Part 1: Chapter 11 Summary

Didion was a student at Berkeley in the 1950s and is back teaching there in 1975 when she reads about Paul Christian shooting his daughter, Janet, and Congressman Wendell Omura. Janet survives; Omura does not. One headline reads: Victor Family Touched by Island Tragedy.

Part 1: Chapter 11 Analysis

In this chapter, we encounter the effects of the strange point-of-view technique that Didion uses in this story. It seems real that the narrator did, in fact, read about the shooting in Honolulu, but in reality, the shooting never happened. It takes some effort to distinguish fact from fiction, and this is precisely what Didion intended. The part about Didion's being a student at Berkeley in the 1950s and going back and teaching in 1975 is true; the part about the Christian family is fiction.