What's in a Story?

The burnt VW Beetle where Gordon Miller's body was found in 1964. PHOTO: ASSOCIATED PRESS

We shall not cease exploration

And the end of all our exploring

Will be to arrive where we started

And know the place for the first time

                                    -- T.S. Eliot

Earlier this month I wrote about the late Joan Didion and her influence as a chronicler of culture and a model for writers. A friend of mine from high school who has more time on his hands now that he's retired from dentistry and coaching college rugby -- time enough to even read my blog -- became intrigued by Didion. One of her books, The White Album, published in 1979, had been taking space on his bookshelf for years, but never opened.

His mother who was an English teacher gave him the book sometime during the 80s. "I never read books. I didn't have time," he said. She sent him a book every year for his birthday. He's kept every one of them.

He sent me a text with a photo of Didion's book and the message: 

"Here goes!" He was about to finally read it.

It's been nearly 60 years since we hung out together. Life changes us. I wondered if he would like the book? For one thing, it's a book of essays from the 1970s, dated material. For another, Joan Didion's perspective and phrasing do not constitute a page turner, more indicative of a writer's rock star, a provocative voice in the jungle.

Yesterday I received a call from my friend Wayne, who had already informed me that he was loving her book. "Her essays involve places in Los Angeles during a time when I was going to school there. Very interesting," he said.

I was glad to hear that but the first thing on my mind was football, a mutual interest that we had in high school. Did you watch football this weekend?" the first thing I asked.

"No, the power has been out since Friday," he said. "The Santa Ana winds knocked it out, uprooted trees, cars were smashed. So no football. We're supposed to get power back tonight (Sunday)." 

He lives in Claremont, about 35-miles east of downtown Los Angeles, along the corridor of the San Gabriel Mountain Range where high desert winds blow in from the Great Basin. Didion wrote stories set amid this regional landscape in a couple of her essays.

"I'm texting you an article from the LA Times about a woman who was a subject in one of Didion's pieces. You've got to read it," he said. The original story involved a murder that happened in nearby Alta Loma.

"Was she upset?" I asked.

I referred to one of Didion's most quoted lines about the real-life characters in her stories: "I will sell you out," she wrote. She understood the adverse commercial aspects of the press, especially when dealing with the subject of murder and people's often fragile lives. 

"No, she's not upset. It's very interesting, a fascinating story."

I found the Times article, under the heading: "I thought Joan Didion's essay would ruin my life. But something else happened."

The piece was written by Debra Miller, whose mother was convicted of murdering her husband -- Debra's father. Debra referred to the case as "one of the most infamous murder trials in California history."

Debra was 14 at the time. Upon her mother's conviction, Debra sprang to her feet in the courtroom and yelled, "She didn't do it! She didn't do it!" This scene was recounted in Didion's essay, which was entitled "Some Dreamers of the Golden State."

Didion compared the upwardly mobile Miller family to the dream-seeking Joad family in Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath, both of whom sought fulfillment in California. The Joad's were from Oklahoma in the 1930s, the Miller's from Oregon nearly 50 years later, and they were real folks as contrasted with Steinbeck's novel. 

Lucille Miller spent seven years in prison before being paroled for the murder of her husband, Gordon Miller, a dentist. The coincidences of the murder happening while we were in high school in the same area where we were living, and that he became a practicing dentist, were not lost by my friend. 

The Miller's marriage had been unraveling among other difficulties. She hated Didion's portrayal of her life and taught her three children to despise Didion. Debra spent a good part of her life hiding from the essay, embarrassed and ashamed, even as she became a high school teacher who taught writing. 

A turning point came during Debra's teaching career when Didion's essay was introduced as a topic for a fellow teacher's English class. She re-read the essay several times and realized the truth in Didion's piece. "She was spot on... She was a genius," wrote Debra in her recent piece. 

She penned a letter to Didion explaining how the essay had affected her life, up until then mostly negatively. 

Didion wrote back:

"There's no real way to tell you how moved I was (am) by your letter... As a writer I tend to compartmentalize the people and events I've written about -- the writer goes in, tries to understand the story, as if the act of writing it down completed the situation, became the truth. I guess I think writers need to do this, have to do this to maintain the nerve to write anything at all. But of course it's an illusion." She thanked Debra for her letter.

Eventually Debra met Joan Didion at a public reading of her then-latest novel where the author, in a moment of compassion, "threw her arms around" Debra.

In her recent piece, Debra reveals the hardships of her life, including drug addiction, and how she was finally able to find release and peace through Didion's essay. Debra's personal observations of her mother while in prison -- not a model prisoner -- and afterward, changed her mind regarding her mother's innocence. 

Debra began to include Didion's essay in her classes, acknowledging that she was the young girl in the piece, opening herself to questions.

The recent death of Joan Didion was a personal loss to Debra. "I would not be the woman I am today," she wrote — “a woman to tell her own story, who survived and flourished rather than succumb to the darkness that consumed my mother and beckoned me."

She expressed confidence that she was ready to write her now memoir.

My musing about Joan Didion led to my friend Wayne picking up her book, an unopened gift from his mother nearly 40 years ago. Being of curious mind, Wayne was intellectually stimulated by reading Didion's work, enough so that he found the above story by Debra Miller fascinating and had to let me know. He and I both are fathers of three daughters, although his are much younger than mine. We are particularly moved by stories about female empowerment. I know this because he said he was going to share this piece with his daughters.

What goes around comes around. 

Thanks Wayne.