we tell ourselves stories in order to live joan didion

The importance of reputation and history reified through the manner by which the wickedness of the murder and adultery at the core of the essay was expressed not by the people, but the landscape. The bare prose used to describe Lucille Miller, the accused, was effortlessly juxtaposed against the dreamlike splendour of California, gradually disintegrating into the hellish landscape of the San Bernardino Valley. The opening essay, ‘Some Dreamers of the Golden Dream’, whilst on first glance an opine on the murder of a husband by his wife, on closer inspection, bled a revelation of the toxicity of the American dream and the perverting power of place.

I opened a copy of Slouching Towards Bethlehem, a choice driven not by any knowledge of its author, but rather by the title’s reference to the poetry of William Butler Yeats – a welcome comfort to the daughter of an English major from Ireland. It wasn’t until I was eighteen and just out of high school that I was first introduced to the works of Joan Didion. They could destroy New York, they could decimate Illinois, but they couldn’t break California. From the psychological unravelling of Esther Greenwood in The Bell Jar, to the persistent pessimism of Holden Caulfield in The Catcher in the Rye, the America that I loved was being ripped apart, but at a sufficient distance so as to preserve my own childhood affections. In the library of books that has grown with me since I left California sixteen years ago, countless volumes have attempted to crumble the glimmering American Dream that my childhood memory refused to let go of.

A slowly dissipating mirage that we hopelessly cling to, where stories have more currency than truth – California belongs to storytellers. The ‘American Dream’ echoes through gaps in white picket fences, and muddles itself in the Green Card lottery. Everything was beautiful, golden and shimmering.Ĭalifornia was, and continues to be, a land wrapped in the mystique of myth, masked by a façade of stasis that gives the illusion of an eternally glamourous home of plenty. A place, seen through the eyes of a child, only half remembered. A ghostly version of California still reverberates through my bones, wraps my memories in a rose-tinted euphoria, and disguises itself as a lingering lilt masked by my now noticeably Australian accent. The Terminator was Governor, Netflix was a small business that delivered DVDs, and strikingly unaware of the woes of the world, my greatest anxiety was of being eaten alive by the mountain lions that supposedly emerged in the dark of night. My preschool years were spent in California, living atop a mountain covered by lush greenery and speckled with wild deer.

We tell ourselves stories in order to live joan didion