Joan Didion (1934-2021) and her Banana-Colored Corvette

 One of those rare talents who pioneered the “New Journalism” of the 1960s.  She defined a generation.

From Steven V. Roberts, “Ode to a Freeway, NYT, April 15, 1973.

Joan Didion, whose novel “Play It As It Lays” helped foster a rather sinister view of the freeways, remembers having one of her “great experiences” in the middle of a traffic jam on the Harbor Freeway. “I had an interview at 9 [A.M.], and I was all tensed up,” she recalled one afternoon, as the Pacific curled against the beach behind her. “I was afraid I'd miss the interview, and I was feeling sorry for myself for being up so early. Then it hit me—what difference did it make whether I sat on the freeway or went to the interview? The whole thing about Los Angeles fell into place. Every minute is a tabula rasa. There it is—by itself—no back or forward references. Just Right Now.”

John Gregory Dunne, her husband and collaborator, loves freeways. “When I'm having trouble working, I get in my car and drive,” he said. “My whole mind opens up, I'm so aware of things; it's a strange kind of highway narcosis. Once, I went out for loaf of bread and wound up in San Francisco. So I got the loaf, turned around and came back.”

That episode might have suggested a well‐known passage in Didion's novel, in which the heroine, Maria Wyeth, is described this way:

“In the first hot month of the fall after the summer she left Carter (the summer Carter left her, the summer Carter stopped living in the house in Beverly Hills), Maria drove the freeway. She dressed every morning with a greater sense of purpose than she had had in some time, a cotton skirt, a jersey, sandals she could kick off when she wanted the touch of the accelerator, and she dressed very fast, running a brush through her hair once or twice and tying it back with a ribbon, for it was essential (to pause was to throw herSelf into unspeakable peril) that she be on the freeway by 10 o'clock. Not somewhere on Hollywood Boulevard, not on her way to the freeway, but actually on the freeway. If she was not, she lost the day's rhythm, its precariously imposed momentum. Once she was on the freeway and had maneuvered her way to a fast lane, she turned on the radio at high volume and she drove. She ‘drove the San Diego to the Harbor, the Harbor up to the Hollywood, the Hollywood the Golden State, San ta Monica, the Santa Ana, the Pasadena, the Ventura. She drove it as a riverman runs a river, every day more attuned to its currents, its deceptions, and just as a riverman feels the pull of the rapids in the lull between sleeping and waking, so Maria lay at night in the still of Beverly Hills and saw the great signs soar overhead at 70 miles an hour, 'Normandie ¼ “Vermont 34, ‘Harbor Fwy 1.’ Again and again she returned to an intricate stretch of the interchange where successful passage from the Hollywood to the Harbor required a diagonal move across four lanes of traffic. On the afternoon she finally did it without braking or once losing the beat on the radio, she was exhilarated, and that night slept dreamlessly.”

Some read that passage as anticipating the day when a sign on the San Diego Freeway will announce “Oblivion 1A.” Joan has always liked the radio station that follows its call letters with the eerie phrase “Freeways Are Forever… .” But, essentially, Maria drove the freeways because they were there. “She didn't have anything to do, she was kind of in limbo,” Joan explained. “When you're in that state, marking time and trying to stay together, you've got to have something to do to organize your day. The freeways give you a spurious sense of organization. You do have to be organized and in control. You're using skills that you have, and you do well or badly. You have a sense of accomplishing something.”