Is there any act of hubris larger than redirecting a river? It is no accident that one of her most famous essays tackles the Hoover Dam. While Faulkner’s obsession with the past led him to the pathologies of Southern identity, Didion’s notion of California as the frontier of the American Dream led her to public life, realms where people took big gambles: politics and the movies, crime, big-city life, and the revolutionary corners of ’60s counterculture.

They seem to grow out of the landscape, the way Faulkner’s own sentences tried to unchoke themselves from the wisteria vine of Southern history. Sentences like that one explain why Didion’s nonfiction holds up so well over time. But there is a reason for this suspension of time, she argues: “California is a place in which a boom mentality and a sense of Chekhovian loss meet in uneasy suspension in which the mind is troubled by some buried but ineradicable suspicion that things had better work here, because here, beneath that immense bleached sky, is where we run out of continent.”

“You might protest that no family has been in the Sacramento Valley for anything approaching always,” Didion wrote in “Notes from a Native Daughter,” one of her earliest published essays.

It looms in her early work as a kind of weigh station between the East Coast and the West, between the past and present. Revisiting this work, it is striking all over again how central being from Sacramento was to Didion’s identity as a writer. Didion has collected all these pieces, and everything that came after it, in a new 1,122-page collection, We Tell Ourselves Stories in Order to Live, which includes all of Didion’s nonfiction up to last year’s The Year of Magical Thinking, her tremendous memoir about grief. As a young freelance writer, Didion took one look at this terrain and realized it said a lot about America and the collective bargain we have made with the past. That here the rules of East Coast life did not apply. Here, each one of her pieces says, is the dream life of California.Īnd what a dream it has been! From the crush of the forty-niners to the big-tent extravaganza of the movies to the election of a first movie-star governor, the first 125 years of California’s history encouraged the belief that tall tales came true. If Kevin Starr’s seven-volume study charted Golden State history, Didion revealed the stories we tell ourselves. She squinted at the landscape, our obsession with water, the movies, our cars, California’s reverence of prestige and our fabulously well-developed self-regard. For four decades now, Didion has run the gamut of California life. After all, the Sacramento native has long been our reigning sociologist of symbols. Should California ever tumble into the ocean, as our doomsayers claim it will, Joan Didion certainly will play a part in reassembling it-or at least remembering it.

Joan didion everyman's library