Joan Didion Daughter of Old California

In a very real way the fate of the Donner Party seems at the center of what makes Joan Didion tick. Her family came out West in the middle of the nineteenth century, at the same time as the Donner group. She is a fifth-generation Californian and more than a little proud of the fact. It crops up often in her writing. In Where I Was From Didion quotes a survivor of the Donner catastrophe offering advice in a letter to a cousin back East soon to make the same trip: “Remember, never take no cutoffs, and hurry on along as fast as you can.” The sentence, repeated elsewhere in the text, becomes a leitmotif for the entire book. Remember, never take no cutoffs, and hurry on along as fast as you can—good advice for a westward traveler in 1850. Taking a cutoff was what got the Donner Party in trouble in the first place, and not hurrying along as fast as they could is what left them trapped in the snows of the Sierra Nevadas with winter’s setting in. What happened after that, of course, is history.

Didion grew up in Sacramento. Her family were members of the landed gentry, a benefit of having got there early. But her father, a drinker and a gambler, was hospitalized for depression when she was still in college. “There was about him a sadness so pervasive that it colored even those many moments when he seemed to be having a good time,” she says in Where I Was From. Her mother, Eduene, was not cut from the standard cloth either. She didn’t believe in dusting, for one thing, or in making the beds, since “they just get slept in again.” She was extremely, fiercely right-wing in her politics and once told Didion’s husband-to-be, John Gregory Dunne, that he would come to think of her as “the original little old lady in tennis shoes.” Her favorite expression was “What difference does it make?,” which she applied to just about everything. “The pure strain,” Didion calls her in the book. “We lived in dark houses,” she says, “and favored, a preference so definite that it passed as a test of character, copper and brass that had darkened and greened. We also let our silver darken, which was said to ‘bring out the pattern.’”

Growing up in an atmosphere such as this helps explain the gloominess that has always characterized Didion’s writing. Her penchant for hewing to the dark side has been so pronounced over the years that it once led the essayist Joseph Epstein to christen her and the equally dour, though less talented, New Yorker writer Renata Adler, “The Sunshine Girls.” Their fellow writer Barbara Grizzuti Harrison, in a left-handed acknowledgment of Didion’s growing literary celebrity, once dubbed her a “neurasthenic Cher.”

That her husband would drop dead at her feet at the dinner table, as Dunne did in the winter of 2003, and that her daughter would die less than two years later of complications from an illness that turned into septic shock, as Quintana Roo Dunne Michael, age thirty-nine, did in the summer of 2005—probably didn’t surprise Didion all that much. It simply confirmed her worldview. In a way, perhaps, it was as if she had spent her entire life in expectation of, and preparation for, just such events. Remember, never take no cutoffs, and hurry on along as fast as you can.

For more than fifty years now, in both her fiction and her nonfiction, Joan Didion has been covering the American scene. As a senior at Cal Berkeley in the early fifties she won a writing competition that earned her an internship at Vogue magazine in New York City, which she soon parlayed into writing assignments at William F. Buckley’s conservative National Review and at the Saturday Evening Post. After that she never looked back. The arrival in 2011 of Blue Nights, a memoir of her life with her daughter, brings to fifteen the number of books written by her thus far...