Where I Was From

Joan Didion, 1970

It's been two weeks since her death at age 87 and writer Joan Didion is still topping the news cycle. As we enter a new year seeking hopeful outlooks, I count Didion's surprising notoriety as a good sign.

First of all, because she earned a living by stringing sentences together -- in essays, reporting, novels and screenplays. The breadth of her work in this age of specialists is impressive. And, in our celebrity-centric culture, writers are not high on the scale. She proved to be an exception.

Secondly, because she was a woman in a man's world, especially when she began writing in the early Sixties. Granted, she had a supportive husband John Gregory Dunne, also a writer and at times collaborator. 

Thirdly, because she wrote the truth as she encountered it, not with an agenda but with an unflinching approach, and a style that would-be writers studied in order to learn the craft. Her sentences were complex yet direct, her pieces always perceptive with a strong sense of place. 

She taught us how to write with a critical eye, including toward herself, the writer. Hemingway she was not.

From The White Album, 1979, a collection of her essays:

"We tell ourselves stories in order to live...We look for the sermon in the suicide, for the social or moral lesson in the murder of five. We interpret what we see, select the most workable of multiple choices. We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images, by the ideas with which we have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience. Or at least we do for a while.

“I am talking here about a time when I began to doubt the premises of all the stories I had ever told myself."

And fourthly, she hailed from California, a fifth generation native whose family roots traced back to the early Donner Party, before the ill-fated split that led to starvation in the Sierra. Her ancestors chose the northern route through Oregon.

I have always identified myself as a Californian, having arrived at the age of four in 1951. My family of four -- two parents, one sister and myself -- left Seattle heading for Arizona but ended up in Southern California where I grew up. When I decided to write a memoir about my life and times, my research into the Golden State that would become my home and major influence, led me to a book: Where I Was From by Joan Didion.

Published in 2003, Where I Was From has been called the "central book in Didion's career." She was in her sixties when the book was published, and, as a writer, still going strong. She began as a Goldwater conservative and drifted left after after Reagan.

Born and raised in Sacramento as part of an agrarian family, Didion tells the story of her family and a state that has always been a magnet for newcomers, new ideas and a land of impermanence. I devoured her book which offered critical and personal perspective on California history, its characters and ethos.

I strongly believe in the power of place, one's environment and how it molds us, from the people we meet, the sounds we hear, the ground we walk on, the music we dance to and the smell of the region that we call home. Such was Southern California for me, mostly the valley town of Pomona, 30 miles east of Los Angeles, home of the L.A. County Fair.

In addition to Malibu, Didion spent much of her career in New York City and a period in Hawaii, yet her California roots formed her soul.

Interesting that she used the past tense, "Was From," in the title of her memoir. 

Where I was from is not the same place that it was when I grew up, either, especially Southern California and Pomona, now a speck amid the sprawl, once a small valley town known as Queen of the Citrus Belt. 

Joan Didion's passing reminds me that I've yet to finish my project. Of course it would help if I possessed her drive and talent.