In the 2017 documentary, Joan Didion: The Centre Will Not Hold, Didion, the subject of the film, gives a telling response to a question from director Griffin Dunne, her nephew.
She recounts scenes she and her husband, John Gregory Dunne, witnessed after they returned to her native California in 1964 from New York, where Didion had spent eight years writing for Vogue. The couple settled in a California vastly different from the Sacramento of Didion’s childhood. They were at the epicentre of a mutinous counterculture and, according to Didion, ‘participated in the paranoia of the time’. Housed in a ropey corner of Hollywood, they hosted parties that attracted the beautiful people, but remained too disciplined themselves to indulge in the excesses that took out many of the celebrities they entertained. Each morning Didion slipped on her sunglasses, sipped an ice cold Coke for breakfast, and started writing.
In Dunne’s documentary, she recalls a visit to the Haight-Ashbury neighbourhood in S…