Soundings: Evelyn McDonnell on Joan Didion, Beyond Saint Joan
- Aug 11
- 3 min read
Just up the coast from San Pedro, on a bluff at Portuguese Bend, there's a squat, tower-topped stone gatehouse that was built in 1926 as the entrance to a grand oceanfront villa that never got built — the stock market saw to that. Joan Didion and her husband, John Gregory Dunne, rented it in 1964, when they were newly married and still finding their footing in California. They would soon bring their adopted infant daughter, Quintana, home to it.
Writer and journalist Evelyn McDonnell used to drive past that gatehouse all the time, before she knew whose it had been. She thought: what a house. Only later did she learn she'd been driving past a piece of Didion's whole California mythology — the ambition, the ruin, the unbuilt villa sitting quietly behind it — without knowing it was there at all. McDonnell lives in San Pedro now, close enough to that stretch of bluff to get there on a whim.
That's the instinct that runs underneath The World According to Joan Didion: the sense that you can be standing right next to something enormous and not know it yet.
McDonnell teaches journalism at Loyola Marymount, where she spends her time handing a torch to students who are, increasingly, discovering their own literary hero through memes on social media. McDonnell had read Didion in college, in one of the only journalism courses her university offered, in an anthology of New Journalism where Didion was one of exactly two women. That was forty years ago. By the time McDonnell sat down to write this book, Didion had become something stranger than an influence: an icon, a face on a tote bag, a woman known first for her sunglasses and her Corvette and only second, if at all, for the actual sentences she wrote. McDonnell, by her own admission, found this a little disturbing. She wasn't the glamour-and-sunglasses type. She wanted the writer back.
So she went and got the writer back the only way she knew how: physically. She drove the levee roads of the Sacramento Delta that Didion wrote about in her first novel. She sat in the Berkeley archive and looked at the crossed-out pages, chapters retyped and retyped on a typewriter, because that is what you did before there was such a thing as CMD-Z for ‘undo.’ She found Didion's cousins in Sacramento and heard, still faintly present in their voices, the accent Didion herself once had and mostly lost. She went to the graveyard where Didion's pioneer ancestors are buried — the ones who crossed the Sierra Nevada with the wagon trains, who parted ways with the Donner Party days before disaster struck — and started to understand something Didion herself spent a whole book, Where I Was From, coming around to: that the golden myth of California settlement was also, at its heart, more complicated, more troubling, than many wished to believe.
What McDonnell found, over and over, was a writer who refused the easy version of things. When Didion went to Hawaii, she skipped the tiki bar for the military cemetery. When she covered the Central Park Jogger case, she published a dissent nobody wanted to hear, years before the truth caught up with her. She was, in McDonnell's memorable phrase, extremely goth: drawn to cemeteries, obsessed with the Donner Party, dark Celine glasses as armor. And still, somehow, capable of writing an essay about an orchid grower in Malibu that reads like a love letter.
McDonnell doesn't pretend to have solved Joan Didion. Nobody could. But she came away from the project with something more useful than an answer: a sense of the discipline underneath the mystique, a woman who, whatever else was happening in her life, still got up and went to the desk and did the job.
She talked about all of it recently with Soundings host Aaron McKenzie, who also lives in San Pedro, close enough to Portuguese Bend that neither of them had to imagine the gatehouse; they could just drive down and look. You can hear the whole conversation on the latest episode of Soundings.
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The World According to Joan Didion is available wherever books are sold. The Soundings conversation with Evelyn McDonnell is available now on all major podcast platforms.
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