Slouching Towards Bethlehem

Didion begins the essay by saying that people who claim to have been to California while only referring to the regions around Los Angeles or San Francisco do not understand California as a place. Didion herself comes from a family that has always been in the Sacramento Valley (which is part of the larger Central Valley), though she admits to the grand use of the term “always,” which she says is in line with the myth of California. She then outlines a brief history of Sacramento: a little-populated valley town until 1847, then a gold boom town, and then a farm town through the 1950s, when the outside world began to move in, which Didion argues made the town to begin to lose its character.

Didion relays some details about her childhood—swimming in the dangerous Sacramento River, being taught about the valley’s resemblance to the Holy Land, and the spring rains that brought flooding. In all of this, there was a particular insularity; one memory Didion has is of a woman dismissing a Pulitzer Prize winner because, “He never amounted to anything in Sacramento” (Page 175).

As an adult living in New York, Didion makes the trip home several times a year, and she notes that Sacramento’s primary characteristic is that it’s constantly disappearing.