Reading Joan Didion in an Age of Delusion
To read a collection of the literary icon’s nonfiction is to witness American mass psychology laid bare.
The very night that I finished Joan Didion’s The White Album—the penultimate night of 2021—I recall a wildfire encircling the home of my uncle, aunt, and cousins in Louisville, Colorado, precisely 1,631 miles from my bedroom in Manhattan. I had no sooner set down “Quiet Days in Malibu,” in which Didion describes a firestorm that consumes 197 of her neighbors’ houses (“Horses caught fire and were shot on the beach, birds exploded in the air”) than I read the frantic texts exchanged over a family group chat:
They evacuated / But house surrounded by fire
Oh no terrible / Just terrible / Do they have the dog? And everyone safe / Nightmare
Yes / Kids and dogs all there / They’ve given up trying to stop it
Okay what a nightmare / Can’t believe this world
How terrible. / Horrible. They must be very scared.
Awful awful awful
In that instant, I experienced what Didion herself famously called “magical thinking”: the belief that independent events are, in fact, causally related. Had my quiet reading of an essay in New York City somehow sparked a wildfire on the other side of the country? Of course, it had not; but for a moment, it almost seemed plausible. This is something Didion understood—how individuals and cultures delude themselves, drawing connections where none exist:
We tell ourselves stories in order to live. We look for the sermon in the suicide, for the social or moral lesson in the murder of five. We interpret what we see, select the most workable of the multiple choices. We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images, by the ‘ideas’ with which we have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience. (The White Album)
In the days that followed those texts, and in the years leading up to them, self-delusion or a rejection of reality felt ubiquitous. I recall my mother’s simmering anger that night toward a relative I will call Amy, who lived not in Louisville with my uncle’s family, but in nearby Denver. A seemingly rare, suburban grass fire in the dead of winter had nothing to do with climate change, Amy insisted. She, like millions of Americans, saw nothing out of the ordinary in the increasingly frequent natural disasters of our era. On some level, she probably chose not to, as a means of clinging to a way of life or a set of beliefs that was becoming increasingly hard to justify. Hers was a distinctly Western self-delusion—that of the stubborn pioneer, weathering the rugged conditions of a vast, dangerous frontier.
In her writing, Didion, a fifth-generation Californian and descendant of the Donner party, came to understand this pioneer mythos as another faulty narrative. In Where I Was From, she dissected “the crossing story as origin myth.” This is a vision known as Manifest Destiny, passed on to all American children at some point: intrepid explorers charting a new course, self-reliant and determined in the face of a wild continent. Didion remembered these images as foundational to her western upbringing but inspected them ruthlessly in Where I Was From. “This book represents an exploration into my own confusions about the place and the way in which I grew up,” she said, “misapprehensions and misunderstandings so much a part of who I became that I can still to this day confront them only obliquely.”
Subverting the self-reliant ethos of the frontier imagination, Didion unmasked government and business as the true historical actors of westward expansion. She concluded that ranches, railroads, dams, and the region’s lucrative industries were paid for by taxpayer dollars; “subsidized monopolization,” not individualist American grit, built the American West. “This extreme reliance of California on federal money, so seemingly at odds with the emphasis on unfettered individualism that constitutes the local core belief, was a pattern set early on, and derived in part from the very individualism it would seem to belie,” she wrote. Never mind the tens of thousands of Native Americans forced off their land by white settlers. The hypocritical mentality of the west, then, is “careless self-interest and optimism.” Confronting the climate crisis, unfortunately, requires just the opposite: clear-eyed realism, community, and a willingness to make sacrifices for others.
Too often, American delusions forged on the frontier paralyze policy. 22 years before the fire, in 1999, Amy worked as a pediatric nurse in Colorado, caring for several children shot in the Columbine High School massacre. She remains, as far as I know, a staunch opponent of gun safety laws. “I don’t understand that logic,” I say to my mother across the kitchen table in 2021. “We tell ourselves stories in order to live,” answers Joan Didion. If hyper-individualism and a paranoid, hypocritical distrust of government are central to the mythos of the American West, it is hardly a surprise that someone like Amy would fear even the most basic measures to regulate firearms. Beginning in the 19th century, “Wild West” narratives and figures—Buffalo Bill, Annie Oakley, and The Great Train Robbery—popularized the gun-toting cowboy archetype. Through the 1920s, Wild West vaudeville shows performed to captivated white audiences, promoting racist stereotypes about Indigenous tribes and glamorizing shootouts. Guns were central to the plot—out on the frontier, extrajudicial, vigilante justice appeared straightforward and satisfying. There were clear heroes and villains, and little appetite for the inefficiencies of government intervention. It was a powerful fiction, identified by political scientist Robert Spitzer as a major contributor to America’s cultural mythology of gun ownership. Today, despite making up around 4 percent of the global population, U.S. citizens own close to 46% of all firearms globally. The Wild West plot lives on in the politics of Colorado congressmember Lauren Boebert, the owner of an old-timey open-carry restaurant, and in the morally juvenile language of the NRA who the laud the “good guy with a gun.” America loves a cowboy.
But let me return to the fire, itself a product of ideology. It allegedly began on property owned by the Twelve Tribes, a fundamentalist Christian sect (i.e. cult) who worship a God named Yahshua. The group, founded by Gene Spriggs or “Yoneq the anointed one,” took root in Tennessee in the early 1970s, and has since faced accusations of child abuse, misogyny, antisemitism, and racism. Their doctrine blames Jews for the death of Jesus, advocates the execution of gays, and calls the enslavement of Black people “a marvelous opportunity.” The facts remain unclear, but investigators soon traced the blaze—which destroyed over 900 homes—back to a burning shed on Twelve Tribes land. A dystopically perfect detail, I thought. Cults, shootings, and climate catastrophe became the same national problem in my mind; that night in December stood in as an allegory for the delusions that defined American politics and culture in 2021 and our present day, wavering between outright psychosis, foolish optimism, and unhelpful cynicism. Some ignored the looming crises of environmental collapse, fascist ascendancy, and democratic backsliding, even as they played out with startling conspicuousness. A disturbing—though not surprising—number of Americans converted to a bizarre, dangerous pattern of conspiracist thought that rejected vaccines, masks, truth itself, and instead imagined pedophilic Satan-worshipping cabals intent on destroying the country. White parents, bankrolled by right-wing billionaires, decried the “Critical Race Theory’’ supposedly indoctrinating their children. Still others saw the dangers with their own eyes and told us all was lost, engendering further inaction. And all the while, I asked myself if the sore throat I woke up to one morning was a mere cold, or the start of a budding coronavirus infection. I wondered if I was the crazy one.
Who better than Joan Didion to capture the disorder and paranoia of such an era? To read a collection of the literary icon’s nonfiction is to witness American mass psychology laid bare. Her talent was in shaking loose the narratives that begin as personal self-deception and are repeated frequently enough in the culture that they become a kind of collective psychosis. Her prose has a reputation for exposing much of the pretense embedded in our nation’s fabric: the failures of our political discourse, or the false narratives retroactively imposed on American history.
There lies the tragedy of losing Joan Didion at this historical moment. In an era of “alternative fact,” pseudoscientific conspiracy theory, and mass complacency in the face of environmental devastation, Didion’s discerning eye feels more critical than ever before. I can’t help but wonder who will strip down and dispel America’s delusions in her absence.