In March of 2020, during the COVID lockdown, I read the new book of essays about LA and about Joan Didion - Slouching Toward Los Angeles (entry point here, Amazon here.) I love Los Angeles - I came here in 1990 for four years at age 30, met my wife here, and we moved back permanently in 2003. I also love knowing details here - this is where Mae West lived, this is where Buster Keaton's studio was, this is how you take the subway to the light rail to Pasadena, this is where Joan Didion lived on Franklin Avenue, near the beautiful Runyon Canyon hiking park, currently closed due to COVID.
For me, the most wonderful moment in reading Slouching Towards Los Angeles came in an essay by Joshua Wolf Shenk. Shenk is an author who's lived in New York, and Los Angeles, and eventually settled in Las Vegas (website here, Twitter here).
In 2005, Shenk had published his first book, and was at LaGuardia for the shuttle to Boston, where he was giving a book reading at Harvard Square in a few hours. The person in line ahead of him was - Joan Didion. She was going to Boston to talk about "The Year of Magical Thinking," her book on the death of her husband and its aftermath. Shenk struck up a conversation. He gave his own talk that evening, and one of the organizers there was on her way to the Didion talk nearby, and Shenk went along. Afterward, the line for autographs from Didion was very long, and Shenk asked the assistant to help get his own signed copy.
A few days later, the copy arrived in New York, To Josh, From Joan Didion - followed by a completely illegible scrawl. Shenk returned to the page again and again, and the extra words eluded him.
Time goes on, and Shenk is teaching a college class on literature and highlights the idea that every author has some keynote, some motife or theme, through all their work. For Didion, the class decided, it was specificity of place. It's not John Roberts in LA, it's John Roberts, driving his light blue BMW down Rodeo Drive in Beverly Hills. It's not going to church - it's going to church at St. John the Martyr, on Pine street, where it meets Sixth Street on the corner with the big oak tree.
Suddenly, as the class continues, Shenk opens the front page of the Didion book and the autograph is legible for the first time. It is, "To Josh, From Joan Didion, from the shuttle."
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The LA Times on Joan Didion, December 2021, here.