Joan Didion's California
A Reflection on Identity and Where I Was From
I am experimenting with something a little different today. I signed on for Petya K. Grady’s October Joan Didion reading and writing fest, The Joan Didion Group Project, in which multiple Substackers are reflecting on one of America’s most iconic writers. After finally reading Play It As Lays last year and feeling sideswiped by how much punch Didion can pack into a slim volume of stripped-to-the-bone prose, I had a goal to read more Didion (beyond The Year of Magical Thinking and a few of her essays, which I had previously read). So, I couldn’t ignore the serendipitous timing of Petya’s project.
One of the blessings of the whole move abroad, life pivot, career pause thing is that I have more time and mental energy for reading, and reading closely and reflectively, as opposed to purely for distraction. And so, book reflections such as these will likely become a recurring feature on this Substack going forward, along with my usual musings on life abroad.
In light of my own recent move to a new country, I decided to delve into a work ostensibly about place and identity, Where I Was From, in which Didion examines her family history intertwined with that of her home state of California. Her views are strongly influenced by the identity myths and histories recorded on scraps of paper and passed down by her pioneering relatives, who crossed the United States in wagon trains and were among the founding families of Sacramento, CA. While Where I Was From is billed as her first memoir, Didion sets herself to recounting (some of[1]) the history and myths of California with journalistic rigor.
Didion’s California is one of rugged manifest destiny, and Didion herself can trace her Sacramento roots all the way back to great-great-great-great-great grandparents who travelled with the ill-fated Donner party, peeling off before that cannibalistic winter mired in the snowy Sierras. She sets the stage recounting the tale of her great-great-great-great-great grandmother, born in 1766, married to a man rumored to have killed ten men “not counting English soldiers or Cherokees.” Didion’s ancestors were women of steely pragmatism—they could ford a river, butcher a steer, make shoes from scraps of leather, and pull up stakes and move 1000 miles, leaving buried children and parents behind.
These were women who in Didion’s view “learned to jettison memory and keep moving.” But what does it mean for a memoir to glorify jettisoning memory?
The history entwined with the myth of ‘the crossing’ and the early Wild West days of California permeate the book before Didion jumps in time to devote a significant section to early 1990s Lakewood, a planned suburb built post-WWII to house McDonnel Douglas workers. Didion writes at length about Lakewood and the Spur Posse, a gang of suburban high school boys who committed a series of sexual assaults and other crimes, and who came to briefly dominate the afternoon talk show set in the early 90s. The episode prompted moralistic hand-wringing about how seemingly privileged middle class boys could turn out so poorly, but ultimately resulted in little accountability (let alone care for their victims). “Such towns [planned communities like Lakewood] were organized around the sedative idealization of team sports, which were believed to develop “good citizens,” and therefore tended to the idealization of adolescent males.”
Why did Didion choose these two seemingly disparate time periods and narratives, while omitting so much of California’s history (and perhaps most glaringly its tremendous racial diversity)? I found myself at times grasping for the throughline. On the surface, Didion seems to be contrasting the new California to the ‘real’ California inhabited by her own ancestors. The California where everyone knew the code of the West (i.e., to kill a rattlesnake when you see one). Indeed, Didion is overtly skeptical of the manufactured manufacturing jobs that drew these suburban newcomers. Of Lakewood and similar planned communities, she asks “what does it cost to create and maintain an artificial ownership class”? As opposed to what exactly—a true ownership class of ranchers and railroad tycoons?
Didion’s cool rejection of the mythology of the post-war American middle class is perhaps not surprising given her own Libertarian leanings. Nonetheless she ultimately grapples with the rotten foundation that underpinned the Californian pioneer legacy—the swaths of money from the railroads, the endless speculation and treating land as a commodity with no real attachment or accountability to it. She further appears to wrestle with her heritage and her culpability in continuing to perpetuate pioneer mythology through her own writing, critiquing her earlier novel Run River, which was set in Sacramento and inspired by her own family heritage.
“[M]embers of my family had been moving through places in the same spirit of careless self-interest and optimism […] Such was the power of the story on which I had grown up that this thought came to me as a kind of revelation: the settlement of the west, however inevitable, had not uniformly tended to the greater good, nor had it on every level benefited even those who reaped its most obvious rewards.”
It’s this latter part of the book, where she lets her trademark mask of detachment slip a bit, that I enjoyed the most. She recounts having only seen her mother cry twice in her life, along with her realization that her mother’s strident opinions were just “her own version of her great grandmother’s “fixed and settled principles, aims and motives in life,” a barricade against some deep apprehension of meaninglessness.” Didion’s famously arms-length approach to the subjects of her writing is a family trait it seems.
She also gives us a few slivers of that perfectly economical Didion prose—e.g., describing her father’s funeral and the way California had seemingly changed in one fell swoop: “they were all old men and it was all San Jose.”[2]
The book ends with her mother’s death and a callback to the crossing narrative: on her death bed her mother gives her a soup ladle that she especially loved because she did not want it to get lost. Didion “was still pretending she would get through the Sierras before the snows fell. She was not.”
Didion’s exploration of her deeply rooted California identity prompted me to reflect on my own.
As someone who moved every few years and who never had a cherished family home to which I returned year after year once grown, perhaps my own memoir would be something more like ‘Where I am Headed Next’ (alternately, ‘Where Am I Headed Next?’). When people ask me where I am from, I internally debate which city or state to provide in response—the place I was born and that my family is from? The place I most recently moved from? The place I lived the longest? In some ways living abroad makes it easier because I can simply evade the question and say I am from the United States, neatly glossing over the massive scale of not just geography but culture encompassed in that (non)answer.
Like Didion though, one of my homes is California. The adult years I consider to be my most formative were spent there—my post-law-school 20s in which I started my career, met my husband, bought a first home, and became a mother. And so Didion’s take on California piqued my interest, as I squinted to see something in her description that I recognized. Though my own journey to California took place on an airplane approximately 250 years after her family’s wagon train journey, the pervasive myth of California as a golden promised land of unbridled opportunity and reinvention is very much still alive. I remember sitting in my apartment in D.C. after accepting a job in San Francisco—a place where I had never set foot but had an intuitive feeling I would like—and playing Phantom Planet’s “California” on a loop (I had a deeply cringe-worthy habit of marking my 20s with some terribly on-the-nose music selections). California was exciting; it was the antithesis to D.C. in many ways. And it became the place where I solidified my fledging adult identity. But, I didn’t stay put.
After a stint in Seattle, an eight-year stint which somehow feels like a blip, we are now in Lisbon. Much like moving to San Francisco, moving here feels like embarking on an adventurous quest in pursuit of reinvention. And yet, even though my language skills are improving and I feel content being here, I know I will never really be from here. Even if we put down roots and stay a long time, I can’t imagine ever feeling like anything other than an outsider. Portugal is after all a small country with a deep history, to which I am a stranger. And one day we may pull up stakes and jettison memories and move again, much like Didion’s ancestors.
Though I consider myself a nostalgic person, I am much more driven by the prospect of the future than holding tightly to the past. Perhaps when you move enough times you realize what shifting sands those foundations are built on anyway. I think even Didion with all of her professed dedication to California would realize that despite its familiarity she could never truly go home again, because home was a story she had told herself. Instead, you are home and so you bring it with you wherever you go.
[1] One of the criticisms of Didion is that she embodies a particularly WASPy world view. Arguably that is on display here as she writes about a very specific type of California, focusing particularly on white pioneers and ranchers etc…, that would perhaps feel a bit foreign to most of its diverse inhabitants. For a different perspective on Didion and California, see Myriam Gurba’s essay: https://electricliterature.com/its-time-to-take-california-back-from-joan-didion/ )
[2] Perhaps you have to have lived in California to understand why ‘it was all San Jose’ just hits a certain way.
As always thank you for taking the time to read, like, and comment on my posts. This Substack provides a needed creative outlet for me, but it also serves as a point of connection across miles and time zones, for which I am equally grateful.