What California Means to Writers

What about California captures the imagination of American writers? The state—the country’s most populous, and one of its most diverse—provides fodder for every sort of author.

This week, Ross Perlin wrote about Malcolm Harris’s new book, Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World, which argues that the titular city, as well as Silicon Valley at large, is responsible for “wreaking havoc on the planet and immiserating so many of its people.” But Perlin is slightly more optimistic: He thinks we could leverage the state’s history to positively change the course of its future. Californian geography can also affect us deeply, the science-fiction writer Kim Stanley Robinson argues. His book The High Sierra: A Love Story is a celebration of the Sierra Nevada, and explores a phenomenon he calls “psychogeology”: “the feelings and perceptions caused by the exposed rock, the light, the thinner air at altitude.” As Verlyn Klinkenborg wrote in July, Robinson’s book not only details his own sublime encounters but shows us how we might find “our own transcendence.”

Back at sea level, Anthony Veasna So’s story collection, Afterparties, evokes a completely different world, in what one character calls the “asshole of California”: In So’s fiction, Stockton and its outskirts are filled with relatives, insular communities, and family-run businesses. His characters are second-generation Cambodian Americans living in the “patchy remembrance” of the genocide perpetrated by the Khmer Rouge, and yet, according to the writer Zoë Hu, they are “just as likely to roll their eyes as they are to flinch” in response to stories about Cambodia’s concentration camps.

The “California writer” is an archetype that could not exist without Joan Didion. She was born in Sacramento and spent time in Berkeley, but is perhaps most associated with the southern part of the state. Last year, Caitlin Flanagan visited the places she lived, looking for the “Joan Didion who invented Los Angeles in the ’60s as an expression of paranoia, danger, drugs, and the movie business.” Around the same time, Eve Babitz invented a Los Angeles of her own. Babitz trafficked in gossip; in L.A., she wrote, “we don’t like news, we like artifice.” Both writers, who died in 2021 within days of each other, were undeniably shaped by the city. But their work also created a version of it—and of the Golden State—that lives on in the minds of their readers.

What We’re Reading

Illustration by Matt Chase / The Atlantic. Source: Getty.

Is Silicon Valley beyond redemption?

“California is worth fighting for, and so is Silicon Valley. If not at Stanford and in Palo Alto, the dynamic and destructive love triangle between technology, capitalism, and higher education would surely be happening somewhere else. (An Austin System might be even worse.)”

Dennis Stockton / Magnum

A love letter to the ‘best mountain range on earth’

“[Kim Stanley] Robinson is no stranger to epiphany; many of his earliest Sierra outings included an acid trip along the way. But he never tries to lead us into the experience of epiphany, however it manifests itself. He’s alert to his own emotions but willing to stand outside them a little, not to diminish them but to understand how they complement his modest, pervasive rationality.”

Getty; The Atlantic

Welcome to the afterparty of the American dream

“Rather than stage his characters in easily comprehensible postures, gathering them around the mythic American dream at self-serious angles, [Anthony Veasna So] shows them to us as they loll about in the dream’s afterparty. Here the lights are dimmer, the truths blurrier, the hangover incoming..”

Illustration by Wayde McIntosh

Joan Didion’s magic trick

“I wanted to feel close to her—not to the mega-celebrity, very rich, New York Joan Didion. I wanted to feel close to the girl who came from Nowhere, California (have you ever been to Sacramento?), and blasted herself into the center of everything. I wanted to feel close to the young woman who’d gone to Berkeley, and studied with professors I knew, and relied on them—as I had once relied on them—to show her a path.”

The Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens

The ‘L.A. Woman’ reveals herself

“Gossip, [Eve] Babitz suggests, is a different, subaltern way of knowing—disdained by the (male) structures of power, but with a power (and an appeal) all its own.”