The first lady of West Coast letters needs to share that honor with the Mexican diaspora

By Myriam Gurba
FROM: Electric Lit

Amado Vazquez, a Mexican botanist, named an orchid after Joan Didion. While that was a chic gesture, I don’t think of her as an orchid. I think of her as an onion. She’s very white, very crisp, and she makes people cry.

In high school, I came up with a nickname for Didion: the windy bitch. She blew into my consciousness senior year when our English teacher herded my classmates and me into the school library to take an Advanced Placement literature test. We sat on wooden chairs, reading, grinding our teeth, annotating, flipping exam pages. At the end of my booklet, I came upon an essay whose opening line grabbed me by my anxious balls: “There is something uneasy in the Los Angeles air this afternoon…” The noir paragraph described a place I actually cared about: California. Often, when we read for English, we “travelled” to places I didn’t want a passport to. The Roman Senate. Winesburg, Ohio. Boats.

But here was home. And home was the star. And I understood the weather that this white lady was writing about! She described regional winds, the Santa Anas, which had touched my family. These shook the windows of the Los Angeles furniture store my dad’s mom, Grandma Hope, ran with her second husband, Bob.

Amado Vazquez, a Mexican botanist, named an orchid after Joan Didion. While that was a chic gesture, I don’t think of her as an orchid. I think of her as an onion. She’s very white, verycrisp, and she makes people cry.

In high school, I came up with a nickname for Didion: the windy bitch. She blew into my consciousness senior year when our English teacher herded my classmates and me into the school library to take an Advanced Placement literature test. We sat on wooden chairs, reading, grinding our teeth, annotating, flipping exam pages. At the end of my booklet, I came upon an essay whose opening line grabbed me by my anxious balls: “There is something uneasy in the Los Angeles air this afternoon…” The noir paragraph described a place I actually cared about: California. Often, when we read for English, we “travelled” to places I didn’t want a passport to. The Roman Senate. Winesburg, Ohio. Boats.

But here was home. And home was the star. And I understood the weather that this white lady was writing about! She described regional winds, the Santa Anas, which had touched my family. These shook the windows of the Los Angeles furniture store my dad’s mom, Grandma Hope, ran with her second husband, Bob. Read Rest of Article Here