 Good evening, everyone. Thank you for joining us for our online program at Mechanics Institute. I'm Laura Shepherd, Director of Events. And I'm very pleased to welcome Evelyn McDonald for a conversation about her new book, The World According to Joan Gideon, which is an intimate exploration of the life, craft and legacy of one of the most respected and significant writers of our time. Before we begin, if you're new to the Mechanics Institute, we were founded in 1854, and we're one of San Francisco's most vital literary and cultural centers in the heart of the city. Mechanics Institute features our General Interest Library, an international chess club, ongoing author and literary events, and on Friday, our Cinema Lip Film Series. So please visit our website at milibrary.org to learn more about our programs and all that we have to offer you. If you're in San Francisco, please join us for a tour of the Institute and our very beautiful Beaux Arts Building here at 57 Post Street, Wednesday at noon, once again, Wednesday at noon for the free tour. Our discussion tonight will be followed by a Q&A with you, our audience. So please put your questions in the chat or on the Q&A, and we'll be reading those questions out to our guests. In her new book, Evelyn McDonald takes us along as she talks about those who knew Gideon and who also inspired her. We travel with her to the places where Gideon lives and documented as she digs through the archives and as we take this deep dive into her writing, her themes, her styles, her characters. Her new book, The World Recording to Joan Didion is a meditation on the people, settings and objects that propel Didion's prose. That is also an invitation to journalists, storytellers, and all life adventures to throw themselves into the convulsions of the world, as Didion once said. Evelyn McDonald has written three, has written or co-edited several books, including Women Who Rock, Bessie to Beyoncé, Girl Groups to Riot Girls and Queens of Noise, the real story of the runaways. She has been a pop culture writer at the Miami Herald and a senior editor at The Village Voice. Her writings have appeared in anthologies and publications, including The New York Times, The Guardian, Los Angeles Times, Miz, and Billboard and others. And she also teaches journalism at Loyola, very Mount University, and lives in San Pedro, California. So we're thrilled to have you here with us, Evelyn. This is just such an honor to welcome you. Thank you, Laura. Thank you so much for having me. I hope to come in person in some future date and see, I can't believe how long Mechanics Institute has just been around and I have not been in it yet. So I look forward to that somewhere down the line. Right. And it's also a great place to research if you spend some time here in San Francisco. We have a great library for research. And so we certainly invite you. You know, before we begin, I just want to give you a little sense of our connection with Joan Didion. You know, we have Joan here at Mechanics Institute for her book tour, The Year of Magical Thinking. And we think it was either 2005 or 2006. And she arrived in her quiet undisturbed demeanor with very few words, a sort of call of grief and mourning due to the recent loss of her husband and daughter and viewed even the weight of her coat. And she did not take off her sunglasses. This was the privacy she needed at this most public and tender time, but her generosity with her audience was apparent and she graciously engaged with each reader and signed every book. And for me, this signaled a very special moment of literary sacred space. So we were very honored to also have this engagement with Joan Didion. It was a very special time and a special engagement with our audiences and with Mechanics Institute. So we sort of just wanted to set the scene that we have a brief connection with her. That's a great anecdote. And just, you know, she didn't take her sunglasses off at her wedding either. So that was a thing. She was known for those big sunglasses. But I do think it was a way of maintaining privacy and hiding her emotional register, which... And by then she was such a public figure and after these experiences, these traumas that she went through, you can certainly understand the importance. But just jumping right in with you, Evelyn. I mean, so from your background, writing about rock and roll and contemporary culture, why and when did you sort of move towards writing about Joan Didion, you know, were you always a fan? And how did this differ from the prior writing research that you had done? Right. So, yeah. So my origin story is like a lot of people's origin story. I discovered her in college, which is part of why I teach her now to my students at LMU. I read some Dreamers of the Golden Dream in the New Journalism Anthology edited by Tom Wolf. I was taking a journalism course. And, you know, along with other selections in that book, it really opened my mind to the possibilities of what could be done in the journalistic form to ways of writing, of bringing in point of view techniques and just having beautiful writing be part of what happens with journalism. So, and I think I just absorbed that and went on to read other works by her, mostly her journalism and essays, mostly her narrative of nonfiction, which I do think was her, what she did best, the essays, books like The Art of Magical Thinking. And, you know, was always a fan, but she wasn't somebody that I really wrote about. She was someone that I read and that I taught as soon as I taught. But I did, you know, mostly write about music in my journalism career now. My first book was called Rock She Wrote. And it was a collection edited with the empowers of writing about music by women. So I do think in a sense, I have come full circle because I am again talking about writers. That book was talking about writers. And, you know, some of, a couple of Joan's more famous pieces were about rock and roll her interview with the doors or not really interview, but her hanging out in the studio with the doors and then her story on Joan Baez for The New York Times. And I do think that she was a rock star among writers and, you know, she was very much, she was a huge part of that 1960s counter-cultural scene. I mean, a critic of it, but also someone who was immersed in it and who documented it. So to me, there's a connection. I've also noticed that a lot of musicians are really inspired by Joan Didion. And that's just something that is emerging more and more. I think since her death, a lot of writers have been, I mean, a lot of musicians have been speaking about that. So, you know, her writing, her really great writing, I think is very musical, has a really special rhythm. She talked a lot about how her relationship to the grammar. So I feel like there's a connection there. I mean, the first song on the new Olivia Rodrigo album, Guts, is from a Joan Didion essay, the title's from a Joan Didion essay. So she's just, you know, 20 year old pop star, perfect album, perfect 10 album declared by Pitchfork Magazine. I saw that today and I agree. So yeah, she's hitting multiple generations still, including musicians. Also, you know, you quote her by saying that we are all storytellers and that storytelling is a basic human right, you know, a necessity just like food and water and shelter and that we tell stories to live. It gives us a rise on debtor. It gives us the parameters of our lives and also the values of our lives. Can you explain and talk more about how this was essential to Joan from her very early days in Sacramento to becoming a famous writer and a serious writer? Right, so, you know, it's her very famous quote, we tell ourselves stories in order to live, which is, you know, partly a critique, but it's also true to her own life that she began writing when she was five years old and she wrote about this in her essay on keeping a notebook that her mother, she was pestering her mother for attention and her mother had a new child, a young child, Joan's brother, Jim, and she said, you know, I'm busy, here's the notebook, go busy yourself and Joan probably took the notebook and went and wrote a short story about being in the Arctic freezing and then this Sahara dying of heat. Very kind of bizarre future hints of things to come. And she wrote in on keeping a notebook about how important it was to her to have this record of what she was thinking and that she always carried a notebook and that it wasn't a diary, it was a notebook where she was jotting down what she saw. And I think, and in my research, I saw some of those notebooks that were part of the books that she wrote, that she used them for notes. And I'm sure there's more of those than the archives that are to come. So, and I kind of think like, I think that's such an interesting moment because she had such a strong relationship with her mother until her mother died. That was a very strong force in her life. And I think that her mother telling her to write as a kind of dismissal, but also like here, you know, you empower yourself by writing it down. I can't listen to it all, but write it down for yourself. It's a great lesson to give your child at that young of age. And she carried it without her through her own life. And, you know, one of the things she said about writing, she talked a lot and wrote a lot about why writing was important to her. And one of the things she says, I write in order to understand what I'm thinking. Which I think is really powerful. I think I, as a writer, read that and go, yes, absolutely, like until I've written it down, sometimes I don't know how to articulate what I want to say. Like it helps me pull out of my head this inchoate information and put it down on the page. So I think, you know, and I also, you know, Joan was a small woman, petite, quiet, as you said, kind of reserved. And I think writing was her way of having power in the world. And she wielded her pen and her notebook and her, you know, keyboard computer, you know, like weapons. I mean, she made the world listen to her. Yeah, it's really powerful. This notebook and how it helps her to evolve as a writer. And just getting back to the notebook and how we start with our, you know, diary or notation or a scribble or, you know, words on an African in a bar. Can you talk about the structure of this book and how each of the chapters are named with these singular words, gold, notebook, snake, et cetera. And also to talk about, can you talk about the significance of each of these chapters and symbols or to Joan and also for you in constructing this unusual biography. Absolutely. So I'm just show the audience for a minute. This is the book. It's backwards in my thing, mirrored. And if you open the book, you'll see on the inside cover, there's all these drawings. And it looks like the inside of a composition notebook. So that was definitely a theme that we were trying to have in homage to on keeping a notebook. And these drawings are all by an artist's name Ann Munches, who lives in Brooklyn, who's a really, really wonderful talented writer. She just, I mean, artists, she did some drawings for women who rock my previous book as well. So let me just read a passage sort of explaining this in the book, and then I'll follow up with that. Just gonna read a paragraph here. Like a notebook, the story proceeds in a fragmented style. As Joan's writing did, it embodies to some degree the atomization she prophesied. It is not a narrative log of events. It is born like an associative legend for a map. With each chapter named after an object that figured large, indideans imaginary. Gold, snake, hotel, orchid. And therefore it leaps around and across space and time. Occasionally I insert myself into the narrative. Joan could be a very informed and partial writer, but one of the keys to her appeal is the way she often personalized her work. For her first piece, for Life Magazine, she wrote not about the war in Vietnam as she had wanted to. Her editor wouldn't send her because, quote, the guys were already covering it. Instead, she wrote that she was in the Royal Hawaiian Hotel in Honolulu, quote, in lieu of filing for divorce. I tell you this not as aimless revelation, but because I want you to know as you read me precisely who I am and where I am and what is on my mind. So Joan was very concrete and detailed in her writing and very observational. That's one of the things that others have said and that I really found in deep diving into her work. And so when I was going through her writing and this is one of the anthologies we tell ourselves called, we tell ourselves stories in order to live from the quote. So this was sort of, this was easy for me in my travels to carry around and it has her first books up through where I was from, which I'll talk about later. So as I was reading them, I started marking different themes that I noticed coming up or different recurring motifs essentially, such as snake, very famous for how often she wrote about snake or flowers. And the snakes are red and they have other books. Here I don't want to knock the books over. And so I color-coded recurring motifs that were also somewhat time-stamped in her life but then ran through it. And so then the book itself is named after those objects. And oh my goodness, my dog I think is gonna join us. Unfortunately, I might let him in. And so the drawings are so, for instance, there's a chapter girl, which it's about when Tana were done and there's the drawing of the girl. And then these are all, man is the glasses of John Gregory done, her husband. These are all then brought together in the endpip papers. And it was just a way of sort of breaking out of, sorry, I'm gonna let my dog in. The chronology, it still goes chronologically. It does go from her birth to her death. It does, her dog wants to come see. Oh, sorry, Alex. There's my dog, Alex. Okay, now you can go back to your bed. Sorry. It does flow chronologically, but I'm also trying to, I really tried to think about the things that mattered to her and why and explain how they recurred throughout her writing and her life. It's very powerful symbols and also they open up these conversations throughout the book, very informative. And also for those of us who don't know who haven't read all of her writing, which is just this huge volume, it kind of grounds us in this particular focus, which is really quite informative and really appreciate how you put that together. The other thing that is so powerful about her writing or one of the many things is that she moved the readers and also the public view from east to the west, especially when she's writing about California on the land, the place, people and the culture. And she also maintained this kind of healthy battle between appreciation and also skepticism of the California dream. So I want to also talk about how she's dealing with, is she accepting the California dream? Is she critical? Is she trying to like shake us and wake us up? What is she trying to portray here and why? And also if you could include a reading. Yes, so she's definitely trying to always, she's trying to make us pay attention to the world around us. I mean, that's why it's called the world according to Joan Diddy and because she was always observing and she was always writing it down and she was wanting to make us look at the world and be critical of what we've been told and the narratives that have dominated our understanding of the world around her. And she did that in her own life. And if readers, if our audience doesn't know she was born and raised in Sacramento, California, the capital of California in the Central Valley. And that was very important. She said that it shaped everything she ever thought because the farmlands there, the flatlands of the valley, the endless fields of hops or all the produce that's grown there as well as the Sacramento and the American rivers. And then framed by the mountains on both sides, right? Berkeley Hills and the Sierra Nevada. And that was absolutely, and she was a fifth generation Californian also, right? Her ancestors came in the middle of the 19th century along with the Mechanics Institute, right? In that, you know, when California became a state and when, you know, someone struck gold and cried Eureka in the Sierra Nevada right outside of Sacramento, employee of Joseph Adolfo Sutter who settled Sacramento found gold and everybody came and came with this promise of a new land. And so she really grew up on those stories of her own family being part of the California dream, the American dream, going out west to make money, you know, digging for gold, but also, you know, to do other questionable things like, you know, convert the native population. So she loved California, she wrote about it often. There's some of her, I think, most beautiful writing is about California, people identified her as a California writing, but she really, at a very young age, she began to question those narratives and to, you know, see the story in a different light and slowly she wrote about that, mostly in speeches that she gave to college students and things that were maybe less in the public eye, because she said later that she didn't want to have to really face California while her parents were alive because she knew that what they had told her was wrong, that a lot of it was a myth and that a lot of foundation and, you know, by extension, of course, of the United States, you know, it was based on extermination of the Indians and, you know, searching for gold and developing and, you know, not really such a beautiful story. Let me just read a passage from the book where we talk about this a little bit more. It's from, I think it's a wrong book. She called it, you know, the wagon wheels narrative that were taught and it's from the chapter, as I said, called Snake. So, a close reading of Didion's work reveals that a prime agenda was to expose the moral bankruptcy of the myth of the Golden Land and the entire rhetoric of Westward expansionism. Her subject was the American Empire and that's something that the writer, David Reath, the son of Susan Sontag, said to me, I interviewed him and other people for this book and I thought it was just a really brilliant statement. You know, one of her great subjects was the American Empire. It took her years to fully grasp and articulate this in part because she resisted it, especially as long as her parents were alive and this is the quote, I didn't wanna figure out California because whatever I figured out would be different from the California my mother and father had told me about, she said in 2006. There are topics, the fate of the Miwok Indians, the exploitation of Mexican immigrants in the fields that are family owned, for instance, that she never did publicly address, but in incremental pieces, speeches, essays, notes that were then gathered together in 2003 after her parents' death as where I was from, she clearly and overtly reveals and removes her blinders on her own past. She laments her middle school optimism and deconstructs the fallacies of her own first novel, Run River, about Sacramento and its perpetuation of frontier myths. She interrogates California narratives written by authors from Josiah Royce to Frank Norris to William Faulkner to Joan Didion. She documents exclusionary institutions from the Bohemian Club to the Spur Posse. Released from her loyalty to her mother, the woman who gave her the tools and instructions to start writing at age five and to whom she was so deeply bound that she interred Eduans remains in the same columbarium as her husband, her daughter and finally herself, Joan Didion lets it all go. And this is a quote from where I was from. All of it, the dream of America the entire enchantment under which I had lived my life. I telling people that where I was from is a really important book to understanding Joan Didion because it is her telling where she was from and also that she calls it where I was from that where I am from, you know her choice of words was so precise and she chose that tense of the verb because she felt alienated from the California that she had been raised on. And we understand that, you know place is such an important part of her writing. Place say over character or plot or theme could you go into more of the importance of place in her writing? She lived in a dozen or more locations some urban, some rural from, you know Los Angeles, Malibu to Honolulu to New York. You know, she was a West Coast Easterner and Eastern West Coaster. But could you talk about what these different cities represented to her and also how they fueled her or influenced her writing? Right, so she started in Sacramento and then she went to college and I think we sort of talked about Sacramento. She went to college at Berkeley, University of California of Berkeley and studied English and literature and spent time in San Francisco. And I'll actually read a little passage about San Francisco in a minute but I'll finish sort of the narrative. And one of the joys of researching this book was that I did retrace a lot of her steps. I did go to a lot of the places that she had been. They also were places that I had lived some of them. She after college, she went to New York City to Manhattan and initially she during college she spent a summer in Manhattan working for Mademoiselle magazine and a special program for students. And then she went back and she won the Prix de Paris from Vogue magazine. And instead of taking the prize of going to Paris which that was what they were offering or money she convinced them to hire her which is pretty interesting. And so she went to New York and was in New York until for eight years until 1964 working her way into the publishing industry very ghetto-ized writing for women's magazines but did have some breakthroughs, wrote for the National Review, wrote for William Buckley's magazine. And she was at that time still fairly conservative. Her parents were very conservative and she came out of that. As I said, she slowly transformed and she was writing book reviews for William Buckley. She wasn't really writing, of course there was politics in them. And he was one of the few editors that was willing to hire her as a woman. She wrote beautifully about New York one of my favorite essays of hers is called Goodbye to All That which starts as a love song to New York and ends up being a farewell. And she and her new husband, John Gregory Dunn, the writer moved back to California. He was from Connecticut. So it was new for him. He wanted to experience it and it's interesting that he followed his wife in a sense back to California but they didn't go to Sacramento. They went to Los Angeles and here they lived in a series of pretty fabulous places. Starting with Portuguese band which is actually very close to where I live here in San Pedro, beautiful house overlooking the ocean and then to Hollywood. And they had rented a kind of rundown mansion there and that's where they had parties where Janice Joplin would show up and that's when she really wrote a lot about Hollywood. And they were writing screenplays. They were breaking into Hollywood themselves. They were doing some production. And then they moved to Malibu which was again another beautiful ocean side home in Troncos and North Malibu, kind of far from LA. And that's, you know, you see a lot of pictures from her there. That's when she was very really starting her to be very famous. TV crews would come and interview her there. She'd be photographed there a lot. Then they moved to Brentwood, very posh part of Los Angeles in part so their daughter could go to high school in LA and they had a beautiful house there. And then they moved back to New York. John, her husband was having hard issues and Quintana, their daughter was going to Columbia and then working in the publishing industry and they went back to the Upper East Side and that's where she lived the last decades of her life. She also spent a lot of time in Hawaii. This was something that appealed to her from a child that she would, you know, look across the Pacific Ocean and imagine, she wrote about imagining Hawaii out there. And once she went, she kind of fell in love with Hawaii. I think she would have preferred to end up there instead of New York, honestly. But that's not what happened. It's interesting, she did also, you know, she wrote a book about Miami. She spent a lot of time in Miami, which I lived in Miami as well. And then she wrote a book about Salvador. These were things that she wrote about for the New York Review of Books. They were long stories that then became books. She, what she did not write about was Europe. She didn't really write about the Midwest. She was very interested in the South. She did travel in the South and her notes from that, those travels appeared decades later in a book called South and West. She was very interested in America and the United States as well as, I would say like the global South. She was interested in Central America and then the Pacific Rim, Hawaii and, you know, Vietnam and democracy takes place sort of around the Pacific Rim. So she had, and so her point of view was still from, you know, California points West as she and John had a column in Saturday evening post-together that was called points West that they alternated who wrote it. Yeah, so that was always her point of view. And let me just, and she was so good at describing place. I think let me just read since you are in San Francisco, I'll just read one paragraph from the building section. So San Francisco Job Hunt was a multi-page reported feature and this was an article that she wrote for Mademoiselle magazine while she was in New York, while she was working for Vogue. She was, she freelanced for Mademoiselle. It was a multi-page reported feature that seemed to be intended as a self-help slash travel piece for young women interested in the West Coast but Didion turned it into an investigation of gender inequity. The writer may have later distanced herself from the women's movement, but at age 25 she had no delusions about the reality of sexism. The article quotes an editor who admits that his newspaper hasn't hired a woman in four years except for one society editor. In advertising, quote, they say that raises come in frequently and transfers to non-secretarial jobs about as often as a major earthquake, Didion wrote. The whole long article reads like an externalization of the writer's internal argument about why she should remain on the East Coast rather than live closer to her roots. Still, she can't help but rhapsodize about that ocean breeze, quote. The feeling of the city is in its air and probably clean smelling of the Pacific. So I just love that way. Like she actually wrote a lot about smells, that way that she's just able to really capture an environment by like the feeling of the air, of the Pacific in the air. I think you can still, it's probably the air is probably not impossibly clean in San Francisco. And more though, I think there is, you know, something about its proximity to the ocean, the bay, that there is a way in which there's something specific. I'm sure you, you know, you feel it there. Yeah. It's the air, it's the fog. It's the movement of both lansy and air that it's just a continual change. Right, right. You know, when she very famously wrote about the Santa Ana winds too, right? And LA notebook, which I hear are about to descend. And again, just like her being able to like understand like the feeling of the physical feeling of an environment, I think is really special. Really, really powerful. I mean, you were talking about her work and her also her work as an essayist, which it allowed her to go into so many different directions and different topics. But she also wrote that the essay can limit and distort reality and that narrative was her expertise but also her enemy. So was she talking about how can codifying a topic also be limiting her point of view in some way? And also, can you give us an example of things where she was a success hitting the mark or maybe missing the mark? You know, maybe point of view was too limited. Right, right. So, you know, narrative is an ordering of chaos, right? It is trying to find a story and everything that happens in the world. And so whenever you, you know, we tell ourselves stories in order to live but in order to tell the story, you're choosing the things that you're gonna tell, right? And, you know, stories can also be lies. One of her most famous articles was political fictions, right? It was really understanding the lies that politicians tell us and, you know, people like Dick Cheney and Ronald Reagan, she was very ruthless in talking about and very on the mark and talking about the stories that they were telling us. And so, you know, I think she was very aware of this in herself as well. And so, yes, she could hit the mark and she could miss the mark too. And I think sometimes she did both in the same essays. So I mentioned before some Dreamers of the Golden Dream was the essay that this really, it's not an essay, it's really a reported story. It's a crime story. It's about a murder in the Inland Empire in San Bernardino. And it's a very dark portrait of suburban California America. So it's really, that's part of like her saying, hey, you know, here's the Golden Dream and it's a woman killing her husband. Very, you know, other people I've talked to that was the story that brought them to her writing. It's so powerfully written in it. It's so out of conventional narrative form, a journalistic form. And it tells the story of California that's not just about beach culture or just about Hollywood or even Westerns, right? It tells a real person story. You know, on the other hand, there have been critiques of that story that have come out from other writers. Susan Strait in particular in the LA Times has said that, you know, who grew up in the towns that Joan was writing about and said she didn't see herself in that San Bernardino at all. And that wasn't her story as the daughter of an immigrant herself. That Joan saw a very white world often and didn't understand the complexity of what California was becoming. I do think like she failed to understand with the complexity of what it had been and what it was becoming. She, another example of that would be from her great essay, another really great essay called Notes from a Native Daughter, since launching towards Bethlehem, which is one of the ones which she just really powerfully talks about what it means to be from California. She has, you know, this great passage in it. If I can make you understand, wait, in fact, that is what I want to tell you about. What it is like to come from a place like Sacramento. If I could make you understand that, I can make you understand California and perhaps something else besides for Sacramento is California and California is a place in which a boom mentality and a sense of Chacovian loss meet an uneasy suspicion in which the mind is troubled by some buried by ineradicable suspicion that things have better work here because here, beneath the immense bleached sky is where we run out of continent, right? It's a great passage. Like nail so many things, you know, that uneasy tension between the past and the future, you know, Mike Davis, you know, years later would talk in city of courts about the California boosters and California noir. And that, you know, she, she talks about it, right? You know, in this passage from like, it's like 1967, I think. You know, the, what does she call it? The Chacovian mentality, the boom mentality and Chacovian loss, right? And yet in this essay, her story of California starts with the settler, starts with the gold rush. Like she really, she never really writes about the indigenous people or the Californios or the Spaniards who, you know, settled California before it became part of the United States. Like there, she misses a lot of that complexity. She does come from a very white privileged position and she blinded her. On the other hand, she had so many insights and she was a ground breaker in terms of her journalism, also groundbreaking for women writers and also for exposing politics during the 60s and 70s. Just from your point of view and from what you've read, did she have, did she, what was her most important political writing, either that she discussed herself or from your observations? Right, so actually, I think, you know, it was really in the 80s and 90s that she really delved into, I mean, she did, I mean, she was talking, she's talking about politics when she's writing about Hayes Ashbury in 1967 because she's, you know, critiquing the counterculture, right? So in a sense that is talking about politics, but, and, you know, she, interviewing Eldridge Cleaver in the 60s, I mean, you know, but she really became a political commentary tater and analyst in the 80s and 90s and mostly in her writing for the New York Review of Books. And I have a whole chapter about this called Jogger and it's called Jogger because, you know, one of the great pieces that she wrote was Sentimental Journeys, which was about New York Central Park, a jogger assault and the young men who were railroaded and falsely convicted in that case. And, you know, she wrote about this, the year of their conviction, not decades later when filmmakers have picked it up again and, you know, and they've since been, you know, exonerated, right? And someone else was admitted to having assaulted the jogger. She was writing about Miami, writing about El Salvador, that these became books and, you know, writing about politicians who cover the campaign trail and wrote, that was political fictions, just really analyzing the narrative of political discourse and how alienated it was from the people of the United States. So that's really crucial work, not necessarily as famous as, you know, her coverage of the 60s or coverage of rock stars or her later work writing about her loss of her husband and her daughter, but this was the, you know, some of the most award-winning and consequential work. Yeah. You know, earlier I have been describing to you about rereading the essay on the women's movement from 1972 and how it's just a very difficult piece of writing. And I wondered if you would talk about how she was so critical of the feminist movement, but, you know, she was a feminist in her own right. She lived her life without compromise, without excuse. And also she had very, you know, very strong lifelong friendships with women, you know, including writers Jean Stein and Nora Ephraim. And I wondered if you could talk about this sort of, this antagonistic relationship with feminism or not. Well, see, this is where my writing about music and writing about Joan Tidding really do come together because I'm so used to this from writing about really strong, iconic, groundbreaking musicians who, you know, will not come anywhere near the word feminist, don't wanna associate themselves or, you know, are very reluctant, you know, and I've come to understand it because they don't want to paint themselves in a box, they don't want labels, they, they, and you know, and it's also not a question we, you know, it's not something we make men identify themselves as feminists or not, you know. So it's not fair that it's a box that we make women check off, but not men. So I get that with Joan and if she didn't, you know, but she also, she wrote, as you said, a piece called the Women's Movement in which she did kind of throw her sisters under the wagon a little bit and critiqued the women's movement. Now I will say that a lot of the things that she said are now common critiques of second wave feminism. So she wasn't necessarily wrong, just maybe wasn't the most sympathetic way to go about analyzing the problems that feminism was encountering, right? She could have done it in a more comprehensible, a fashion and maybe more sisterly, but you know, to me, what's more important is that she lived a life that modeled how to be a woman that took risks and spoke for herself and spoke for other women and that she wrote constantly about women's lives from that piece in Manmoselle about, you know, which was supposed to be a travel piece about San Francisco and she ends up exposing the sexism of the media industry there, you know, to all of her novels have women characters as their protagonists. So, you know, she didn't call herself a conservative, she didn't call herself a liberal, she didn't call herself a liberal, you know, she doesn't have to call herself a feminist, I can still see her as a powerful woman who changed my life and changed many women's lives. Yeah, well, she's certainly been a great influence to us and, you know, with her writing and her essays, I mean, her five novels, I mean, she and her husband, John, had written, I didn't realize it was five screenplays, not to mention. Well, those are the ones that got produced. They did produce, exactly. Yeah. I mean, you know, her, the vastness of her work is so amazing and, you know, we have you to also thank for all of the points of view that you've brought to us in your book. But I'd like to open this up to our audience. We have a couple of questions. And Andy, would you like to read those out to us and we'll have some responses? Absolutely. I'll start with a question, which I know has been gone over a bit, but we'll ask again, how did your experience writing about Joan Diddy and differ from your experience writing about women in the music industry? Well, I mean, Joan's, that doesn't sound wrong, but of course, Joan's very articulate. She was a writer, so it was, you know, she, and she wrote a lot about herself. So she explained herself very well. You know, not all musicians, a lot of musicians, they don't want to articulate what their songs are about because they don't, they want the listener to decide, or because they don't really know, right? Sometimes it's a mystery process, mystery for them, right? Or they don't want to diffuse the mystery. So, you know, Joan wrote so much about writing, wrote so much about her own life, that made it easy. I would say that was the main difference. And then, you know, there were the similarities of not wanting to identify as a feminist. Joan wrote with a lot of transparency. She also had her secrets. And, you know, some of those I didn't pry open. And, you know, some of them I poke around a little bit. She's also no longer with us, sadly. And most of the musicians that I've written about are still with us, so that's also very different. What, you know, what you can say, what you are willing to say, right? Our next question asks, for Evelyn is, if asked, did you see the Joan Diddy exhibit at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles? And do you have thoughts on that? Yes, I did see it. I saw it, I think three times. I took a, I had, was teaching a literary journalism class. So I took my students to see it. I wrote about it from high country news. If you, you can Google that and find out in depth what I thought. I actually thought it was really interesting. It was, you know, curated by Hilt Nells and a curator at the Hammer. And it's now in Miami actually. So I'm going to go see it again in a couple of weeks. I'm going to be in Miami and I'm going to give a little tour of it, as a matter of fact. I actually thought it was really interesting. You know, it's a weird, my students were confused. Some of my students were confused by it because they, it's, it's basically, you know, Hilt N's impressions of different works that reflect themes in Joan's work. It's not, you know, she did okay it. She was aware that it was happening, but she, you know, she passed, you know, two years before it opened. So she didn't know most of what was in it. She had a general sense. I actually thought it was really thoughtful and I went on a tour that he gave of it. And, you know, he also says like, you know, where I was from is the, you know, the touchstone and the importance of sentimental journeys. Like I thought he hit a lot of the right notes in it in an interesting evocative fashion. Yeah, if you have the chance to go to Miami and see it, it's, you have to understand that there are photos of Joan in it, some, and there are some artifacts, but it's mostly artwork by artists that maybe Joan knew, maybe Joan liked, but maybe just Hilt N feeling like this evoked something about Joan. Our next question comes from an attendee asking, if Joan Didion, or if you know anything about Joan Didion's relationship to Chinese American history or culture, and they share an anecdote of when I ushered for one of her talks at the Norse Auditorium, during the rehearsal, they promised that if she signed everyone's book afterwards, they would take her to Samuel restaurant to eat and named her favorite dishes there. Interesting. Yeah, this is actually really interesting because I was just in Sacramento last week and I rode the River Roads from Berkeley to Sacramento, which I highly recommend along the Delta, it's just such a beautiful, interesting and that she wrote so much about that. And if you've seen Lady Bird driving over those bridges in the movie. And there's a lot of Chinese restaurants there because there were many Chinese laborers in the fields. And there was a presence, and actually when I stayed and I stayed in, it was called the Wong mansion that was built by, I was told it was a Chinese diplomat that I was told it was a doctor so I'm not exactly sure which is the correct story. But there was also, I mean, this is the time of a lot of anti-Asian sentiment in the 30s when this mansion was built, when Joan was born. She did not write hardly at all about Asian-Americans that I know of, but I know she was a big fan of Maxine Hun Kingston and worked to support her career and saw her as a really important writer of about California and about America and anything part of her interest in the Pacific Rim and in Hawaii, just because she was also again interested in those cultures. I did find it's in the book. I was going through her grandparents' papers and they were part of the native sons and native daughters of the Golden West which is a kind of Shriners of California dedicated to memorializing that glorious 19th century past of America and I mean of California in the Gold Rush and I found an old pamphlet from like 1935 that had explicit anti-Asian racism in it about like one of the goals of the organization is to not let the Asian-American quota be expanded because we can't let them take over. It's really horrible. Now this is Joan's grandparents who she did not like and she spoke, wrote poorly of, but very important figures in Sacramento history. Genevieve Didion was on the school board for decades and there's a school named after her. So that's a really, I love that anecdote and I'd like to find out more about it because I do think that she was very sympathetic and she also, she did write beautifully about Mexican culture but not as much as she could have but she wasn't unaware of these things. And I think in a way she was trying to be like, well, it's not really my place to tell these stories but let's, you know, Maxine Honkingston needs to tell these stories and we need to listen to her tell these stories. So she probably would have gotten critiqued if she had, maybe because I mean, Miriam Gerba has, you know, leveled some very strong and correct criticisms of Joan Didion but I think she also, you know, wouldn't have wanted Joan Didion to write American Derby either, so. I'm so glad to hear about this connection between Joan and Maxine Honkingston because we are great fans of Maxine and we're close friends. She's been to mechanics many times and we do adore her. That's interesting. Before we close out, Evelyn, I just wanted to know if through all of your work and writing about Joan Didion, was there something about her family life and or her life as a writer that surprised you along the way? Yeah, I think that finding things like her letters, some letters to Maxine that are in Maxine's papers at the Bancroft Library in Berkeley just in letters in general that she wrote that I found in different collections or that people shared with me that were really just so warm and personal and just such lovely letters. And we do, you know, there's this kind of like, there's something scary about her. Joan, you know, she could be a very withering critic, you know, the sunglasses, right? And so to see that warmth that came out in those personal letters and also the people that I've talked to that knew her family, members, friends, colleagues, spoke to that side of her, that I never saw, I never, you know, met her. I didn't have those kinds of personal interactions but I'm gonna have next to me here a picture, I don't know if you can see it very well but it's flower that she pressed in a frame. It's a riff and don her nephew took a photo and sent it to me. So this is a print out of a photo of a print but she would do this for people. She would press flowers. This is her and her daughter did this together and give these to people, which is just, you know, a very, again, she loved as much as she was afraid of snakes, she loved flowers and that was the side of her that I wanted to honor and I focus on that at the end of the book. That's great. Well, Evelyn McDonnell, I wanna just thank you for your insights and your perspectives of Joan Didion in this amazing book, The World According to Joan Didion and I do recommend everyone pick up a copy at your local bookstore. We'll put book passage in our link and also I wanna also say, this has just been a great introduction and an opening to Joan's work and also to your work as well. And once again, join us in San Francisco for your next book tour and we look forward to meeting you here in person. Thank you so much. Thank you for having me. I really appreciate it. I hope to come there myself as well. And thanks everyone for joining us and we'll see you either online or in person at Mechanics Institute. Thanks again.