Clouds over the sunshine state

Throughout her successful writing career, which began in New York in the early 1960s, the American essayist, novelist and critic Joan Didion has demonstrated two qualities not often found together: emotional fragility and moral strength. As the cover photograph on this new book shows, she looks frail, exuding nerves and tension from behind huge, and trademark, dark glasses. She has written openly about her own vulnerabilities and, in her fiction, about shy, thin-skinned women hovering on the brink of psychological collapse; her most memorable novel, Play It As It Lays, has just such a heroine who stays sane by driving the freeways around Los Angeles for hours on end.

At the same time, though, she has demonstrated over and over again, especially in her long critical essays about American politics and society, that as a journalist she is fearless, humorous and tough, with a cold eye for pretension and a sharp ear for hypocrisy and cant. Along the way, she has acknowledged that looking small and nervous has had its advantages. She may come on like a bush baby in need of sanctuary but she operates, and writes, with the cunning, elegance and ruthlessness of a lynx.

In this new book she has seized the moment in a writer’s life when the urge, often prompted by a parent’s death, to write a memoir becomes irresistible and extended it into something grittier, more demanding and original. It was indeed partly her mother’s death in 2001 that led her to look back over her own early years, growing up in and around Sacramento, in northern California, and then to relate her experiences to a host of forebears, the people who for seven generations had prepared the ground where she grew up.