Gustavo Arellano: Joan Didion, California and the enduring power of ‘our special history’
The assignment I give my Orange Coast College literary journalism students every semester after our first class is always the same: Read six classics of narrative nonfiction, and write one-page summaries on each.
I send them the expected (Tom Wolfe on Southern California kustom kulture in the 1960s, Gay Talese on an aging Joe DiMaggio) and the not — if you haven’t yet read Alice Walker searching for the grave of then-forgotten Black novelist Zora Neale Hurston for Ms. magazine, then you don’t know what great writing is.
And I assign my class the grand dame of California letters, Joan Didion.
She’s everything they’re not: Privileged. Pedigreed. Possessor of polished
