Talking Joan Didion With Rabbi Sol Solomon

Tune in tomorrow, Saturday Jan. 27, to hear me in conversation with the good Rabbi Sol Solomon on the Dave’s Gone By podcast. I bet you will laugh!

Remembering Joan Didion at the Algonquin

Notes from a book tour

Researching The World According to Joan Didion, I traced the writer’s movements, from her birth and childhood in Sacramento, to her education at Cal, to her publishing apprenticeship in Manhattan, to her emergence as a celebrated writer and dedicated family woman in LA, back to the Upper East Side. I started to retrace the tracing last week in a short book tour.

With Robert Weidner

At the reading at the picturesque Mrs. Dalloway’s in Berkeley, history repeated: Joan’s old beau, Robert Weidner, was back in town, telling stories of their romance from the front row. At the Center for Sacramento History, where I had found the Didions’ old addresses in phonebooks and disturbing racism in her grandparents’ papers, the audience was sharp and inquisitive, teaching me a thing or two. Back home, the Book Jewel welcomed me with its excellent book AND plushie collection, plus the store cat. The well-informed audience included neighbors, colleagues, students, and political legend Jane Harman. But my faves were the three South Bay women who were taking an online Didion course together – and meeting each other in person for the first time. Writers need readers.

Like a true Californian, I drove, which was a delight as I rode the river roads in the Sacramento Delta and ate some of the best wonton soup I’ve ever had, but exhausting on the endless freeway there and back. Joan wrote about this route too, in “Notes from a Native Daughter”: “All day long, all that moves is the sun, and the big Rainbird sprinklers.”

With research assistant Tyler Roland

With LA Times reporter Seema Mehta

Dear friends the Palmers

Paiges the Book Jewel cat

In Isleton

Jane Harman signed my poster

With sculptor Lisa Reinertson

Isleton

Why Joan Didion Wrote

“I’m only myself in front of a typewriter,” Joan Didion once said.

It’s publication day! One of the reasons I loved writing THE WORLD ACCORDING TO JOAN DIDION is because Didion was so transparent about the process of writing, sharing advice and agonies in articles and interviews. Lit Hub excerpts my chapter “Typewriter” today. I hope you like it enough to want to read the book.

“To Be A Writer, You Must Write”: How Joan Didion Became Joan Didion

Joan Didion, snakes, and Time

You can get a taste of THE WORLD ACCORDING TO JOAN DIDION at the Time magazine website today. They excerpt my chapter “Snakes.” Pub date: 9/26. Reading at Vroman’s 9/28.

https://time.com/6316512/joan-didion-snakes-essay/

Berkeley Book Event

I’ll be visiting Joan Didion’s collegiate stomping grounds of Berkeley Oct. 18 for a Litquake event at the wonderfully named Mrs. Dalloway’s. Artist Lisa Reinertson will join me, and I hope you will too!

London Calling: Writers Salon Sept. 5

I will be doing my first event related to The World According to Joan Didion, and it’s virtual so all can attend. I’ll discuss “The Art of Cultural Commentary, Biographies and Journalism” with the London Writers Salon Tuesday, September 5, from 2 to 3:30 p.m. Eastern time. Use the code LWSFRIEND50 for 50 percent off. I will send a code for free admission to the first five readers to post their favorite Didion quote in the comments. Here’s one of mine, which I found in her notes at the Bancroft Library in Berkeley: “Whenever I feel troubled, I think about the sea.” Register at https://lu.ma/mcdonnell.