California Dreaming With Joan Didion
PARIS—A few years before I met her in an elevator in San Salvador, Joan Didion wrote a novel set in Central America. She’d been inspired by a fever-plagued trip to Colombia, which is actually a bit South of Central. And when the novel, A Book of Common Prayer, came out in 1977, a reporter for the New York Times noticed “props and cue cards” around Didion’s home office in Malibu: “postcards from Colombia, a newspaper photo of a janitor mopping up blood in a Caribbean hotel, books on tropical foliage and tropical medicine and a Viasa Airlines schedule with ‘Maracaibo-Paris’ circled in blue.” (Joan and her husband, the author John Gregory Dunne, loved Paris, especially the Bristol Hotel on the Faubourg Saint-Honoré, which had the distinction of an indoor pool and tanning terrace on the top floor.)
There was also a map of Central America on which Joan had written notes to remind her of the effects she was looking for in the novel. Among them was the word “iridescent.” “I wanted to do a deceptive surface that appeared to be one thing and turned color as you looked through it,” she told the Times.
But when Didion was in the home stretch of Common Prayer she left behind the house in Malibu overlooking the sea, and the map, and the cue cards, and retreated to her mother’s home in Sacramento, which is where she grew up. “It’s very easy for me to work there,” she told the interviewer. “I’m not required to lead a real life. I’m like a child in my parents’ house.” Her room was “sort of a carnation-pink, and the vines and trees have grown up over the windows,” she said. “It’s exactly like a cave. It’s a very safe place.”