I wanted to spend my days in the house out in Malibu, where the fever broke. I wanted to go with her to pick out a dress for Linda Kasabian, the Manson girl who drove the getaway car the night of the murders. I wanted to hear about the high-ceilinged rooms of the Royal Hawaiian Hotel, and about all the people who came to parties at her house on Franklin Avenue. I didn’t want to hear reports of her decline. Over the previous two years people kept contacting me with reports of her decline. I read that book and something changed inside me, and it has stayed that way for the rest of my life. I was in Ireland, as I always was in the summer, and I was bored out of my mind, as I always was in the summer, and I happened to see a copy of Slouching Towards Bethlehem in a Dublin living room. She’d been a visiting professor in the Berkeley English department, and my father was the department chair. I had met Didion that spring, although she wasn’t famous yet, outside of certain small but powerful circles. I picked up Slouching Towards Bethlehem in 1975, the year I was 14. People who can’t really explain how those first two collections hit us, or why we can never let them go. There are people who admire Joan Didion, and people who enjoy reading Joan Didion, and people who think Joan Didion is overrated. “Let the reader be introduced to Joan Didion.” “Call me the author,” she writes in that novel. I don’t know how many times I’ve read Democracy. My sense of myself is in many ways wrapped up in the 40 essays in Slouching Towards Bethlehem and The White Album.

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South and West by Joan Didion