Still others share personal histories that take us to Brentwood’s Mandeville Canyon and San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury, after the hippies.įor my own essay “Dark Mirror: Reflections on the Golden Dream” (and the title of this tribute), I turned to the pages of Didion’s seminal 1968 book, Slouching Towards Bethlehem. A few enter through side doors like Didion’s recipe collection and the Sacramento state archives. Some gaze at a photograph - a fleeting instant captured in Hollywood or Malibu - until it speaks its truth.
Others are more connected through inner landscapes. It offers a portrait of a writer and her readers that is as multifaceted as the work that inspired it. Slouching Towards Los Angeles is a love letter and thank-you note, personal memoir and social commentary, cultural history and literary critique. She held California up like a diamond, revealing each facet (and flaw) through meticulous and surprising detail, startling psychological insights and prose so clean it’s incandescent. beyond Hollywood and Hollywood beyond itself. These years were ones of radical change - from the rise of the counterculture through the Reagan era - and in that time Didion became the city’s most important public intellectual, elevating L.A. Joan Didion grew up in Sacramento, went to college in Berkeley, and then, after a stint in New York City during which she worked at Vogue and met her husband, John Gregory Dunne, she returned to California in 1964 to live for 24 years in Los Angeles. “JOAN DIDION held California up like a diamond, revealing each facet (and flaw),” says author and editor STEFFIE NELSON.
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