“All I read about is death and California.”
That was a note I messaged someone, without thinking much about it, when she asked for a book recommendation that wasn’t “too emotionally heavy.”
Her reply came back: “Jesussss, son.”
I happened to be turning through the pages of Joan Didion’s “Some Dreamers of the Golden Dream” when I sent the text. And what I was reading was absolutely a story of death and California – and death in California.
Didion grew up in a stately historic home on the edge of Midtown Sacramento, tucked quietly in an old neighborhood known throughout the city’s life as Poverty Ridge. That name is more than a little ironic since its streets are stacked with gorgeous Colonial Revival mansions. Walking by ‘the Didion House’ this month, I noticed its elegant white porch columns enjoyed a fall shade from the vast valley oaks overhead and leaves that were turning candy-red on the tupelo trees.
Fall seasons in New York, where Didion was breaking out as a magazine writer in her 20s, looked a bit different. Maybe that’s why her mind kept drifting back to Sacramento, so much so that she decided to set her first novel along its bending levees, a book she would ultimately call “Run River.” Didion wrote that saga on a shopworn typewriter she’d bought in high school while freelancing for the Sacramento Union.
The most acclaimed wordsmith California’s capital produced moved to Santa Monica in 1965. With a radar for society’s hidden rooms, Didion was unleashing her narrative ambitions on the other half of the state now. Eventually, the overall breadth of her movements, from San Bernardino to the Berkeley hills, gave her an encompassing view of California and triggered a decades-long meditation on the geo-thematic end of the West.
“Some Dreamers of the Golden Dream” is a riveting take on that subject. It’s technically a piece of true crime writing, though the murder that Didion focuses on is mainly a cracked window through which to view the Golden State’s essential ingredients – rootlessness, greed, seduction, second chances, constructed facades and a constant will to class-climb. In other words, certain transgressions can only show their purest nature under the golden haze of the California ideal.
Didion was focused on Old Hollywood’s deathbed during her Santa Monica years, too. The piece she wrote titled “John Way: A Love Song” came from visiting the set of the Duke’s 165th film, witnessing how age and illness were robbing not only the once-invincible screen icon of his strength, but robbing Tinseltown of a grand arsenal of illusions that it had sold the world around white hats and strong jawlines. And, as always, Didion was determined to ponder how the California cities that Wayne grew up – Lancaster and Glendale – helped fuel this rise and fall.
“Some Dreamers of the Golden Dreams” and “John Wayne: A Love Song” were both re-published in Didion’s groundbreaking literary nonfiction collection “Slouching Towards Bethlehem.” She would go on to have more landmark achievements in publishing. Today, most readers familiar with Didion often bring up her late-life memoir “The Year of Magical Thinking.” That’s probably because it is so relatable. Its pages contemplate the tumult that storms through a person after the unexpected death of a loved one, Didion’s stream-of-coconscious prose capturing the “vortexes” of memory that engulf a mind in that instance, and how those internal whirlwinds tear someone’s awareness across time to drop it in remote corners of the past. It’s raw, aching and numb. It’s totally unflinching. The book also features an ongoing collision between medical and psychological grief literature and the impenetrable fog of the human heart.
Two years before her husband’s passing inspired that work, Didion had penned a very different type of memoir in the form of “Where I Was From.” Partly a treatise on Sacramento’s place in inspiring the California dream, and partly an interrogation of reality versus sentimentalism around pioneer history, “Where I Was From” highlights Didion’s life-long fascination with how the state’s immense span of beaches, mountains, wetlands and deserts gave birth to such a distinct part of the American experience.
On Tuesday, December 2, California Groundbreakers is hosting a Didion-themed book club event around that memoir. The gathering is open to the public and includes a conversation with guest speaker Jennifer Sander, a former editor for Random House and literary historian who also offers “Joan Didion’s Sacramento,” a two-hour driving tour of the author’s homes and hangouts.
“Joan Didion would have turned 91-years-old on December 5, so in honor of this famous Sacramentan, I selected her 2003 book ‘Where I Was From,’” California Groundbreakers’ Vanessa Richardson noted. “It combines historical writing, journalism and memoir to show a history of California as well as Didion’s own experiences living here.”
The “Where I Was From” book event will happen in Room 10 of the Sierra 2 Center for the Arts in Curtis Park at 6:30 p.m. Participation is free, but attendees need to RSVP here for planning purposes. The venue is located at 2791 24th Street in Didion’s hometown of Sacramento.
The way I write is who I am, or have become.
– Joan Didion