Joan Didion was the writer who made modern California matter to American literature. But over the last twenty years she became something else, too: an icon. The sunglasses. The Corvette. The memes.
What if that iconography is exactly what’s getting in the way of understanding how good she actually was? That’s the question at the heart of the latest episode of Soundings, our podcast hosted by San Pedro Today writer/photographer Aaron McKenzie.
His guest is Evelyn McDonnell, a San Pedro-based journalism professor at Loyola Marymount University and the author of The World According to Joan Didion. Her book retraces Didion’s footsteps—from Sacramento to New York to a gatehouse on Portuguese Bend, just up the coast from San Pedro.
Recording from that same stretch of Southern California coastline, the two discuss Didion’s method as a reporter—disappearing into the background, listening instead of interrogating—her complicated reckoning with the California pioneer mythology she was born into, and what it means to strip away “the Cult of St. Joan” to find the disciplined, unsentimental worker underneath.
The World According to Joan Didion is available wherever books are sold.
The episode is available below, on YouTube here, and wherever you get your podcasts.
You can also watch/listen to the previous episode of Soundings with Rose George on the global fishing crisis. spt
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