I admit, Joan Didion could cough up a hairball and I’d think it was smart and interesting. No hairball at the LA Times Fesitval of Books last weekend; just a bunch of interesting things about writing and California. She was in UCLA’s enormous Royce Hall speaking to a sold-out audience (if a free evet can be sold out), answering questions from David Ulin. I was particularly interested in what she’d say about writing and Los Angeles.
David Ulin asked if, in the stories "Some Dreamers of the Golden Dream" and "Slouching Towards Bethlehem," she was deliberately creating a mythic framework. Joan Didion replied that she was "meeting a deadline so we could get the check before Christmas." Then she relented a little. "We had just come here. We arrived here in 1964 in the middle of the summer. [Southern California] was astonishing to me. It was all very vivid. [those stories were] a response to my enchantment with where I was."
on writing…
Joan Didion: As a writer, I’ve never made a private piece of writing. The other end of writing something is having someone read it.
on LA…
JD: The basic LA experience resists narrative.
on leaving LA…
JD: The reason we left LA has never been clear to me. John felt it was time to – he was between books, he was bored. It was my intention to tell no one. I did come out quite a bit — I started doing "A Letter From Los Angeles" for the New Yorker, which was silly [since they’d moved back to NY].
and: I still regard myself as a California writer.
on "Goodbye to All That"…
David Ulin asks about using up/having been used up by New York as Didion writes in "Goodbye to All That."
JD: What was using me up then ? I really could not work in NY because I was aware that everyone around me was doing the same thing, and they were doing it better. I couldn’t listen to people talk about their advances anymore.
