Joan Didion made her mark on L.A. Here are 10 places she knew and loved

Los Angeles Times

11-03-2025

Joan Didion haunts Los Angeles. In January, as catastrophic fires ripped through the Pacific Palisades and Altadena, Didion's name became an echo on social media timelines as Angelenos shared and reshared her famous quotes about the Santa Ana winds.
So much so that local literary critic Katie Kadue was moved to tweet , wryly, 'I think I speak for everyone here in Los Angeles when I say we desperately need a link to that Mike Davis article, or even just a Joan Didion quote. Every little bit helps.'
Didion looms so large in the literary world that, even in death, her work is getting published. In April, Knopf will release an edited collection of her journal entries that she wrote for her husband, John Gregory Dunne, transcribing intimate sessions she had with a psychiatrist in the 1990s. And whether she intended to or not, Didion has become known as one of Los Angeles' foremost mythmakers — a conceit that is central to yet another new Didion book, a cultural biography, 'We Tell Ourselves Stories,' by New York Times film critic Alissa Wilkinson.
'She's so tied to Los Angeles in the imagination, even though arguably other parts of California are more formative for her,' says Wilkinson.
Didion was born and raised in Sacramento and died in 2021 in New York, where she'd spent the last several decades of her life. But her 20 years in Los Angeles left a lasting mark on both her and the city.
The Los Angeles that Didion describes in her books — and specifically 'The White Album,' from which Wilkinson borrows her book's title — isn't as tangible as the Los Angeles described by her frequently invoked counterpart, Eve Babitz. Though both women were socialites, Babitz's writing was set in glam restaurants and glitzy hotels. Didion's Los Angeles often took place in the imagination.
'She's interested in very specific aspects of the geography and of the weather and the water and the fires and the winds and she writes about all that stuff, but for her California is an idea that governed her life,' Wilkinson says of Didion. 'And it is the idea that kind of wraps up with American expansion and Western pioneers and courage and John Wayne and all of that stuff.'
Even as she wrote about Los Angeles with detachment, Didion's prose showed affection. 'What is striking about Los Angeles after a period away from it is how well it works,' she wrote in a 1988 essay for the New Yorker about real estate in Hollywood . 'The famous freeways work, the supermarkets work (a visit to, say, the Pacific Palisades Gelson's, where the aisles are wide and the shelves full and checkout is fast and free of attitude, elevates grocery shopping to a form of zazen), the beaches work.'
For reasons both quotidian and tragic, much of the Los Angeles that Didion described in her writing is gone — or at the very least unrecognizably altered. The Pacific Palisades Gelson's was reduced to ashes in January. The Trancas Market she mentions in 'The White Album' is now the Starbucks at Trancas Country Market. I. Magnin, the department store where she bought a dress for Manson family member Linda Kasabian to wear to court on her first day on the stand, is now a Saks Fifth Avenue. Ma Maison, where Didion often dined with her husband — which also became central to a feud between the couple and Dunne's brother, Dominick, whose daughter was murdered by the sous chef there — closed in 1985 and its location on Melrose Avenue remains vacant. And, of course, the Malibu that was once her home is now irrevocably changed by both time and fire.
But as much as things have changed, they also have stayed the same, and if you search real hard you can still experience Joan Didion's Los Angeles — which is not just a place but a vibe. Here are our suggestions on how to do just that.