Joan didion's sacramento (Los Angeles, Berkeley, Arden-Arcade: house, neighborhood, movies)

[Chimérique]

JOAN DIDION'S SACRAMENTO - what do you know about "Sacramento's Favorite Daughter", where she lived, and how her words, her novels, show, how she was the "Ultimate Sacramentan, the Ultimate Californian".

When will she come back, at least for a book signing,

[Chimérique]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=99Na...i7awT6pQg1fETx

[wburg]

Didion left Sacramento long before we were born and never looked back, which means that despite having visited a couple of times, her mental image of Sacramento is from the 1950s and she refused to learn anything about what has happened here in the intervening half-century plus. She came to the conclusion that Sacramento's "soul" died when the patrician Sacramento families she knew sold off their properties to be turned into suburbs, and thus there wasn't anything worth knowing about after she departed. I disagree with that conclusion--the suburbs, as banal and boring as the are, produced generations of bored and talented young people, who descended on the city and in some places followed her route out of town, but in other cases stayed and did interesting things here.


So, while she's a very talented writer, I don't know if I'd call her the "ULTIMATE SACRAMENTAN" as though her opinions on the subject of a city that hasn't existed in most of a human lifetime are still meaningful today. I live down the street from a couple of her childhood homes, they're very nice, but know that the stories that took place after her departure belie her assumption that nothing interesting has happened in that neighborhood since she left.

[eureka1]

I didn't know she was still living. Where is she now?

[CA4Now]

Originally Posted by eureka1

I didn't know she was still living. Where is she now?

New York City.

I never even knew that she ever lived in Sacramento. I'd always read about her writing when she lived in Malibu with her husband and daughter.

[CA4Now]

There's a new book out, a collection of essays about Didion and her writing.

“Slouching Towards Los Angeles” is, as the collection’s editor Steffie Nelson writes, a “celebration and an investigation of Didion’s ongoing claim on California and its writers — because she in turn belongs to us.” There are so many exciting facets of this ownership, among them Didion’s gender, which, Nelson writes, “was at once revolutionary and irrelevant; she wasn’t playing a man’s game — she created her own game.” (Twenty of the book’s 25 contributors are female.)

Many know Didion’s seemingly effortless style, her dinner parties, the husband she wrote movies with, the move from Malibu to New York City. But this collection, at its best, adds new information to the swirling, decades-long accumulation of gossip, legend and close reading.

https://www.latimes.com/entertainmen...-didion-review

[wburg]

Originally Posted by CA4Now

New York City.

I never even knew that she ever lived in Sacramento. I'd always read about her writing when she lived in Malibu with her husband and daughter.

yeah, she grew up here--the Didion family were early settlers who became local patricians with fairly extensive farm holdings and a nice house on Poverty Ridge where she lived for about 18 months while in high school. She also lived in a more modest Poverty Ridge house, in Curtis Park for a while, and in what is now Arden-Arcade when it was mostly sheep farms. She was a participant in a Federal Art Program sponsored art center located in Midtown when she was a young girl--not sure what influence it had on her writing. She wrote her first novel, "Run, River," about her Sacramento family, plus a few other essays and works referencing Sacramento, but generally knocked the dust of this town off her boots as soon as she got into college and rarely returns except in her memories, so those are her frame of reference for Sacramento.

[Chimérique]

Originally Posted by eureka1

I didn't know she was still living. Where is she now?

She is very much alive, prolific as ever, and she has 2 films recently released that she wrote. She's 85 yrs old.

She was born and raised in Sacramento, 1934-1952. 5th generation Sacramentan, her relatives were from the Donna-Reed Party (ya know the Sacramento, California bound group that got stranded in the Sierras and succumbed to cannibalism in 1846-1847). They didn't take the short-cut, hence they didn't eat each other, and made it to Sacramento :-). She writes about this in her book, Where I Was From, and other writings.

College at Berkeley 1953-1956.

Went to NYC in 1956 to work for Vogue.

Her first novel, Run River, about Sacramento, is published in 1963.

Moves back to California, 1964-1988, living on the coast, Palos Verdes Peninsula, Portuguese Bend, then on to West LA, leaves her daughter to live with grandparents in Sacramento for a time; then moves inland to Hollywood; then moves back to the coast, Malibu, a young pre-actor Harrison Ford is her Contractor/Carpenter for the Malibu house; moves back inland to West LA-Brentwood Park.

Moves to NYC upper east side in 1988. Still lives on 71st street Manhattan.

[Chimérique]

https://www.californiamuseum.org/inductees

Joan's was honored as an inductee to the
California Hall of Fame 8th class.

[Chimérique]

Originally Posted by CA4Now

There's a new book out, a collection of essays about Didion and her writing.

“Slouching Towards Los Angeles” is, as the collection’s editor Steffie Nelson writes, a “celebration and an investigation of Didion’s ongoing claim on California and its writers — because she in turn belongs to us.” There are so many exciting facets of this ownership, among them Didion’s gender, which, Nelson writes, “was at once revolutionary and irrelevant; she wasn’t playing a man’s game — she created her own game.” (Twenty of the book’s 25 contributors are female.)

Many know Didion’s seemingly effortless style, her dinner parties, the husband she wrote movies with, the move from Malibu to New York City. But this collection, at its best, adds new information to the swirling, decades-long accumulation of gossip, legend and close reading.

https://www.latimes.com/entertainmen...-didion-review

I'll check this out.....oh darn my free subscription to the Times has run out...thanks for the post.