Joan Didion's California is the kind of place I had in my mind's eye before I moved here. Brash, sunny, arid and plastic, full of new things, fresh starts and a to-hell-with-the-past attitude. (As it has turned out, I'm in leafy Northern California, a remarkably lush place despite the low rainfall. San Francisco is worlds away from the California I had in my mind. Although it is sacrilege to say so, San Francisco nearly belongs out of California altogether. It should be towed northwards to join up with the Pacific Northwest, the cool, foggy Portlandia where it belongs.)
If I had read 'Slouching Towards Bethlehem' before moving here, I probably would have hesitated more in taking Global Giant up on their relocation offer. The essays paint a portrait of a part of America that is wild and new but also tough and heart-breaking, not a place for the faint-hearted. The very first essay about the Seventh Day Adventist murderess, Lucille Miller, has a chilling modernity to it. 'Of course she came from somewhere else' Didion writes about the Canadian-born Miller, who staged a car crash while out driving with her lethally drugged husband in order to destroy the evidence of his murder and collect the insurance payments. I found this sad account of the real nightmare the family was living behind their California dream, written by their daughter in the LA Times.
Didion herself was from Sacramento, not Death Valley, but a hot enough place with no coastal breeze to cool it. The book of essays has the feel of aching heat about it, waiting for a drizzle of rain to slake your parched throat. There is a sense that Didion conveys of California being the place where America finds its end. Even the greatest heroes created by Hollywood are nothing behind the facade.
Most fascinating for me is her account of the people at the heart of the 'flower power' movement in San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury district. This gave me a new perspective on the Sixties peace movement. From Didion's perspective, half a generation older than these 'kids' and 'little girls' as she says, the hippies are products of a society in decline where no-one belongs anywhere anymore. The only answer they have to the atomization of modern American life is drugs, self-destruction and dissipation. It's a negative take on a movement we tend to idealize today.
She zeroes in the the children living in the hippy communes, a little boy called Michael whose drugged-out parents are oblivious while he plays with electrical cables and matches and a five-year-old girl who is given speed by her mother. It reminded me of Ralph Arlyck's documentary 'Sean', about a grass-smoking four-year-old boy growing up with hippie parents in the Haight in 1969.
Didion was around my age, and had one child also, when she wrote the essays in Slouching Towards Bethlehem. 'On Going Home' struck a particular chord with me, exploring as she does her mixed feelings about the familiarity of home to her as she takes her daughter from LA to Sacramento to visit her parents for her first birthday and the fact that she can't offer her daughter a feeling of home in the way that she herself had growing up. This idea of lacking a home, rootlessness and drifting pervades the whole book.
That's who California is for, after all: drifters, dreamers and prospectors hoping to find gold, to find their better selves in the sun-soaked California landscape.
Didion herself was from Sacramento, not Death Valley, but a hot enough place with no coastal breeze to cool it. The book of essays has the feel of aching heat about it, waiting for a drizzle of rain to slake your parched throat. There is a sense that Didion conveys of California being the place where America finds its end. Even the greatest heroes created by Hollywood are nothing behind the facade.
Most fascinating for me is her account of the people at the heart of the 'flower power' movement in San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury district. This gave me a new perspective on the Sixties peace movement. From Didion's perspective, half a generation older than these 'kids' and 'little girls' as she says, the hippies are products of a society in decline where no-one belongs anywhere anymore. The only answer they have to the atomization of modern American life is drugs, self-destruction and dissipation. It's a negative take on a movement we tend to idealize today.
She zeroes in the the children living in the hippy communes, a little boy called Michael whose drugged-out parents are oblivious while he plays with electrical cables and matches and a five-year-old girl who is given speed by her mother. It reminded me of Ralph Arlyck's documentary 'Sean', about a grass-smoking four-year-old boy growing up with hippie parents in the Haight in 1969.
Didion was around my age, and had one child also, when she wrote the essays in Slouching Towards Bethlehem. 'On Going Home' struck a particular chord with me, exploring as she does her mixed feelings about the familiarity of home to her as she takes her daughter from LA to Sacramento to visit her parents for her first birthday and the fact that she can't offer her daughter a feeling of home in the way that she herself had growing up. This idea of lacking a home, rootlessness and drifting pervades the whole book.
That's who California is for, after all: drifters, dreamers and prospectors hoping to find gold, to find their better selves in the sun-soaked California landscape.
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