The Last Love Song (102 page)

“bound to be friction”: Doug Munro, “Confessions of a Serial Biographer: An Interview with Carl Rollyson,”
History Now
9, no. 1 (February 2003): 2.

“perceived,” “accurately reported,” and “get it right”: Didion,
The Year of Magical Thinking,
156.

“a drudge” and subsequent quotes from Mark Schorer: Mark Schorer,
The World We Imagine
(New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1968), 221, 224–26, 230, 231, 232–33.

“women we invent”: Joan Didion, “Introduction” in Elizabeth Hardwick,
Seduction and Betrayal: Women and Literature
(New York: New York Review of Books, 2001), xiv.

“masterpieces”: Joseph Frank
, Dostoevsky: The Miraculous Years, 1865–1871
(Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1995), xi.

CHAPTER 1

learned of the Donner Party: Didion probably also knew George R. Stewart's classic account,
Ordeal by Hunger: The Story of the Donner Party,
published in 1936, two years after Didion's birth.

“hardened”: George H. Hinkle and Bliss McGlashan Hinkle, “Editors' Foreword,” in C. F. McGlashan,
History of the Donner Party: A Tragedy of the Sierra
(Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1940), vii.

“I am haunted by the cannibalism of the Donner Party”: Alfred Kazin, “Joan Didion: Portrait of a Professional,”
Harper's
magazine, December 1971, 112.

“Its language”: Hinkle and Hinkle, “Editors' Foreword,”
History of the Donner Party,
viii–ix.

“too important a part of western American history” and “I have made every effort”: Julia Cooley Altrocchi,
Snow Covered Wagons: A Pioneer Epic: The Donner Party Expedition 1846
–
1847
(New York: Macmillan, 1936), ix–x.

“Foster has eaten”: ibid., 152.

“a problematic elision or inflation,” ‘Just ready to go,' and “[T]he actual observer”: Joan Didion,
Where I Was From
(New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2003), 30.

“
writers are always selling somebody out
”: Joan Didion,
Slouching Towards Bethlehem
(New York: Modern Library, 2000), xxviii.

“their supply of food becoming exhausted” and “Indians would visit”: Diana Smith, “Dr. William Geiger, Jr.,” Oregon Biographies Project, coordinated by Jenny Tenlen; available at
www.freepages.genealogy/rootsweb.ancestry.com/~jtenlen/ORBios/wgeiger2.txt
.

“with the sensible suggestion”: Didion,
Slouching Towards Bethlehem,
118–19.

“a certain predilection for the extreme”: ibid., 119.

“lonely and resistant rearrangers” and “she is a singularly blessed and accepting child”: ibid., 118.

“What difference does it make” and “they just get slept in again”: Didion,
Where I Was From,
207.

“passionately opinionated”: ibid., 205.

“The authentic Western voice” and subsequent quotes from Didion's review: Joan Didion, “I Want to Go Ahead and Do It,”
New York Times,
October 7, 1979; available at
www.nytimes.com/books/97/05/04/reviews/mailer-song.html
.

“I have already lost touch”: Didion,
Slouching Towards Bethlehem,
124.

“code of the West”: Didion,
Where I Was From,
96.

“selling of what I had preferred to think of as heritage”: Joan Didion in conversation with David Ulin in the Los Angeles Public Library's ALOUD series, November 24, 2011.

“in a minute”: Didion,
Where I Was From,
15.

“adult” books: “Telling Stories in Order to Live,” Academy of Achievement interview with Joan Didion, June 3, 2006; available at
www.achievement.org/autodoc/page/did0int-1
.

“wasn't allowed to listen to the radio”: Didion quoted in Karen R. Long, “The Uncompromising Joan Didion Speaks Up in Cleveland,”
Cleveland Plain Dealer,
May 13, 2009; available at
www.cleveland.com/books/index.ssf/2009/05/writer_joan_didion_whose_spare.html
.

“I think biographies are very urgent to children”: “Telling Stories in Order to Live.”

“In the late summer of
what
year”: Joan Didion, “Last Words,”
The New Yorker,
November 9, 1998, 74.

“I was always embarrassed”: Ernest Hemingway,
A Farewell to Arms
(New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1957), 177–78.

“magnetic”: Hilton Als, “Joan Didion, The Art of Nonfiction No. 1,”
The Paris Review
48, no. 176 (Spring 2006); available at
www.theparisreview.org/interviews/5601/the-art-of-nonfiction-no-1-joan-didion
.

“I have not wrote you half the trouble we've had”: Quoted in Didion,
Where I Was From,
75.

CHAPTER 2

“stock of every kind could be seen”: Joseph A. McGowan,
The Sacramento Valley: A Students' Guide to Localized History
(New York: Teacher's College Press, Columbia University, 1967), 24.

viewed Sacramento as a “cold” place: Christian L. Larsen,
Growth and Government in Sacramento
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1965), 161.

“when the miners paid for everything in dust”: Mark A. Eifler,
Gold Rush Capitalists
:
Greed and Growth in Sacramento
(Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2001), 240.

“The area was a streetcar suburb”: William Burg to the author, December 9, 2011.

“My father, when I was first born”: Connie Brod,
In Depth
interview with Joan Didion, Book TV, C-SPAN 2, 1992.

“fuzzy” about finances: Didion quoted in Susanna Rustin, “Legends of the Fall,”
The Guardian,
May 20, 2005; available at
www.theguardian.com/books/2005/may/21/usnationalbookawards.society
.

“full of dread”: Joan Didion,
Where I Was From
(New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2003), 213.

“nervous” and “different”: ibid., 12.

“Childhood is the kingdom where nobody dies”: Edna St. Vincent Millay quoted in Joan Didion,
After Henry
(New York: Simon & Schuster, 1992), 17.

“Class … is something that we, as Americans”: Didion quoted in Kel Munger, “Where She Was From,”
Sacramento News and Review,
October 16, 2003; available at
www.newsreview.com/sacramento/where-she-was-from/content?oid=1640
.

“They were part of Sacramento's landed gentry”: William Burg to the author, March 25, 2013.

“whose favorite game as a child”: Joan Didion,
Run River
(New York: Ivan Obolensky, 1963), 100.

“successful impersonation of a non-depressed person”: Didion quoted in Rustin, “Legends of the Fall.”

“I wanted to be an actress”: Linda Kuehl, “Joan Didion, The Art of Fiction No. 71,”
The Paris Review
20, no. 74 (Fall-Winter 1978); available at
www.theparisreview.org/interviews/3439/the-art-of-fiction-no-71-joan-didion
.

her father's dad, “didn't talk”: Didion quoted in Rustin, “Legends of the Fall.”

“If you were born in Sacramento”: William Burg to the author, December 9, 2011.

“There used to be a comic strip”: Didion quoted in Leslie Garis, “Didion and Dunne: The Rewards of a Literary Marriage,”
New York Times Magazine,
February 8, 1987; available at
www.nytimes.com/1987/02/08/magazine/didion-dunne-the-rewards-of-a-literary-marriage.html
.

“muted greens and ivories”: Didion,
Where I Was From,
65.

“my mother says”: Didion quoted in Rustin, “Legends of the Fall.”

“eyes that reddened”: Didion,
Where I Was From,
13.

“clean plate club” and “She's not a human garbage can”: Joan Didion,
Blue Nights
(New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2011), 113.

act of rebellion: ibid.

She admitted Eduene found her willful and difficult: interview with Didion on “Morning Joe,” MSNBC, November 25, 2011; available at
www.msnbc.com/morning-joe/45436046#4543
.

“My mother ‘gave teas'”: Joan Didion, “In Sable and Dark Glasses,”
Vogue Daily,
October 31, 2011; available at
www.vogue.com/magazine/print/in-sable-and-dark-glasses-joan-didion/
.

“going page by page through an issue of
Vogue
”: ibid.

“perfect white sauce”: ibid.

“line your garden walk” and “that will happen only when the angels sing”: Didion,
Where I Was From,
198.

One of her troop mates told me: Joan Haug-West to the author, January 16, 2012.

“lucky number”: Didion, “In Sable and Dark Glasses.”

“I kept playing around with writing”: Don Swaim's audio interview with Joan Didion, October 29, 1987; available at
www.wiredforbooks.org/joandidion
.

“Let that be the greatest of your worries”: Didion, “In Sable and Dark Glasses.”

LONELY OCEAN STILL HOLDS SECRET OF AMELIA'S FATE
:
San Francisco Chronicle,
July 11, 1937; available at
www.sfmuseum.org/hist6/amelia.html
.

“hated” and subsequent Steinbeck quotes: John Steinbeck,
Their Blood Is Strong
(San Francisco: Simon J. Lublin Society of California, 1938), 1, 6–7, 30. This material was originally published by Steinbeck as “The Harvest Gypsies” in a series of articles in
San Francisco News,
October 5–12, 1936.

CHAPTER 3

Military records:
Official National Guard Register for 1939
(Washington, D.C.: United States Government Printing Office, 1940), 218.

“I tended to perceive the world”: Linda Kuehl, “Joan Didion, The Art of Fiction, No. 71.
” The Paris Review
20, no. 74 (Fall-Winter 1978); available at
www.theparisreview.org/interviews/3439/the-art-of-fiction-no-71-joan-didion
.

“Meanwhile, we were living in a hotel”: “Telling Stories in Order to Live,” Academy of Achievement interview with Joan Didion, June 3, 2006; available at
www.achievement.org/autodoc/page/did0int-1
.

“It's an adventure”: Joan Didion,
Where I Was From
(New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2003), 208.

“Poor children do it”: ibid.

“pilots kept spiraling down”: ibid., 209.

“I did not at the time think this an unreasonable alternative”: Joan Didion,
Blue Nights
(New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2011), 95.

did “not now seem … an inappropriate response”: Joan Didion,
The White Album
(New York: Simon & Schuster, 1979), 15.

“scouted the neighborhood, and made friends”: Didion,
Blue Nights,
95.

“military trash”: Didion,
Where I Was From,
209.

“false bravery”: Didion quoted in Susanna Rustin, “Legends of the Fall,”
The Guardian,
May 20, 2005; available at
www.theguardian.com/books/2005/may21/usnationalbookawards.society
.

“for some time now”: Didion,
The White Album,
134.

“As far as my sense of place”: “Telling Stories in Order to Live.”

“we were snowbound”: ibid.

“my dear mother”: Herman Daniel Jerrett,
California's
El Dorado Yesterday and Today
(Sacramento: Press of Jo Anderson, 1915), v.

“historical questions”: Herman Daniel Jerrett,
Hills of Gold
(Sacramento: Cal-Central Press, 1963), ix.

“innocent”: Didion,
Where I Was From,
10.

“enthusiasm and pride”: Jerrett,
California's El Dorado Yesterday and Today,
127.

“taken out of the middle” and all other discussion of migraines, except where otherwise noted: Suzanne Styron and Jacki Ochs, “The Migraine Project,” Eleventh Hour Films; available at
www.migraineproject.com/#section0
. See also Didion,
The White Album,
169.

“those sick headaches”: Joan Didion, “Thinking About Western Thinking,”
Esquire,
February 1976, 14.

“My sense was that we lived in the only possible place”: Adair Lara, “You Can't Keep the California Out of Joan Didion,”
San Francisco Chronicle,
January 6, 2004, D1.

“There was a certain way that possibilities”: Didion quoted in Kel Munger, “Where She Was From,”
Sacramento News and Review,
October 16, 2003; available at
www.newsreviews.com/sacramento/where-she-was-from/content?oid=1640
.

“I think Mother just couldn't face”: “Telling Stories in Order to Live.”

“When the school was first built”: Kel Munger to the author, December 6, 2011.

“idea that I was smarter”: “Telling Stories in Order to Live.”

“didn't get socialised,” Didion quoted in Rustin, “Legends of the Fall.”

“If you never learn how”: Joan Didion, “American Summer,”
Vogue,
May 1963, 117.

“It was mystifying to my mother”: “The Female Angst,” Anaïs Nin, Joan Didion, and Dory Previn, interview by Sally Davis, Pacifica Radio Archives Preservation and Access Project, KPFK, February 1, 1972; available at
www.pacificaradioarchives.org/recordings/bc0611
.

“We did not fight”: Joan Didion,
Slouching Towards Bethlehem
(New York: Modern Library, 2000), 149.

Frank brought Didion: Didion recounts this episode in “Making Up Stories,” her 1979 Hopwood Lecture at the University of Michigan. The lecture appears in Robert A. Martin, ed.,
The Writing Craft: Hopwood Lectures, 1965–1981
(Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1981), 235–48. Didion says she is not entirely certain she and her father ate cracked crab at lunch.