"Beautiful country burn again."

May 4, 2016 4:04 PM

"This is not about Patricia Hearst. It is about me and the peculiar vacuum in which I grew up, a vacuum in which the Hearsts could be quite literally king of the hill." Joan Didion's notes for a never written story about the Patricia Hearst trial.
posted by Kattullus (4 comments total)

Didion is one of my favorite writers. I was going through some old correspondence from my uncle and the late Hollywood writer Stanford Whitmore (Stan did the forward to uncles book) and Whitmore qouated Didion: "L.A. is the city of slow no"

Thanks for posting this.
posted by clavdivs at 4:45 PM on May 4, 2016 [4 favorites]

C. Vann Woodward: “Every self-conscious group of any size fabricates myths about its past: about its origins, its mission, its righteousness, its benevolence, its general superiority.” This has not been exactly true in San Francisco.

I guess we can date this to before the California Ideology, then.
posted by gusandrews at 9:28 PM on May 4, 2016

I was thinking that I'd also be interested in reading something by Joan Didion that really is about Patty Hearst, and it turns out that such a thing exists: "Girl of the Golden West," in After Henry -- new to me, but apparently one of Didion's better-known pieces.
posted by Gerald Bostock at 8:01 AM on May 5, 2016 [2 favorites]

This is excellent.
posted by Fizz at 3:49 PM on May 12, 2016