Recent Reads

Let Me Tell You What I Mean by Joan Didion

Read in March 2021

Whenever one moves to a new community, expect a steep learning curve.  The flurry of paperwork required to become a citizen of a new state can be overwhelming; changes in voter’s registration, changes in addresses (after thirty-one-years in the same place), banking, driver’s licenses, new doctors, dentists, barbers, hairdressers, utility providers, even tax preparers who introduce a new set of laws and ways of being. The list is endless.

Despite all of the endless adjustments, when I moved to California in 2004, I was delighted to live near family in the small, historical, pristine (and often magical) community of Mendocino, and in a personally significant way, to work within an educational system that was the largest in the world, serving over two million students. I loved my new state immediately. 

Day by day, I grew more comfortable.  I enjoyed becoming a Californian, represented by two female state senators, a similar statistic I had left behind in Washington.  Nancy Pelosi, soon to be Speaker of the House was from San Francisco, just down the coast.  Many of my favorite musicians, Joan Baez, Joani Mitchell, Carole King, the Eagles and The Beach Boys, The Grateful Dead, Huey Lewis and the News, Merle Haggard, Jackson Brown were all Californians.  And then I discovered Joan Didion, whose essays written between 1968 and 2000, were a different form of history, a deeper invitation and understanding of the state of California. Didion was already the author of seventeen books, screenplays, and countless published essays, in numerous periodicals.

What is remarkable about this new collection of previously-written  essays, twelve pieces that illuminate the mind and writing process of Didion, is how they remind us of  how she sees and how she writes on subjects as diverse as not getting into the college of her choice (Stanford), Nancy Reagan and her choice of green carpets to please Ronnie, Martha Stewart, the San Simeon Castle built by Hearst, Ernest Hemingway’s writing, and racial bias and The Central Park Five, among other compelling topics. 

The extensive and thoughtful Foreword, written by Hilton Als, a staff writer for The New Yorker, pays homage to Didion, a fifth-generation Californian, who is now eighty-six, and living in New York. He extols her writing for its qualities, “A way of looking but not joining, a way of moving through but not attaching, a kind of romantic individualism distinctly adapted to its time and source.”

Joan Didion, still one of the best of Californians.