Didion never forgot Sacramento — it forgot her

With Joan Didion’s death in late December, the world lost a literary giant. Grief poured out across the country and in Northern California over her passing. As a fellow Sacramento-area native hoping to follow in her footsteps, I have been moved by the tributes made to Didion.

But the one place where the remembrance has been noticeably absent is in her own hometown of Sacramento. Without permanent steps, I fear for what will become of this native daughter’s local legacy.

Growing up in nearby Folsom, I’d heard of Didion but never in connection to her — our — hometown. During my senior year of high school, the French fashion house Céline selected her to model a pair of $430 sunglasses. In the ad, with her outsized frames and allblack ensemble, Didion looked like a quintessential New Yorker, the kind of person I was hoping to emulate in college.

The following year, after I’d fled east, I read “Rock of Ages,” a short piece Didion wrote about visiting Alcatraz Island after the prison closed. I was stunned by the raw connection she felt to the land. She wrote about Northern California with such nostalgia, the kind of longing you can only feel after you’ve left a place.

I was devastated by the last line of the essay, “I could tell you that I came back (to Los Angeles, where she was living at the time) because I had promises to keep, but maybe it was because no one

asked me to stay.”

As I read the rest of “Slouching Towards Bethlehem,” I realized that Didion’s cosmopolitan identity could not be divorced from her Sacramento upbringing. While she was waiting to become an icon, Didion had been and still was, in some ways, the girl who went to C.K. McClatchy Senior High, who got ice cream at Vic’s after school and waited for the State Fair to come back every year.

Perhaps for this reason, Didion chose to include her McClatchy yearbook in her California Hall of Fame display case. The exhibit that highlighted her has since closed, making room for new classes of inductees, including Lucille Ball — who has two statues and an entire museum devoted to her in her hometown of Jamestown, N.Y.

No such fanfare exists for Didion in Sacramento, only an edificial footnote: The Didion is currently on the market for $9.3 million and features 12 lofts and a gluten-free and vegan ice cream and doughnut shop on the bottom floor.

It hardly sums up the legacy of a woman who bemoaned the “featureless new buildings” that were beginning to fill Sacramento, which she described as a “rich farm town,” filled with generations of interlocking families who visited their great-aunts on Sundays.

The Didion building would be blasphemous were it not for the mural by Maren Conrad, depicting Julian Wasser’s iconic photograph of Didion for Time magazine, between the bakery and the entrance to the residences.

It’s fitting that Conrad is also responsible for the city’s much larger portrait of Saoirse Ronan in “Lady Bird.” In the film, a quote from Didion serves as the epigraph: “Anybody who talks about California hedonism has never spent a Christmas in Sacramento.”

Greta Gerwig, the film’s Sacramentoborn writer and director, has been outspoken about her admiration for Didion, telling Vanity Fair that discovering her writing was “as shattering as if I’d grown up in Dublin and suddenly read James Joyce.”

Gerwig is right to evoke Joyce here, as Didion is to Sacramento what the Irish writer is to Dublin. But, unlike, Sacramento, the city of Dublin has chosen to celebrate Joyce.

There is a statue of Joyce in their bustling city center, a museum devoted to his literary legacy and a celebration every June 16 in honor of his masterpiece, “Ulysses.” Essentially, Dublin has monetized its Joyce connection, attracting thousands of tourists each year, myself included.

Closer to home, Monterey has integrated John Steinbeck into its landscape with an official Steinbeck

Itinerary for visitors, which includes trips to the Steinbeck House in nearby Salinas and sites from his novels.

A Didion Itinerary could include trips to the Sacramento River, which inspired her first novel, and the old Governor’s Mansion, which Didion called “my favorite house in the world.” Both Dublin and Monterey could be a model for Sacramento as it goes about finding a meaningfully way to honor her, raising funds for a Didion Center.

This is something I hope will be top of mind for local officials, especially Gov. Gavin Newsom, who released an official statement that reads in part, “She was peerless in her capacity to write about life, loss, love and society — easily the best living writer in California. Her ability to put the tapestry of California and the times into words made her a treasure for her generation and generations to come.”

As a 24-year-old getting her master’s degree in nonfiction writing, I am proof of Didion’s generational impact. She made me want to become a writer. Didion’s also the reason I started telling people at my New York college that I was from Sacramento. She makes a girl proud to be from there.

It is too late for us to honor Didion while she is still living. I only hope that, in the wake of her death, the city will finally recognize the roots of this extraordinary woman.