The Atlantic’s June Cowl Story: “Chasing Joan Didion”

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Final fall, having heard that Joan Didion’s well being was in decline, The Atlantic’s employees author Caitlin Flanagan bought in her automotive and began driving throughout California. “I needed to really feel near the lady who got here from Nowhere, California (have you ever ever been to Sacramento?), and blasted herself into the middle of every part. I needed to really feel near the younger girl who’d gone to Berkeley, and studied with professors I knew, and relied on them—as I had as soon as relied on them—to indicate her a path. The factor to do was get within the automotive and drive. I might go and discover her within the locations the place she’d lived.”

Flanagan was on the lookout for a solution to the nice query of Didion’s profession: “What makes so many individuals really feel possessive not simply of the tales, but additionally of their connection to the author. What’s it about these essays that takes so many individuals hostage?” She had met Didion and first learn Slouching In the direction of Bethlehem in 1975, when she was 14 years previous; Didion was a visiting professor at Berkeley however not but well-known: “And one thing modified inside me,” Flanagan writes, “and it has stayed that means for the remainder of my life.”

Chasing Joan Didion” is Flanagan’s attractive cowl story for The Atlantic’s June 2022 problem, and leads an growth of The Atlantic’s Books part that launches at this time. In a chunk traversing Sacramento, Berkeley, Malibu, and Hollywood—the positioning of Didion’s most recognizable residence, on Franklin Avenue—Flanagan finds Didion within the rivers and pastures, within the seaside home, within the groves and shadows. She additionally uncovers the truth of Didion’s well-known marriage to John Gregory Dunne: “There weren’t phrases in these days for the way a person’s rage might form the lifetime of a lady who lived with him, however now we have one now: abuse.”

Every cease Flanagan makes––from Didion’s childhood residence in Sacramento, to a sorority home in Berkeley the place scrapbook clippings foreshadow making it large in New York magazines, to the Los Angeles and Malibu properties she shared along with her husband––Flanagan resolves the truth of particular areas in opposition to the methods she imagined them. “I spotted—maybe the lesson of the entire tour—that I didn’t need these locations to be actual, as a result of they lived so vividly in my thoughts.”

It’s in Didion’s most well-known properties, those she shared with Dunne and with their daughter, Quintana Roo, that Flanagan calls out the factor few different writers have been keen or capable of state. “The Didion-Dunnes’ marriage was one lengthy dialog between two writers fully in sync about their beliefs on writing and all the time concerned about what the opposite needed to say. However Dunne additionally had a legendary and harsh mood, and he was an extremely imply drunk. Even his friends reported as a lot, as a result of it could be not possible to evaluate the person with out admitting to those central information of his nature. That they had learn in regards to the kicked-down doorways, and plenty of who had been near the couple had witnessed extra examples of his rage.”

Finally Flanagan discovers what the journey meant and what she was in search of: “I hadn’t gone on the lookout for the precise Joan Didion or your Joan Didion and even ‘the reader’s’ Joan Didion. I went on the lookout for the Joan Didion who was partly a historic determine, and partly an excellent author, and partly a fiction of my very own design. And he or she lives proper the place she all the time has.”

What number of miles to Babylon?
Three rating miles and ten—
Can I get there by candlelight?
Sure, and again once more.

The Atlantic’s June 2022 problem is now on-line. Please be in contact with questions or interview requests. Flanagan and deputy editor Jane Yong Kim will discuss in regards to the cowl story throughout a digital occasion, The Atlantic Reads, on Thursday, Might 19, at 12 p.m. ET. (Register right here.)

The Atlantic, a literary vacation spot since its founding 165 years in the past as {a magazine} of “Literature, Artwork, and Politics,” is at this time unveiling a dramatically expanded Books part dedicated to essays, criticism, reporting, unique fiction, poetry, and guide suggestions.

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