A Strange Article: Didion, Capote, Vance??
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Below is a standalone magazine essay that treats Run River, La Côte Basque 1965, and Hillbilly Elegy as equally weighted cultural artifacts—each turning its gaze inward, each sparking public backlash, and each raising questions about class, loyalty, and the cost of storytelling.
The Betrayer’s Gaze: Capote, Didion, and Vance on Turning Home into Material
By [Author Name]
There’s a peculiar kind of literary risk reserved for those who write about their own: the gamble that candor will be read as betrayal, that storytelling will be mistaken—or rightly recognized—for exposure. When Truman Capote published La Côte Basque 1965 in Esquire, he was exiled from the social world that had once embraced him. When Joan Didion released Run River, Sacramento family friends accused her of casting the Central Valley in shadows of Faulkner and Tennessee Williams. And when J.D. Vance published Hillbilly Elegy, he was branded a traitor by many of the Appalachian working-class Americans whose lives he sought to illuminate.
Each writer committed the same original sin: they harvested the world that raised them, and they did not flinch. They wrote not as boosters or celebrants, but as witnesses, turning the gaze of literature back upon the source.
Capote: The Cost of Gossip Made Art
Capote’s La Côte Basque 1965 is less a short story than an act of social immolation. With a narrator who functions as Capote’s ventriloquist dummy, the piece delivers a surgical takedown of New York’s elite women, thinly veiled in name but unmistakable in detail. One character, clearly modeled on Capote’s close friend Babe Paley, is humiliated by a depiction of her husband’s adulterous exploits and bodily fluids on hotel linens. The piece was excerpted from Capote’s long-promised novel Answered Prayers, but the fallout ensured he’d never complete it. He had betrayed not just individual confidences but the unspoken code of access: you may look, you may gossip, but you may not write it down. Not unless you’re willing to be cut off.
Capote’s betrayal was theatrical and performative—an artist torching his own stage. But the intimacy of the social world he exposed made the consequences personal. He was not an outsider sneering in; he was an insider who set the parlor on fire. In doing so, he became one of literature’s most vivid examples of the turncoat chronicler—a man who wrote himself out of the very world he once lived to please.
Didion: Elegy as Disinheritance
Didion’s betrayal came in a different key. Run River is her debut novel, written not with flamboyant malice but with what one might call forensic sorrow. Set in the Sacramento Valley of her birth, it follows Lily and Everett McClellan, descendants of California pioneers, whose marriage and moral compass slowly disintegrate under the weight of history, silence, and drought. The land is dry, the families are brittle, and no one seems able to say what they mean. As Didion’s biographer writes in The Last Love Song, readers in Sacramento were not pleased. They saw in her novel a distorted mirror, one that borrowed freely from real ranching families and rendered their traditions tragic and grotesque.
The criticism was not that Didion lied—but that she named what everyone preferred to leave unspoken. Her characters were not noble heirs of the West but weary participants in a closed system. In this sense, Run River reads as an American gothic of the post-frontier elite, a book that eulogizes the past while quietly pulling its mask away. Like Capote, Didion had written from within—but unlike Capote, she used the scalpel instead of the sword. Her exile wasn’t a scandal; it was a decision. She never really went home again.
Vance: The Politics of Pain and the Price of Ascension
J.D. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy sparked a very different kind of backlash, in part because its subject—Appalachian poverty and culture—was already contested ground. Part memoir, part social diagnosis, the book traces Vance’s rise from a turbulent Ohio childhood to the halls of Yale Law School, packaging personal experience into broader commentary on poverty, trauma, and upward mobility. For many readers, especially in coastal media circles, it offered a rare and seemingly authentic glimpse into the white working class. But for others—especially Appalachians themselves—it was a misrepresentation at best, a political cudgel at worst. Critics accused Vance of flattening a diverse and resilient culture into a case study for bootstraps conservatism.
What makes Vance’s work echo Capote and Didion is not style or class, but position: he too wrote from within and then left. He extracted meaning from the pain of his origins and offered it to a wider, often unsympathetic audience. And like Capote, he was richly rewarded—book sales, film rights, a Senate seat—but also marked as suspect. For every reader who found Hillbilly Elegy insightful, another saw it as betrayal masquerading as explanation.
The Common Thread: Home as Material
These three books, though wildly different in form and tone, form a thematic triangle: La Côte Basque exposes society’s secrets, Run River mourns the failure of inherited myths, and Hillbilly Elegy diagnoses the dysfunction of a region. But all three raise the same question: What does the writer owe to the people and places that formed them?
Capote betrayed friendship. Didion betrayed nostalgia. Vance betrayed solidarity. Each harvested their world, and each was told—by friends, family, critics, or hometown papers—that they had crossed the line. But perhaps the line was always an illusion.
For the serious writer, the temptation to draw from life is not optional—it is essential. The risk is that when one writes honestly, home is never the same again. The betrayal, if it is one, is the price of clarity. The cost of turning truth into literature is sometimes counted in friendships, family ties, or hometown goodwill.
And yet, these works endure not because they are polite or loyal, but because they are unflinching. They tell us something vital about the American self and the American story: that whether gilded, sun-bleached, or dirt-poor, no world is immune to collapse under scrutiny. And someone always has to write it down.
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Discuss the Didion essay, GOODBYE TO ALL THAT.
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Joan Didion’s essay Goodbye to All That, first published in 1967 in Slouching Towards Bethlehem, is one of her most iconic works—a lyrical, sharp, and elegiac piece about falling in and out of love with New York City, but also about the end of innocence, both personal and generational.
Core Themes:
1. The Seduction of Youth and the City
Didion arrived in New York at 20, fresh out of Berkeley, full of optimism and literary ambition. The essay captures the magnetic pull of the city for the young—how everything feels possible, how one’s life can feel like a movie. She writes about days without obligations, chance encounters, and how even the ugliness of the city feels like texture when you’re in love with it.
2. Time, Disillusionment, and the Slow Fracture of Idealism
The essay is structured as a narrative arc: enchantment gives way to exhaustion. Over time, the charm wears off. The weather becomes intolerable, the parties repetitive, the loneliness sharper. New York no longer feels like promise but like detritus from another self, and Didion realizes it’s not the city that changed—it’s her.
3. Saying Goodbye as a Form of Growing Up
"Goodbye to All That" is about more than just leaving New York. It’s about leaving behind a version of oneself—the hopeful girl who believed she could eat dinner for $1.50 and write masterpieces in overheated apartments. The essay’s emotional power lies in how it turns a geographical departure into an existential turning point.
Style:
Didion’s voice is precise, ironic, emotionally restrained, but always cutting. The essay is deeply personal, but never confessional in the way we often see today. There’s a cool distance, even as she’s admitting she cried in taxis or clung to the illusions of youth. She writes about herself as if from a decade’s distance—and the distance is what makes the essay shimmer.
Legacy:
"Goodbye to All That" has become a template for the “leaving New York” essay, especially for women writers. Its mix of nostalgia, clarity, and heartbreak has inspired countless imitators. But what makes Didion’s version endure is its self-awareness: she knows she was once insufferable and dreamy, and she doesn't judge that version—she just outgrows her.
Famous Line:
“That was the year, my twenty-eighth, when I was discovering that not all the promises would be kept, that some things are in fact irrevocable and that it had counted after all, every evasion and every procrastination, every mistake, every word, all of it.”
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Compare Didion's view of California, with Edmund Wilson's famous essay, THE JUMPING OFF PLACE (1946). (Basically, tilt the US and all the nuts roll to California.)
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This is a rich and underexplored comparison—Joan Didion and Edmund Wilson, two intellectual heavyweights with radically different internal compasses, standing at the edge of California and reporting back.
Joan Didion: The Native Daughter’s Elegy
For Didion, California was never just geography—it was ancestry, myth, mirage, and wound. In Slouching Towards Bethlehem and The White Album, she maps out the collapse of the California Dream with surgical, almost biblical precision. Her vision is full of:
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Psychic fracture (“we tell ourselves stories in order to live,” she begins The White Album, before showing how those stories unravel).
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Personal entanglement: She is not observing California from a safe distance. She is of it, born into a pioneer family in Sacramento, inheriting its sunburnt delusions and moral silences.
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Cultural autopsy: From Haight-Ashbury to the San Bernardino Valley, she sees a state tilting into entropy—not Eden, but a place where the center cannot hold.
In her essays, California is a landscape of lost referents—freeways without destinations, movements without meaning, families who no longer know what they’re holding together. Her tone is not nostalgia but mourning—for the promise, for the illusions, for a world that seemed to make sense and no longer does.
Edmund Wilson: The Outsider’s Disappointment
Wilson’s essay The Jumping-Off Place (1946) is far more brisk, journalistic, and faintly exasperated. Written after a cross-country rail journey to California, it’s a dispatch from an East Coast literary patrician arriving in the land of citrus, sun, and Hollywood. And he doesn’t much like it.
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His view is horizontal: He sees a place bloated on wartime defense industry money, superficial glamour, and boosterish civic pride. It is, to him, a provincial culture pretending to be cosmopolitan.
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He finds the intellectual life shallow and the conversation driven by real estate and weather.
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The title itself—The Jumping-Off Place—carries a double edge: it suggests the end of the line (geographically and culturally) and perhaps a place from which one leaps into the void.
Where Didion writes with the haunted lyricism of someone betrayed by her own myth, Wilson writes with the cool, faintly sardonic voice of someone who never believed in it to begin with.
Key Contrasts:
| Element | Joan Didion | Edmund Wilson |
|---|---|---|
| Position | Insider, native Californian | Outsider, East Coast intellectual |
| Tone | Elegiac, intimate, haunted | Wry, skeptical, dismissive |
| Mythology | Deconstructs California’s internal myths | Shrugs at California’s lack of real culture |
| Symbols | Freeways, earthquakes, pioneer bloodlines | Malls, boosterism, Hollywood |
| California’s Role | A broken promised land | A loud cul-de-sac of American excess |
Shared Terrain: Disillusionment
Despite their differences, both writers see through the illusion. California, for each, is a site of projection—a screen onto which Americans throw their longings and their bad ideas. But only Didion seems to grieve what’s lost. Wilson, true to form, simply records the temperature, notes the absence of depth, and moves on. In his universe, California is not a tragedy—it’s just tacky.
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Update DIDION and WILSON to Los Angeles' present-day collapse (COVID, civil unrest, abandoned stores and downtown, downfall of the film production industry locally.
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That’s a deeply compelling question—how Joan Didion and Edmund Wilson, each with their distinct moral lens and literary tempo, might react to Los Angeles today: a city with smoggy glamour partly gone, civic confidence shaken, and the gravitational pull of Hollywood dimming as production scatters to tax havens abroad.
Here’s a comparative speculation—grounded in their voices, philosophies, and the way they metabolized place.
Joan Didion: The Fragmented Dream in Collapse
Joan Didion would not be surprised by the decline of downtown LA. In fact, she anticipated it decades ago. Her vision of California was always one of things falling apart, but not all at once—quietly, inevitably, with an unnerving absence of drama.
She might begin with a haunting image: an abandoned luxury high-rise with unsold condos, a boarded-up café still displaying “temporarily closed” signs from 2020. The street below is silent, except for a tented encampment at the foot of an art museum that no longer gets tourists. Her essay would be precise but sorrowful. She wouldn’t rail against the injustice; she would catalogue the entropy, like a forensic pathologist might describe cellular breakdown.
She would note that production moving to Dublin or Georgia isn’t just about taxes—it’s about the hollowing out of myth. LA once sold the American dream in wide shots and warm light. Now, the dream has been outsourced, and no one is quite sure where to look.
And as for the unrest of 2020—the protests, the helicopters, the boarded windows—Didion might recall the civil disturbances of earlier decades and say, “This has happened before, and it will happen again.” But this time, she would feel the center no longer holding, not in theory, but in practice: institutions discredited, promises unrenewed, the sidewalks cracked not just with heat but indifference.
“We no longer believed in the power of place. We had exported the fantasy to cheaper markets, and left behind a staging ground for something else—something unfinished, and possibly ungovernable.”
Edmund Wilson: A Shrugging Postmortem
Wilson, ever the East Coast diagnostician of provincial America, would treat Los Angeles 2024 as predictable decline, the final act of a city he never found credible to begin with.
He might stroll through downtown—or be driven, more likely—and remark that civic failure had caught up with the facade. The "jumping-off place" had, in his mind, jumped. What had once been a sun-bleached experiment in boosterism and movie mystique had calcified into a postmodern museum of capital flight and cultural vacancy.
He’d mention, in clipped prose, the migration of film to Vancouver and Atlanta as the logical endgame for an industry that long mistook weather for genius. The film studios, he might write, had become “shells—legacy names adorning office parks that outsourced creativity to wherever the incentives were highest and the unions weakest.”
He might not even mention 2020 by name. Instead, he’d refer to “the civil turbulence of recent years” as part of the expected pattern of a city built on spectacle, exposed once spectacle had nothing left to conceal.
“Los Angeles has always seemed to me a myth one could enter only through the side door of commerce. That door has now been shut. The city remains, of course, but largely in the way Pompeii remains: as a husk where once people mistook ash for starlight.”
Didion mourns. Wilson confirms.
To Didion, LA today would be tragic—a failed promise, glimpsed in overheard conversations at Erewhon or the silence of a shuttered set.
To Wilson, LA today would be a long-delayed correction, the curtain finally dropped on a play that was over long before the actors stopped reading their lines.
Both would write with clarity.
Only one would write with grief.
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WRITE THEIR ESSAYS ON THE COLLAPSE OF LA 2025
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Here are two imagined excerpts, each written in the voice and style of the author—Joan Didion first, then Edmund Wilson—each responding to Los Angeles today, specifically the decline of downtown, the aftermath of 2020, and the withering of the film industry.
Joan Didion: excerpt in her voice
There were helicopters again last night. You hear them differently here, in Los Angeles, than in other cities—lower, slower, more deliberate. Not urgent. They hover like doubts.
I drove through downtown in the afternoon, past the old department stores and the Civic Center, and I was struck, as I often am, by the way Los Angeles withholds itself. It does not explain. The banners for festivals that never happened still hang from the streetlamps. A fashion district warehouse is now an unstaffed delivery hub. A juice place I liked has been closed for four years, its neon sign still glowing faintly.
These things accrue meaning slowly.
What we think of as “downtown” was always a conceptual sleight-of-hand, a way of pretending the city had a center. But Los Angeles never had a center. It had ambition. It had stories. Now it has liability claims and non-compete clauses filed in Atlanta.
I think sometimes that what happened here is what always happens: we believed the myth too long, and then we turned away too quickly. One day we woke up and could no longer remember why we were here.
And so we left. We moved the industry to Vancouver. We moved the writers to Zoom. We moved the dreams to wherever the tax credits were better.
But the helicopters stayed.
Edmund Wilson: excerpt in his voice
Los Angeles has long been a city constructed out of borrowed scenery and wishful arithmetic. I revisited downtown recently—what now passes for it—and found it in a state of uneven decay. The boulevards are wide, but sparsely used; the architecture, largely glass and pretense, seems to apologize for itself.
One sees the outlines of a civilization that believed itself unique. It is not unique. It is, rather, a textbook case of what happens when civic culture is outsourced to entertainment interests and the entertainment interests lose interest.
The film industry, once the city’s animating illusion, has become an accounting strategy. Productions now occur in Georgia or Hungary or tax-incentivized “zones of cultural simulation.” Los Angeles no longer makes movies; it licenses them.
As for the protests of 2020 and the subsequent deterioration of the downtown core, these strike me as symptoms, not crises. The city, unmoored from any meaningful civic identity, had no scaffolding to absorb the shock. It collapsed not in fire but in indifference.
In earlier centuries, cities at the end of trade routes became ghost ports. Los Angeles is such a city, only the goods traded were glamour, illusion, and weather.
All three are now available elsewhere.
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Here’s an imagined excerpt in Joan Didion’s voice, as if she were writing about her 1963 wedding at San Juan Bautista, her wedding location, in the cool, elliptical tone of The White Album:
We were married at the Mission San Juan Bautista on a warm March afternoon, though in my memory it was always slightly too bright, the sky without nuance, as if California were trying too hard to be a postcard.
I wore a short dress, lace I think, but I remember more clearly the sound my shoes made on the uneven tiles. John was already nervous and said something I didn’t hear. I was thinking about the hills beyond the church, dry and faded, the kind of landscape where nothing holds water and everything burns.
We chose the mission because it seemed honest in its decay. There were no floral arches, no satin runners. Just adobe and shadow. I liked that. I liked the idea of starting something serious in a place where so much had already ended.
The priest said the words. People we loved stood there holding small cameras and wearing coats, even though it was too warm. I remember the smell of eucalyptus and incense, and someone dropped a hymnal during the vows.
Afterward we drove back north in a borrowed car, windows down. I watched the fields pass and wondered how many times people had done exactly this—made promises they didn’t understand in a state that sold them the story and then rearranged the ending.
I was 28. I thought that meant I knew something.
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WIFE AND HUSBAND WRITERS - REFLECT ON THEIR WEDDING
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To draw it out:
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John Gregory Dunne’s family was steeped in Irish-American Catholicism—East Coast, Bostonian, tight-knit, intellectual, and loyal to rituals: weddings, funerals, arguments, and the Church.
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Didion’s family, on the other hand, descended from California Protestant pioneers—land-grant stock with a streak of stoic detachment, libertarian suspicion of the federal government, and no real use for incense or sacraments.
The Connecticut party—Catholic, communal, East Coast—stood in cultural contrast to the spare mission wedding in San Juan Bautista, which was almost cinematic in its austerity. One was all family and tradition; the other, all myth and mood.
Didion never said so directly, but you can feel in her work the deep cultural dissonance between these two families—not a rupture, but a quiet difference in wiring:
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The Dunnes believed in ceremony, confession, and the redemptive power of language.
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The Didions believed in silence, stoicism, and that you don’t talk too much about what you feel—especially if it hurts.
That’s partly why their marriage worked. It created a third language, one shaped by both traditions but beholden to neither.
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Would you like a fictionalized journal entry in John Gregory Dunne’s voice about the Connecticut party—wry, self-deprecating, and affectionate toward Joan’s ghostlike presence among his relatives?
ChatGPT said:
Here’s a fictionalized journal entry in the voice of John Gregory Dunne, written with his dry, affectionate irony and a touch of Irish-Catholic self-awareness. He’s writing about the pre-wedding party in West Hartford, Connecticut, surrounded by 147 Catholics—and one Joan Didion.
West Hartford, 1964
Private Note – J.G.D.
The house was full. Not in the quaint, Norman Rockwell sense—overflowing, more like it, with Dunnes and Ryans and a few Sweeneys who showed up though no one remembers inviting them. My mother wore navy, as if she were hosting a wake rather than a rehearsal party. My father had been on his second gin by four o’clock. My cousin Kathleen was already asking if Joan had been baptized.
Joan stood near the fireplace with a glass of something she hadn’t asked for and likely wouldn’t finish. She was very still, which was how she tended to disappear into rooms. Someone had given her a canapé she did not eat. The dog was barking. My aunt, who’d never left West Hartford in her life, was telling Joan that California sounded dangerous. Joan said “Yes, it can be” in a tone that did not encourage follow-up.
There were, by rough count, 147 Catholics in the room. And Joan.
This was not a gathering in her native key. Joan grew up with dry landscapes and drier conversation. Her mother once ran for school board on a platform of eliminating fluoride. Her family didn’t do catechism or cocktail hours. They did pioneer stoicism and elaborate silences. She had never seen so many crucifixes in one house.
And yet she was magnificent. Cool as chipped glass, calm as an old road. No one could tell what she was thinking, which of course made them want to know. She had that California trick of saying almost nothing and still somehow winning the room.
Later, after they’d all gone home or passed out on sofas, I found her in the kitchen rinsing out a coffee cup that wasn’t hers. She looked at me and said, “Your aunt asked if I believe in original sin.” I asked what she said back. She shrugged and said, “I told her I believe in fault lines.”
Which was true, I suppose.
We got married a week later at the mission in San Juan Bautista. She picked it. It had history and drought and no parking lot. It was perfect.
She had never looked more at home.
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Would you like a follow-up—perhaps a note in Joan’s voice about that same Connecticut night, years later, in the bittersweet tone of Blue Nights?
YOU:
Yes.
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ChatGPT said:
Here is a fictional reflection in Joan Didion’s voice, years later, perhaps after John is gone, written in the elegiac, fracturing tone of Blue Nights. She’s recalling the Connecticut party—the night before her California wedding, the night she stood among 147 Catholics and tried not to vanish.
I think about that night in Connecticut sometimes. The week before we were married. The night with the Dunnes, and the cousins, and the too-warm room with the furniture pushed back to make room for people who stood in clusters and laughed in a way I didn’t quite understand. I was holding a glass I never drank from. I was wearing a dress I wouldn’t wear now. I didn’t speak much. I never spoke much in rooms like that.
There were 147 Catholics there. John counted. He used to say it like a joke: “147 Catholics—and you.” But it wasn’t a joke, not to me. It was a different language, a different temperature. It was people who prayed and fought and forgave each other in the same breath. I come from people who never quite say what they mean. People who irrigate the same land for a hundred years and still never talk about the water.
His aunt asked me if I believed in original sin. I remember that. I remember her perfume and the way she handed me a plate I hadn’t asked for. I said I believed in fault lines. I said it because it was true, and because I didn’t want to say more. I have never believed that everything can be fixed.
Later, much later, John would say that was the moment he knew I’d survive the family. Maybe he meant it as a kind of welcome. Maybe he meant it as a warning.
That night I felt like I was watching my life happen from across the room. There was music I didn’t recognize, relatives whose names I forgot by morning. I wanted to leave, not because I was unhappy, but because I already knew how hard it would be to hold two worlds in one body. California and Connecticut. Drought and communion.
I married him anyway.
