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  • The Curse of CoolJoan Didion's Elusive Los Angeles
  • Joshua Wolf Shenk (bio)

LA, Joan Didion, alienation, estrangement, writing, city, illusion, reality, home, architecture, fatherhood, son


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In the fall of 2005, at the shuttle terminal of New York's LaGuardia airport, I entered the security line and noticed, in front of me, a slight and slightly stooped older woman. After a couple of blinks, I recognized Joan Didion.

I was going to Boston, en route to Harvard Square, for the first stop of a small book tour. Didion had just published The Year of Magical Thinking. I introduced myself and, with some diffidence, told her how much she had influenced me, and could I give her a copy of the book I had just published, my first?

Didion held a single, small leather bag in her left hand. She looked at me with what seemed like a mild panic. "Can you mail it to me?" she asked, with some diffidence of her own, as if the additional weight in her bag would be more than she could bear. (She really did seem that frail.)

That afternoon, I gave my reading at the bookshop. When I finished, the clerk who had tended to me said she was off to set up for Didion herself, at a Unitarian church down Massachusetts Avenue. She saved seats for me in a front pew and, after the reading, seeing the fantastic queue that had formed, offered to take my copy of Magical Thinking and get it signed for me after the rush.

Several days later, the book arrived in the mail to my apartment in Brooklyn. Of course, I recognized the signature. But no matter how long I stared at it I couldn't make out what Didion had inscribed. It was a thin scrawl, delicate and inscrutable. I tried to resign myself to not understanding it. I put the book on my shelf, but now and then couldn't help but pick it up and try again.

I find myself thinking of this encounter when I take stock of my relationship to the city that Didion is so identified with—Los Angeles—and I've come to realize that Didion and L.A. disconcert me in much the same way; each has articulated in my life—one in urban arrangements and architecture, the other in prose and ideas—the eros of estrangement, the allure of alienation.

I came to live in Los Angeles in a roundabout way, because of the Bricklin. This was a car made in the mid-1970s in a volume of roughly 3,000 units by a wild-eyed entrepreneur named Malcolm Bricklin. They were striking cars—low-slung, with electric gull-wing doors, and a fiberglass body covered by acrylic resin. But the Bricklin had a fatal flaw: The electric doors drew so much power that the battery would quickly drain and die.

My grandfather was a wholesaler. He bought big lots of odd products whose makers could not sell them, and he bought the lot of Bricklins from their bankrupt manufacturer and unloaded them from his warehouse in Columbus, Ohio. One of these cars came to my dad when I was a boy. The color of a light brown M&M, it had a long snout like a Ferrari and a big growl. It seemed to always smell faintly of gasoline. It had a space behind the two bucket seats—not a backseat, more an open hatchback, an upholstered space for a suitcase or something—where two of we three brothers would clamber. I remember the snug rush of riding in the back. I also remember standing next to the Bricklin in a parking lot, hearing the impotent click of the black plastic door switch (which the Bricklin had in lieu of [End Page 95] a handle) as my dad jammed his finger against it—waiting, in vain, for the muscular hum of the door's motor that was supposed to follow.

The Bricklin was exotic and doomed.

In the meantime, my dad moved on to other fascinations with motion. He continued to be drawn to dramatic...

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