Chasing Joan Didion

I visited the writer's California homes, from Berkeley to Malibu. What was looking for?

- By Caitlin Flanagan

“Think of this as a travel piece, she might have written. “Imagine it in Sunset magazine: 'Five Great California Stops Along the Joan Didion Trail.”

Or think of this as what it really is: a road trip of magical thinking.

I had known that Didion's Parkinson's was advancing; seven or eight months earlier, someone had told me that she was vanishing; someone else had told me that for the past two years, she hadn't been able to speak.

I didn't want her to die. My sense of myself is in many ways wrapped up in the 40 essays in Slouching Towards Bethlehem and The White Album. I don't know how many times I've read Democracy.

“Call me the author,” she writes in that novel. “Let the reader be introduced to Joan Didion.”

Call me the author,” she writes in that novel. “Let the reader be introduced to Joan Didion.

There are people who admire Joan Didion, and people who enjoy reading Joan Didion, and people who think Joan Didion is overrated. But then there are the rest of us. People who can't really explain how those first two collections hit us, or why we can never let them go.