My first experience with Joan Didion began when I picked up The Year of Magical Thinking in a thrift store in Cambridge, England. It was her most recent book—published in 2005—and one of the most life-changing, perspective-altering, soul-calming pieces of literature I have ever mentally consumed. The novel is a memoir that begins with her husband’s sudden death due to cardiac arrest while their daughter Quintana is in a coma due to septic shock from pneumonia. Quintana dies less than a year later. Didion loses the two most important people in her life in one foul swoop from 2003 to 2004 and approximately 240 pages.

It sounds depressing. But for anyone who has ever dealt with the strange, inexplicable feelings that we label “grief”, The Year of Magical Thinking is soothing. In her usual magical way, Didion succeeds in articulating the unarticulatable. She explores her own feelings—an oscillation between numbness and shock—with a level of detail that seems much more natural than most literature written about death. There is no sugar-coating, and sometimes the world can look a little dark, but there is a surprising amount of beauty in the shadows.

Didion, now 74-years old, has written 14 books in her lifetime—five of which are fiction—as well as five screenplays and countless articles for Vogue and Time. An avid reader since childhood, she has also regularly contributed to The New York Review of Books since 1973. In November 2005, she was awarded the National Book Award in the category of non-fiction for The Year of Magical Thinking. In 2007, Didion’s “distinctive blend of spare, elegant prose and fierce intelligence” was recognized by the National Book Foundation with a medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters. The Writer’s Guild of America decorated her with the Evelyn F. Burkey Award that same year.

But Didion’s greatest distinction is her unparalleled connection to California. In her review of Didion’s 1979 work The White Album, Michiko Kakutani crowned Didion California’s official journalist. If Kilimanjaro belongs to Ernest Hemingway, Oxford, Mississippi, belongs to William Faulkner, and Honolulu belongs to James Jones—“California belongs to Joan Didion,” wrote Kakutani.

Los Angeles, too, became the property of Joan Didion when she composed the vignette “Los Angeles Notebook,” published in her 1968 essay collection Slouching Towards Bethlehem. It was this particular essay that fused Didion with my writer’s soul indefinitely. Very few writers can capture Los Angeles in anything more than a superficial way. Truly interpreting the landscape is like catching a glimpse of Sasquatch, or stumbling upon the crumbling top point of an Ancient Egyptian pyramid buried deep beneath the sand, or witnessing the glistening neck of the Loch Ness Monster stretch beyond the lid of a Scottish lake for little more than an instant.

Raymond Chandler captured it with ease in his short story “Red Wind,” which describes the ominous, unsteady feeling brought to Los Angeles by the Santa Ana wind. After reading “Red Wind” some years ago, I never for a moment thought that the Santa Ana wind would belong to any author other than Chandler. It takes a person of exceptional perception to capture the tone-change—the ethereal flicked switch—that accompanies the desert wind, and Chandler must have squeezed blood from his spiritual peripheral vision to do it. But exactly 30 years later, Didion squeezed too.

There is something uneasy in the Los Angeles air this afternoon, some unnatural stillness, some tension. What it means is that tonight a Santa Ana will begin to blow a hot wind from the northeast whining down through the Cajon and San Gorgonio passes, blowing up sandstorms out along Route 66, drying the hills and the nerves to the flash point. For a few days now we will see smoke in the canyons, and hear sirens in the night. I have neither heard nor read that a Santa Ana is due, but I know it, and almost everyone I have seen today knows it too. We know it because we feel it. The baby frets. The maid sulks. I rekindle a waning argument with the phone company, then cut my losses and lie down, given over to whatever it is in the air. To live with the Santa Ana is to accept, consciously or unconsciously, a deeply mechanistic view of human behaviour.

The Santa Ana wind, Didion tells us, is a foehn wind—a malevolent force that causes headaches, nausea and restlessness. It is a mythological and a scientific wind. Native Indians would throw themselves into the sea when this bad wind blew. In Switzerland, suicide rates increase during a foehn. In Los Angeles, some teachers suspend classes because children become unmanageable during a foehn. “A few years ago an Israeli physicist discovered that not only during such winds, but for the ten or twelve hours which precede them, the air carries an unusually high ratio of positive and negative ions,” writes Didion. “…What an excess of positive ions does, in the simplest terms, is make people unhappy. One cannot get much more mechanistic than that.”

Perception is Didion’s extinguishing characteristic as a writer, but contextual detail is her forte as a journalist. She lays the scene and brings the reader to a point of hungry anticipation: I see it, the reader says. Now tell me what I should think of it. Didion is the trusted guide. She is the vital organs. She is the eyes, the brain and the heart.

“We tell ourselves stories in order to live,” writes Didion in the opening of The White Album. But for writers like Joan Didion it’s the other way around. Writers who are able, so naturally, to capture complete moments in time and transform blank pages and blank thoughts with them—live in order to tell stories.

Slouching Toward Bethlehem

Tags: california, classic journalism, Joan Didion, Los Angeles Notebook, Slouching Towards Bethlehem, The White Album, The Year of Magical Thinking