Forget East Coast Cool—Joan Didion Was a California Woman

In a little-known 1978 speech, Joan Didion wrestled with the meaning of womanhood, feminism and identity in her home state of California.

Joan Didion’s artful articulation of her own struggles and gimlet-eyed interrogation of social power have made her a touchstone writer for multiple generations. In researching her life and work, I found that some of her deepest insights were presented in speeches she gave at universities, such as “The California Woman,” presented at her alma mater, the University of California, Berkeley, in 1978; the manuscript is housed in the Bancroft Library there.

Didion herself was very much a California woman, a fifth-generation descendent of white settlers from the east who was born and raised in Sacramento, went to college in Berkeley, and spent decades writing precise, trenchant observations about the Golden State from homes in Palos Verdes, Hollywood, Malibu and Brentwood.

The following excerpt is from The World According to Joan Didion, which comes out in paperback July 29. “Q” is a reference to her daughter, Quintana Roo Dunne.

The piece in which Didion most explicitly addressed her feelings about gender roles and restrictions was the speech she delivered for the Friends of the Bancroft Library at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1978.

“The California Woman” begins with Joan regretting the title as “the worst kind of meaningless generalization. As if California had one woman.” Having thus summed up her disdain for the boxes of identity politics, Didion went on to deliver a speech in praise of several specific California women (all white), including the architect Julia Morgan, economist Jessica Blanche Peixotto, writer Gertrude Stein, dancer Isadora Duncan, and Joan’s own ancestors. (Parts of this speech later appeared in Where I Was From.)

Didion celebrates something I noticed as soon as I moved from New York to San Francisco in the early 1990s: that women were able to do far more interesting and important work on the Best Coast than on the seaboard that was still tied to traditional, European values. California, after all, is the state that gave the country the first female speaker of the House and vice president.

On the one hand, Didion jokes about the ways in which even the California women she admires fell into gender essentialism: “She was immensely eclectic—adaptable to a fault—she would construct whatever fantasy the client seemed to require—which is perhaps the only distinctively feminine aspect to her career,” she says of Morgan.

But, echoing her criticism of the women’s movement, she praises refusals to see gender as an obstacle. She falls so in love with a quote from the writer Mina Curtiss that she types it in all caps: “I HAVE FOLLOWED MY INSTINCTS AND TRIED TO USE COMMON SENSE IN MY BEHAVIOR.” She could see this manifesto of gut plus pragmatism being carved on her gravestone, she says.

It did not become her epitaph, but it is a line worth repeating: “I have followed my instincts and tried to use common sense in my behavior.”

The talk, available as a typed manuscript at the Bancroft Library, is a kind of lodestone key to/summation of Didion’s world. Here is her great subject, the American empire: Visiting London and Paris the fall prior, “it seemed to me then that all of America was very far away—I FELT IT VISCERALLY AS THE NEW WORLD.”

Flying back to Los Angeles, “the enormity of that empty space between our own coasts struck me as it had not in years. We are still different here. We are still looking to the Orient rather than to Europe.”

Here is her disillusionment with the frontier myth of the Golden State and her own family’s role in it, “which was in no way revisionist—but simply a more detailed version of the Wagons West panel in the textbook illustrations.”

aHere is her Western disdain for Atlantic snobbery: “In the presence of certain high Eastern accents I fall so helplessly into the Okie diction of the Sacramento Valley as to be unintelligible.”

And then there is this statement of purpose, a 180-degree reversal from the talk’s opening dismissal of its title: “As I thought about it I realized that I have been writing about the California woman all my adult life, that what it means to be a California woman has been a great question to me—the California woman has been—if not exactly my subject—at least quite certainly my material.”

Being a woman in a long line of mothers of courage, in community with other women, and a link in a chain to future women was intrinsic to Joan Didion’s identity. She looked back to her great-great-great-grandmothers and beyond, and she looked forward for her daughter and nieces and cousins and friends.

For proof of her maternal capacity, consider the many women she supported in her life. She helped Eve Babitz publish her first book. (Babitz dedicated it in part to Joan and John “for having to be who I’m not.”)

The writer Susanna Moore lived at times with the Didion-Dunnes in the Franklin house. “Her silence was a refuge which I often preferred to conversation,” the author of In the Cut said at Didion’s memorial.

Joan’s younger cousin Julia Armstrong-Totten, an art historian, house- and dog-sat in Brentwood and would often stay at the Didion-Dunne pied-à-terre at Alwyn Court. “They kind of took me under their wing,” Armstrong-Totten says. “That’s how I saw it.”

Didion mentored the writer Sara Davidson, who in turn has passed on in her own books and articles much of the advice Joan gave her.

Didion championed and befriended the writer Maxine Hong Kingston, petitioning the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters to give her a Livings award, saying “her two books published to date seem to me strange and wonderful and entirely original.”

And of course there was Q. In “The California Woman,” the writer whose vocation was launched when her mother gave her a notebook says that she plans to pass the quilt made by her great-great-grandmother on to either her daughter or her brother’s oldest daughter because: “Daughters carry these souvenirs, and they also carry down the narrative, which is perhaps why women figure very large in the narration.”

And there is a statement of feminist literary criticism and historiography if there ever was one.

Adapted excerpt from The World According to Joan Didion by Evelyn McDonnell and reprinted with permission from HarperOne, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers. Copyright 2023.