As a teenager, growing up in Seattle, I wanted nothing more than to go to college in California. My mother supported everything, almost anything I wanted to go after – except for that.
Reading Didion, I’m reminded precisely why. My mother’s San Fran, full of luncheons at the St. Francis Yacht Club and high tea at the St. Francis Hotel, that was over. She knew I romanticised the place and she knew the place had changed. She knew it back then, in the late 60’s, in fact she moved the family away in’65.
And Didion captures California like no other writer and everyone agrees on that fact. She captures that period of missing children, of lost children in ’67 in Slouching….
Re-visiting Didion is a wonder and her writing is austere. But it resonates, and so do her quotes, especially in this gloomy, dark period ~ so I’ll end with a gloomy, dark quote:
“There is no real way to deal with everything we lose”