction-no-71-joan-didion.
her father’s dad, “didn’t talk”: Didion quoted in Rustin, “Legends of the Fall.”
“If you were born in Sacramento”: William Burg to the author, December 9, 2011.
“There used to be a comic strip”: Didion quoted in Leslie Garis, “Didion and Dunne: The Rewards of a Literary Marriage,” New York Times Magazine, February 8, 1987; available at www.nytimes.com/1987/02/08/magazine/didion-dunne-the-rewards-of-a-literary-marriage.html.
“muted greens and ivories”: Didion, Where I Was From, 65.
“my mother says”: Didion quoted in Rustin, “Legends of the Fall.”
“eyes that reddened”: Didion, Where I Was From, 13.
“clean plate club” and “She’s not a human garbage can”: Joan Didion, Blue Nights (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2011), 113.
act of rebellion: ibid.
She admitted Eduene found her willful and difficult: interview with Didion on “Morning Joe,” MSNBC, November 25, 2011; available at www.msnbc.com/morning-joe/45436046#4543.
“My mother ‘gave teas’”: Joan Didion, “In Sable and Dark Glasses,” Vogue Daily, October 31, 2011; available at www.vogue.com/magazine/print/in-sable-and-dark-glasses-joan-didion/.
“going page by page through an issue of Vogue”: ibid.
“perfect white sauce”: ibid.
“line your garden walk” and “that will happen only when the angels sing”: Didion, Where I Was From, 198.
One of her troop mates told me: Joan Haug-West to the author, January 16, 2012.
“lucky number”: Didion, “In Sable and Dark Glasses.”
“I kept playing around with writing”: Don Swaim’s audio interview with Joan Didion, October 29, 1987; available at www.wiredforbooks.org/joandidion.
“Let that be the greatest of your worries”: Didion, “In Sable and Dark Glasses.”
LONELY OCEAN STILL HOLDS SECRET OF AMELIA’S FATE: San Francisco Chronicle, July 11, 1937; available at www.sfmuseum.org/hist6/amelia.html.
“hated” and subsequent Steinbeck quotes: John Steinbeck, Their Blood Is Strong (San Francisco: Simon J. Lublin Society of California, 1938), 1, 6–7, 30. This material was originally published by Steinbeck as “The Harvest Gypsies” in a ser
ies of articles in San Francisco News, October 5–12, 1936.
CHAPTER 3
Military records: Official National Guard Register for 1939 (Washington, D.C.: United States Government Printing Office, 1940), 218.
“I tended to perceive the world”: Linda Kuehl, “Joan Didion, The Art of Fiction, No. 71.” The Paris Review 20, no. 74 (Fall-Winter 1978); available at www.theparisreview.org/interviews/3439/the-art-of-fiction-no-71-joan-didion.
“Meanwhile, we were living in a hotel”: “Telling Stories in Order to Live,” Academy of Achievement interview with Joan Didion, June 3, 2006; available at www.achievement.org/autodoc/page/did0int-1.
“It’s an adventure”: Joan Didion, Where I Was From (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2003), 208.
“Poor children do it”: ibid.
“pilots kept spiraling down”: ibid., 209.
“I did not at the time think this an unreasonable alternative”: Joan Didion, Blue Nights (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2011), 95.
did “not now seem … an inappropriate response”: Joan Didion, The White Album (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1979), 15.
“scouted the neighborhood, and made friends”: Didion, Blue Nights, 95.
“military trash”: Didion, Where I Was From, 209.
“false bravery”: Didion quoted in Susanna Rustin, “Legends of the Fall,” The Guardian, May 20, 2005; available at www.theguardian.com/books/2005/may21/usnationalbookawards.society.
“for some time now”: Didion, The White Album, 134.
“As far as my sense of place”: “Telling Stories in Order to Live.”
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