When her reportorial persona becomes excessively solipsistic or didactic, her work loses some of its power.
The daughter of Frank Reese and Eduene Jerrett Didion, Joan Didion was born in Sacramento on 5 December 1934. She comes from a family that has been rooted in northern California since 1848. Some of her best writing is about the pioneer legacies left to her native state, where the past becomes coeval with the present. Her great-great-great-grandmother came to California with the ill-fated Donner-Reed party but left the group before it became stranded and resorted to cannibalism. Didion insists on "wagon train morality," a code that values survival and responsibility over utopian ideals. For Didion, the Donner Pass always lies just ahead.
Raised in Sacramento, Didion, in the essay "On Going Home" in Slouching Towards Bethlehem, describes her family as "difficult, oblique, deliberately inarticulate," while sharing a love of nature, independence, and community. Through childhood "some nameless anxiety colored the emotional charges" between Didion and the place she came from. She believes her generation may be the last to "find in family life the source of all tension and drama."
Didion is most self-conscious in her personal journalism.
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