Hello to All That
My copy of “Slouching Towards Bethlehem” is the size of my palm. On the front cover is an illustration of Joan Didion: black and white with splotches of purple and red. Her lips are dark, her eyebrows bushy and thick. Although she’s staring right at me, I can’t make out what she’s thinking. The painting is cold and harsh, words I might use to describe Didion’s most celebrated work: “Slouching Towards Bethlehem.”
I can’t remember where I bought “Slouching Towards Bethlehem.” All I know is that someone had recommended it to me when I was a high school junior preparing for a camping trip. That pocket-sized book was all that could fit in my pack — shoved in the corner of what backpackers call the “brain,” an area reserved for essentials. The “brain” held my granola for the day, a handful of m&ms, my sunglasses, sunscreen, a pencil and “Slouching Towards Bethlehem.” We were near Mount Massive, Colorado’s second tallest peak. The elevation was high and water took an hour to boil.
While Didion and I do not share upbringings or political views, her essays are a roadmap for living a thoughtful life. Since I opened up my copy of “Slouching Towards Bethlehem,” I have found myself taking note of my own actions in the context of her writing: when I write, I think about “On Keeping a Notebook”; when I travel, I think about “Slouching Towards Bethlehem” and “Goodbye to All That.” Didion’s intention with much of her essay-writing was to identify important cultural keystones, pop-culture figures like John Wayne, Jerry Garcia and Jim Morrison, but her broader insights about life and how we live –– such as keeping a notebook, going home, holding onto items with sentimental value –– are what make her writing so compelling to myself and other readers of Didion.
“Slouching Towards Bethlehem,” The Essay
Before I read “Slouching Towards Bethlehem” (the collected essays) for the first time, my dad and I took a trip to San Francisco. I had never been before. We went to the Golden Gate Bridge and Golden Gate Park. My dad took me to Haight-Ashbury, which is now largely filled with tourist traps commemorating a time when LSD and The Grateful Dead made frequent appearances. So, when I read Didion’s piece set in San Francisco, “Slouching Towards Bethlehem,” I had a notion of where she might have been. She might have stood just where I stood, but the area’s waste and kaleidoscopic graffiti would not have been clean enough for the chic stores that have since moved in. Didion’s piece ends with a five-year old attending “High Kindergarten,” tripping on acid, right beside her mother.
In “Slouching Towards Bethlehem,” university professors and hippies alike roamed around with flower crowns and took acid on the streets of Haight-Ashbury in San Francisco in the ’60s. Thousands paraded through Golden Gate Park, and a mysterious man named Deadeye kept reappearing in Didion’s peripheral vision. “It was a country of bankruptcy notices and public-auction announcements and commonplace reports of casual killings and misplaced children and abandoned homes and vandals who misplaced even the four-letter words they scrawled,” she wrote of the United States in 1967. As a reader, it felt almost as if the apocalypse had taken place on the West Coast. Didion attempted to convey the attitudes of the people she met in the Haight in her writing, moving from person to person on the pages without little direction. Didion does not answer any journalistic or political questions but instead follows people such as Deadeye as they embark on their daily, mundane tasks.
When reading “Slouching Towards Bethlehem,” I had still yet to really understand the Grateful Dead’s impact beyond whatever story “Almost Famous” attempted to tell about band groupies despite having visited San Francisco. Now when I think about “Slouching Towards Bethlehem,” I compare and contrast Didion’s descriptions of Haight-Ashbury to my own and how the area has changed. I remember walking with my Dad down Haight-Ashbury. He would point to various spots in the neighborhood, including writing on the sidewalk with each Grateful Dead members’ name and signature. He explained who each band member was. My dad grew up listening to the Dead and Springsteen, closer geographically to Springsteen’s New Jersey than the Dead’s San Francisco. He and I visited San Francisco during the summer before my senior year of high school — my last “real” summer, we called it. But I had been away, and we hadn’t been talking. With hopes to spend more one on one time together we agreed to a weekend trip in the Bay. I grew up in Los Angeles, raised by parents with almost no familial connections to California. For them, California represented ease and warmth. I picked up on the Californian accent and rode my bike on the beach. When I arrived in the Bay Area, the fog and cool wind surprised me; I was a tourist in my own state. I had no close family to visit or friends to see. Although California culture resonated with me, my visit to San Francisco revealed my scarce ties to the state. My dad and I toured the city, hiking up streets like cliffs and swimming through fog like cement.
While Didion also wrote about racism and children on drugs in the essay –– describing one scene where a Black man was hit with nightsticks on the sidewalk, for example –– she primarily focused on the hippie movement and the impact they had on the community, romanticizing the scene to a degree. “Janis Joplin is singing with Big Brother in the Panhandle and almost everybody is high,” she wrote, “and it is a pretty nice Sunday afternoon between three and six o’clock, which the activists say are the three hours of the week when something is most likely to happen in the Haight-Ashbury…” Didion’s glimpses into the Haight, where she watched Joplin perform amongst “activists,” for example, encapsulates the San Francisco of the 1970s. Really, that’s why I resonated with her later piece “On Keeping a Notebook” so much –– words cannot completely represent a moment, but they’re the only tools we have. When I read “Slouching Towards Bethlehem” –– despite being lodged between two rocks on the side of a Colorado mountain –– I envisioned my summer in San Francisco, except with the occasional appearance of a hippie trekking behind me or Deadeye, too, in the background.
“On Keeping a Notebook”
When I first read “On Keeping a Notebook” I was, in fact, keeping a notebook. I would journal about the people surrounding me on the camping trip, or I would pretend to write letters home, or I would describe the wilderness I had seen that day. Didion’s essay, it turns out, isn’t only about writing but also about re-reading your entries later. “The impulse to write things down is a peculiarly compulsive one,” Didion wrote, “inexplicable to those who do not share it, useful only accidentally, only secondarily, in the way that any compulsion tries to justify itself.” While camping in the Rockies, after having journaled each night, I would look back at my entries from the last few weeks. In my notebook, one person recurred in many entries. We were forced to spend a lot of time together despite our disagreements. I would angrily write about the way she had made me feel, only to take it back a day later. I nearly laughed while re-reading my own words, noting the peculiarity of this habit. The moments I put on the page became slightly less real with distance, but how I reinterpreted my own words after re-reading made the process of journaling important: I was able to have a conversation with myself.
The last time I journaled was when my grandmother passed away, this past August, in Canada. After a day of preparing to travel to Montreal, packing my bags and getting ready for three days of sitting shiva, I laid in bed with a new notebook in hand. My first one — the Colorado one — was filled to the brim with words, pencil markings eroding the cover. Now I would start this new notebook, a green hardcover journal with my initials, “ZH,” written plainly in silver on the front cover. I was quick to note the date and time: August 7th, 2021, 11:30pm PST. Over the next nine pages I would write line by line the events of the preceding 24 hours. My final phone call with her. I wrote about how she looked comfortable in bed despite adamantly telling me that she wasn’t. I wrote about the journey that was ahead and reconciled it with how I would handle the coming days.
I’ve re-read “On Keeping a Notebook” many times. It’s the one essay that seems to connect much of Didion’s work, from her observations of studio visits in “John Wayne: A Love Story,” to her time with the Doors in an earlier essay, “The White Album.” In each case, her abundant curiosity guided the work, while her diligent notetaking colored the pages with the most minute of details. Now that I don’t journal every day, I’ve really only journaled for moments that I see as having significance to my life, such as my grandmother’s passing. My accounts of each important event are likely riddled with inaccuracies, like Didion said they would be. She wrote: “‘That’s simply not true,’ the members of my family frequently tell me when they come up against my memory of a shared event.” Later in “On Keeping a Notebook,” she continues that line of thought, “perhaps it never did snow that August in Vermont … but that was how it felt to me, and it might as well have snowed, could have snowed, did snow,” Didion wrote.
When I wrote about my grandmother’s house last semester in my English class, I used my journal entries and a collection of iPhone photographs I took of her home to recreate the space and time in my mind. According to Didion, these are objects “useful only accidentally.” When I sat down to write the piece, I had what felt like notes between a journalist and their subject, tapping directly into a specific moment I never pretended as though I could perfectly describe the scene: given the new context in which I looked at my own writing, I tried to synthesize how I was feeling. Maybe I exaggerated the decoration of the house when I wrote; I had no way of knowing. “[T]hat was how it felt to me,” Didion wrote.
“Los Angeles Notebook” & “On Going Home”
I grew up in Didion’s “Golden Land.” I was raised in Los Angeles, in an area that became a frequent fire-hazard. One year, on the first day of a new wave of fires, I rode my bike to school and wondered about the air’s smoky smell. The winds picked the fire up, pushing it further and further into the city. Didion wrote about those winds in her essay “Los Angeles Notebook.” The Santa Ana winds are a spectacle for my East Coast family. “To live with the Santa Ana is to accept, consciously or unconsciously, a deeply mechanistic view of human behavior,” she wrote. I was tying down furniture a few weeks ago when I was back at home, out of fear that the Santa Anas would blow it away. The wind tried, but we didn’t let it.
When I read Didion’s “On Going Home,” I thought about my own return home to Los Angeles. She wrote about the experience of celebrating her daughter’s birthday with family in California’s Central Valley, functioning as both an adult with her newborn and as a child to those around her in the house. Like all other Yalies, my winter break was longer than expected. I lived with my mom and dad in Los Angeles –– functioning too at times like a young adult and a child depending on the instance. In my room, there’s a printed-out picture that says “Vote for Lady Bird,” a reference to the 2017 film and a pinned photograph of John Lennon. There’s a pile of New Yorker magazines on the side of the desk that I have yet to read. I have a silver box on my wooden desk that used to hold my great-grandpa’s cigarillos and still smells like them fifty years later. Whereas Didion felt like both a parent and a child when she went home, I felt both like a child and an adult; I connected with the items around me, but farther away than before.
Unlike Didion in “On Going Home,” I am still young enough that those objects in my room still –– at times –– represent who I am and largely what my interests are: the Bob Dylan records or books by Susan Orlean and Gabriel Garcia Marquez I keep. “The question of whether or not you could go home again was a very real part of the sentimental and largely literary baggage with which we left home in the fifties; I suspect that it is irrelevant to the children born of the fragmentation after World War II,” Didion wrote. I have never considered what it would mean to not be able to go home. Children nowadays in America are not plagued by war, except from within our television screens. Besides highlighting questions of home, Didion’s “going home” meant visiting a house in Central California that was packed with anxiety. She explored what it meant to go home, especially when the meaning of “home” changes, a feeling I have come to understand as a college student.
The closest thing I have to home while in Connecticut is my grandparents’ apartment in New York City. The week before December finals, I left with a friend to go to New York City. I found myself on the 6 Train at around 3 p.m., alone, headed to my grandparents’. The train car was packed, so I tightened the tip of my face mask. After a few stops on the 6, I took a seat and swiped aimlessly through apps on my phone, exiting and then reopening them over and over.
After a while, I arrived at my stop. It was a familiar sight: the bagel place next to the subway station, the grocery next door and a Starbucks in front of the local hospital. Despite not actually living in New York, I felt comfortable. In the Didion piece, although she writes about “going home” in Central California, home for Didion is synonymous with being with her daughter. “She is an open and trusting child, unprepared for and unaccustomed to the ambushes of family life, and perhaps it is just as well that I can offer her little of that life,” she writes. Just as Didion associates home as “the place where my family is,” or where her daughter is, more specifically, my sense of home is just as strong whether arriving in my Los Angeles kitchen or getting off of the 6 in New York to see my grandparents. My proximity to family, like Didion’s proximity to her daughter, is what makes a space feel familiar. “On Going Home” is mostly about the anxieties of visiting extended family, not about finding comfort. Although that is the case, I still feel as though the larger idea of the essay is what “home” means to each of us.
I was headed towards my grandparents’ building, one block away from the station. After a few minutes of walking I found myself in the elevator, staring in its mirror. The elevator clicked open, and I entered their home. I was welcomed by them almost immediately when I walked in. My grandmother’s art was everywhere, and my feet made the wood floors squeak. Although I was a six hour flight from Los Angeles, this was the closest I’d felt to home in a while. We caught up for about an hour before I had to slip out. I looked out the window, taking note of the school across the street. My grandmother offered to pull out hummus and vegetables, but I insisted that she stay seated. By the time I left, it became clear that I had, after all, visited some version of home.
“Goodbye to All That”
I’ve been told that everyone moves to New York City after college. In her acclaimed piece “Goodbye to All That,” Didion wrote about New York. “I am not sure that it is possible for anyone brought up in the East to appreciate entirely what New York, the idea of New York, means to those of us who came out of the West and the South,” she wrote. When I was visiting New York over the summer, my friend and I were walking around when we began to wonder if a place’s charm and excitement wears off when it becomes home: when the Californian Pacific becomes a daily sight or when riding the New York subway isn’t an exhilarating experience but instead a part of the hour-long daily commute to work. Didion wrote, “In retrospect it seems to me that those days before I knew the names of all the bridges were happier than the ones that came later, but perhaps you will see that as we go along.” But, she said, “I was in love with the city, the way you love the first person who ever touches you and you never love anyone quite that way again.” My friend and I were walking uptown to see this one-woman show starring Ann Dowd at the Park Avenue Armory. It felt like ninety degrees Fahrenheit despite the New York gloom. Men sold hot dogs on the sides of the street. New York was, at that moment, unlike Haight-Ashbury and Los Angeles’ Ocean Boulevard, where a cool wind comes through in the late afternoons. There was a humidity that I was not used to and a hustle which California has never subscribed to.
In “Goodbye to All That,” there is a sudden shift — when New York ceases to be a dreamscape. “I would see women walking Yorkshire terriers,” she wrote of New York’s Madison Avenue, “and shopping at Gristede’s, and some Veblenesque gorge would rise in my throat.” It’s possible that Madison Avenue eventually came to bother Didion for the same reason that so many have a distaste for LA or Beverly Hills. It seems to me that eventually, the fronts those around her were putting on began to fade, just as she realized that she couldn’t maintain the fast-paced New York City lifestyle she’d been attempting to uphold.
After all of the city’s parties had been exhausted and she waited aimlessly for her husband to call her, they left New York for Los Angeles. “Goodbye to All That” really tells the story of what happens when the noise of a specific place starts to become less and less of a distraction. Many members of the Yale community take the short train ride into the city, even if only for a day. Just as it was for me during December finals, New York can be a brief escape from our heavy workloads or college lives. “Goodbye to All That,” though, makes me wonder what will happen to the idea I have of New York when the excitement finally dies down. It’s possible that the overwhelming reality of adult life will lead me to write. If there is anything reading Didion has taught me, it’s that sometimes the only way to collect myself when I feel overwhelmed by the loudness of the world is to jot down my thoughts.
Goodbye to the Rest
I finished “Slouching Towards Bethlehem” on my same Colorado trip. I was in the forest, hidden below a tree. It was Yom Kippur. Although I do not generally fast, I try to observe it in my own way. I went to the woods and finished “Slouching Towards Bethlehem.” No one bothered me. I just read in silence, until I read the final words of “Goodbye to All That.” I put the book away, and carried on.
Her essays pushed me into a state of self-reflection like those that the High Holy Days command. Yom Kippur itself is — as I’ve been taught — a day for atoning one’s sins, reflecting on the previous year and looking towards the future. So I read “On Self-Respect,” and “On Going Home” and “Goodbye to All That,” and I absorbed Didion’s critiques and observations on the human spirit as I scanned the pages. Reflection is what Didion allows us to do best. In “On Keeping a Notebook,” she writes “My stake is always, of course, in the unmentioned girl in the plaid silk dress. Remember what it was to be me: that is always the point.” Didion transported us to the most important moments of the late 20th century by telling the reader in the most coherent of ways exactly what she was thinking and feeling in each moment. “Our favorite people and our favorite stories become so not by any inherent virtue,” Didion wrote, “but because they illustrate something deep in the grain, something unadmitted.” I started “The White Album” the week after Didion’s death. She died in December of 2021, almost immediately following my return home for Winter Break. I read about Malibu and the Getty Museum, the meaning of Hollywood and the American Mall. How had I moved through those spaces in similar ways? I inserted myself into the essays.“Remember what it was to be me,” I heard Didion say again and again. “That is always the point.”