Damnatio Memoriae in California: Joan Didion’s Play It as It Lays and Where I Was From

Abstract

In this article I explore Joan Didion’s novel Play It as It Lays (1970) and her family memoir Where I Was From (2003) in order to assess and compare the ways in which she articulates the telling of both fictional character narratives and ostensibly factual historical tales, both taking place in parts of the California with which she is so intimately familiar. In Play It, Maria Wyeth tries to escape her past through the repression, curtailment and editing of her memories. On the winding freeways of Los Angeles, she feels she can remain in the present and blank out painful memories by looking ahead. ‘Never look back at all’ is the California mantra that she tries to personify (Didion 2003: 199). In Where I, Didion analyses her own culpability in the mythologization of her home state and the failure of her own narrative authority. What can Didion’s fiction and non-fiction, both populated and cultivated by unreliable narrators, tell us about the way history is told, myths of origin perpetuated and memory fabricated, and what might this signify about storytelling in California more generally?