So much will be written about Joan Didion in the coming days, but I think @michi_kakutani really said it best back in 1979. “In her new book, "The White Album," Joan Didion writes: "Kilimanjaro belongs to Ernest Hemingway. Oxford, Mississippi, belongs to William Faulkner... a great deal of Honolulu has always belonged for me to James Jones... A place belongs forever to whoever claims it hardest, remembers it most obsessively, wrenches it from itself, shapes it, renders it, loves it so radically that he remakes it in his image." California belongs to Joan Didion. Not the California where everyone wears aviator sunglasses, owns a Jacuzzi and buys his clothes on Rodeo Drive. But California in the sense of the West. The old West where Manifest Destiny was an almost palpable notion that was somehow tied to the land and the climate and one's own family-an unspoken belief that was passed down to children in stories and sayings. Joan Didion's California is a place defined not so much by what her unwavering eye observes, but by what her memory cannot let go. Although her essays and novels are set amid the effluvia of a new golden state peopled by bored socialites, lost flower children and unsentimental engineers, all is measured against the memory of the old California. And in telling what has happened to California in the past few decades, Didion finds a metaphor for some larger, insidious process at work in American society.”