How the inimitable California-bred writer Joan Didion gave Sacramento an identity again

Joan Didion’s gift was in describing the indescribable, whether she was matching words to the zeitgeist of the 1960s and ’70s or to such wordless phenomena as grief, countercultures, political upheaval and, of course, California.

It would be too easy for us, as hometown cities that have birthed stars are inclined to do, to stake some claim to Didion’s greatness or feign intimacy with a writer whose words helped define generations. But Didion’s death at 87 Thursday in her Manhattan home — about as far from Sacramento as one can get in this country — reminded us of the literary icon’s clear-eyed, critical descriptions of California’s capital city.

Of any writer who ever attempted the near-impossible feat of capturing the real California on a page, not the one propagated by Hollywood or the capital’s own tourism officials, Didion was the best.

She wrote correctly, for example, that anyone who traveled to the state from the East Coast only to see San Francisco or Los Angeles had not actually seen or been to California.

“Sacramento is California,” Didion wrote in “Slouching Towards Bethlehem,” a collection of essays published in 1968. “And 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.”

Despite a childhood spent in Sacramento, Didion never wrote of the city with anything remotely resembling nostalgia. Instead, in neutral and often cold tones, she wrote of “incautious children” who drowned in the Sacramento, Cosumnes and American rivers; of winters’ yellow elm leaves “wadded in the gutters”; of the state’s rapidly disappearing identity; of a Sacramento whose truth is “elusive, and must be tracked with caution.”

“Did not the Donner-Reed Party, after all, eat its own dead to reach Sacramento?”

It would be a mistake to remember Didion solely in the context of Sacramento — the brief time she spent here or the few but significant pages of her extensive body of work that she devoted to the city. Didion was a fifth-generation Californian with more authority to write about the state than almost anyone else. But she made a name for herself only after leaving the West Coast and launching her career in New York City.

Didion stood out not only as a writer but also as a journalist. She was associated with the “New Journalism” that emerged during the ’60s and ’70s and was defined by subjective language and a forthright acknowledgment of the presence of the writer in the story. She was on the front lines of an array of era-defining events: the advent of hippie culture in San Francisco; the Black Panther Party’s emergence; the women’s rights movement. Later, she was the first mainstream writer to criticize the Central Park Five verdict, calling out the inherent racism of the decision.

Didion wrote widely, including an entire book on a two-week visit to El Salvador during its 1982 earthquake and another on exiled Cubans who took up residence in Miami following the overthrow of Fulgencio Batista.

So, yes, to reduce Didion to a Sacramento or even a California writer would be to do her a disservice.

Yet if our city had lost its core identity, as Didion argued, then the ways she wrote about it, challenged it and questioned it gave Sacramento an idea of itself again.

“It makes one wonder … that Sacramento is not the city,” Didion wrote. “In just such self-doubts do small towns lose their character.”

This story was originally published December 23, 2021 at 1:30 PM.