20 Contemporary Literature, 1970 to Present
1960s, a literary movement that applied the techniques of fiction writers (scene,
dialogue, first-person perspective) to nonfiction. The result boosted journalism to
a recognized art form and freed writers such as Didion to report on people and
cultural events through a subjective gaze. When Didion stated that her presence
as a reporter always ran counter to her subjects’ “best interests,” she added: “That
is one last thing to remember: writers are always selling somebody out .” The sever-
ity with which Didion constantly scrutinizes her own motives, however, gives the
reader confidence in her vision when she applies it in laser-like fashion to others.
Filtered through her vision are several motifs that emerge and reappear through-
out her work: social commentary, California, and politics.
“On the Mall” in The White Album is a typical example of how Didion’s social
commentary flows from her personal narrative. The essay recounts her naive dream
of managing shopping malls as a way of funding her other dream: fiction writing.
Trying to be sensible, she enrolled in a correspondence course on “shopping-center
theory” while working at Vogue. Didion deftly blends her personal dream with the
more mythic ones of California developers who believe that
The solution was in sight. The frontier had been reinvented, and its shape
was the subdivision, that new free land on which all settlers could recast
their lives tabula rasa.The mall in Didion’s mind takes on larger significance as part of a new wave of
westward migration and development, part also of the naive dreams (like her
own) of financial success in the promised land of California. Although this par-
ticular dream of hers will go unfulfilled, her personal narrative transcends a simple
critique of real-estate development. She reclaims for malls across the country the
therapeutic role of sedating anxiety: “In each of them, one moves for a while in an
aqueous suspension not only of light but of judgment, not only of judgment but of
‘personality.’” Didion herself finds the temporary escape offered by malls particu-
larly useful; she was diagnosed in 1968 as “a personality in process of deterioration
with abundant signs of failing defenses,” a literal fact as well as a metaphor for
the social unrest of the 1960s.
Didion’s writing about California runs throughout her corpus. She devotes a
major section in Slouching towards Bethlehem, The White Album, and After Henry
(1992), to her home state. Didion’s memoir Where I Was From (2003) remains her
most comprehensive study of California. She returns to the more personal prose
of her earlier essays, describing the work as “an exploration into my own confu-
sions about the place and the way in which I grew up, confusions as much about
America as about California, misapprehensions and misunderstandings so much a
part of who I became that I can still to this day confront them only obliquely.”
As always, Didion begins her examination into the public record through
questions about her personal life. In Where I Was From she digs up her matrilineal
roots, tracing pioneer women who did not have “much time for second thoughts,
without much inclination toward equivocation.” These hardscrabble traits of her
forbearers are alive and well in Didion’s prose. As Didion charts her family tree