A fourth excerpt from the essay collection:
Slouching Towards Bethlehem: Essays (FSG Classics), by Joan Didion
Joan Didion has many topics that obsess her. Crime, narrative, real estate, language, to name a few. One of her obsessions is her home state, California (and, interestingly, these other obsessions (crime, narrative, real estate, language) could be seen as “having to do” with California. She moved to New York as a young woman and lived there for almost a decade before returning to California. Perhaps it was her “time of exile” that allowed her to see her home state in such a unique clear-eyed way. She comes back to the state, again and again and again in her essays, and wrote an entire book about California a couple years ago called Where I Was From. She writes about land, she writes about water, she writes about the defense industry which is huge in California, she writes about the Getty, she writes about the freeways. She can’t get enough. Her vision is not rose-colored. There’s more of an investigative spirit behind all of it. There are narratives beneath the accepted story lines, of a person, a place, a time, and it is that underlying narrative Didion is always after. The vision one gets of California, just by hearing the name, doesn’t “explain” it. It is often a sentimentalized vision. Or one thing pops up: “Hollywood”, as though the entire state can be defined by that one industry. And, indeed, in many ways, it can.
Didion thinks about these things. She worries about them. She has been worrying about them for years. You can still feel her squinting at the streets of Sacramento, or Malibu, thinking, “What is really going on here?”
Her essay “Notes From a Native Daughter” is about her home town, Sacramento.
Excerpt from Slouching Towards Bethlehem: Essays (FSG Classics), by Joan Didion
It should be clear by now that the truth about the place is elusive, and must be tracked with caution. You might go to Sacramento tomorrow and someone (although no one I know) might take you out to Aerojet-General, which has, in the Sacramento phrase, “something to do with rockets”. Fifteen thousand people work for Aerojet, almost all of them imported; a Sacramento lawyer’s wife told me, as evidence of how Sacramento was opening up, that she believed she had met one of them, at an open house two Decembers ago. (“Couldn’t have been nicer, actually,” she added enthusiastically. “I think he and his wife bought the house next door to Mary and Al, something like that, which of course was how they met him.”) So you might go to Aerojet and stand in the big vendors’ lobby where a couple of thousand components salesmen try every week to sell their wares and you might look up at the electrical wallboard that lists Aerojet personnel, their projects and their location at any given time, and you might wonder if I have been in Sacramento lately. MINUTEMAN, POLARIS, TITAN, the lights flash, and all the coffee tables are littered with airline schedules, very now, very much in touch.
But I could take you a few miles from there into towns where the banks still bear names like The Bank of Alex Brown, into towns where the one hotel still has an octagonal-tile floor in the dining room and dusty potted palms and big ceiling fans; into towns where everything – the seed business, the Harvester franchise, the hotel, the department store and the main street – carries a single name, the name of the man who built the town. A few Sundays ago I was in a town like that, a town smaller than that, really, no hotel, no Harvester franchise, the bank burned out, a river town. It was the golden anniversary of some of my relatives and it was 110° and the guests of honor sat on straight-backed chairs in front of a sheaf of gladioluses in the Rebekah Hall. I mentioned visiting Aerojet-General to a cousin I saw there, who listened to me with interested disbelief. Which is the true California? That is what we all wonder.
Joan Didion is one of my favorite authors. I discovered her in college when our writing class required we read Slouching Towards Bethlehem. I’ve been hooked ever since.
The tragic loss of her husband and daughter have informed her latest books, and these memories are now etched on her face. She is one brilliant and courageous woman. She writes on …