Malibu from Malibu Pier, August 1993
As for many people I expect, Joan Didion’s now classic The year of magical thinking made a lasting impression on me, so I was keen to read her essay “Quiet days in Malibu” when it popped up as a Library of America (LOA) Story of the Week back in November. I was also interested in the subject matter. Having lived in Southern California in the 1990s, I wanted to see what Didion had to say about Malibu, a place that has always conveyed the romance of Californian beaches to me, largely through Gidget! There, I’ve admitted my teen-girl secret.
What Didion had to say was not what I expected. She starts with:
In a way it seems the most idiosyncratic of beach communities, twenty-seven miles of coastline with no hotel, no passable restaurant, nothing to attract the traveler’s dollar. It is not a resort. No one “vacations” or “holidays,” as those words are conventionally understood, at Malibu. Its principal residential street, the Pacific Coast Highway, is quite literally a highway, California 1, which runs from the Mexican border to the Oregon line and brings Greyhound buses and refrigerated produce trucks and sixteen-wheel gasoline tankers hurtling past the front windows of houses frequently bought and sold for over a million dollars. The water off Malibu is neither as clear nor as tropically colored as the water off La Jolla. The beaches at Malibu are neither as white nor as wide as the beach at Carmel. The hills are scrubby and barren, infested with bikers and rattlesnakes, scarred with cuts and old burns and new R.V. parks. For these and other reasons Malibu tends to astonish and disappoint those who have never before seen it, and yet its very name remains, in the imagination of people all over the world, a kind of shorthand for the easy life [my emph]. I had not before 1971 and will probably not again live in a place with a Chevrolet named after it.
Things have, naturally, changed since Didion lived there for seven years through the 1970s, but only a little I think. Pacific Highway 1 still runs through it, alongside the beach, though the more inland 101 Freeway is the main north-south route. It is still home to many celebrities and other well-to-do living in expensive mansions. This opening paragraph, however, also introduces us Didion’s style – including her use of repetition (“The water off … The beaches at … The hills are …”) and quietly pointed commentary (as in “I had not before 1971 and will probably not again live in a place with a Chevrolet named after it.”)
This essay, published in a 1979 collection titled The white album, was in fact a reworking of two pieces published in Esquire in 1976. LOA’s notes say that those pieces “showcase the beach community” not through its celebrities but through “the lifeguards on the beach and the manager of a local orchid farm.” To these pieces, which form the bulk of the essay, Didion added the above-quoted introductory paragraph and a concluding section, about which more later.
The white album, LOA’s notes also tell us, opens with her famous line, “we tell ourselves stories in order to live”. The stories she tells in this essay are about “ordinary” people, as much as anyone, really, is ordinary. First up is lifeguard Dick Haddock. She introduces him thus – with that same use of repetition:
Dick Haddock, a family man, a man twenty-six years in the same line of work, a man who has on the telephone and in his office the crisp and easy manner of technological middle management, is in many respects the prototypical Southern California solid citizen.
She describes visiting his “office”, the lookout on Malibu’s Zuma Beach, on Thanksgiving morning in 1975, when
A Santa Ana wind was just dying after blowing in off the Mojave for three weeks and setting 69,000 acres of Los Angeles County on fire. Squadrons of planes had been dropping chemicals on the fires to no effect. Querulous interviews with burned-out householders had become a fixed element of the six o’clock news. Smoke from the fires had that week stretched a hundred miles out over the Pacific and darkened the days and lit the nights and by Thanksgiving morning there was the sense all over Southern California of living in some grave solar dislocation. It was one of those weeks when Los Angeles seemed most perilously and breathtakingly itself, a cartoon of natural disaster …
Oh no! As I post this story, we are suffering similarly from bushfires. We certainly feel that we are living in “some grave … dislocation”. Note too another of those pointed comments – on LA seeming “most perilously and breathtakingly itself, a cartoon of natural disaster”. Anyhow, Didion’s description of Haddock, his colleagues and their work, is respectful and evocative, recognising both the drama and the tedium of what they do.
The second piece is about another prototypical Southern Californian, “a Mexican from Mexico”, or “resident alien” (just as I, a wife, was a “derivative alien” to my husband’s “primary alien”!) Amado Vazquez is anything but ordinary, though, as he’s an expert orchid breeder for Arthur Freed Orchids. Didion shares with us her love of greenhouses:
all my life I had been trying to spend time in one greenhouse or another, and all my life the person in charge of one greenhouse or an- other had been trying to hustle me out.
And here, finally, was her opportunity to spend time in one! Again, in her chatty style, she explains the work of an orchid breeder – of stud plants, of orchid fertility, of the naming of plants, of the business of orchid breeding. She references that racist name-changing behaviour that white people often do, whereby the orchid named for Vazquez’s wife “mysteriously” becomes “Vasquez”.
But, I want to close on the short concluding section in which, after significantly mentioning the drowning death, “a casualty of Quaaludes”, of one of her 12-year-old daughter’s friends, she describes another horrendous fire:
Within two hours a Santa Ana wind had pushed this fire across 25,000 acres and thirteen miles to the coast, where it jumped the Pacific Coast Highway as a half-mile fire storm generating winds of 100 miles per hour and temperatures up to 2500 degrees Fahrenheit. Refugees huddled on Zuma Beach. Horses caught fire and were shot on the beach, birds exploded in the air. Houses did not explode but imploded, as in a nuclear strike. By the time this fire storm had passed 197 houses had vanished into ash …
This fire also destroyed three years of the orchid breeder’s work … Malibu, you see, with its peculiar geography, has is rife for natural disasters.
It was at this point that I realised the irony of the title. Through restrained, respectful reportage about the ordinary people of Malibu, Didion conveys that, in fact, Malibu is rarely quiet, and that few of its inhabitants enjoy an “easy life”.
Joan Didion
“Quiet days in Malibu”
First published: The white album, 1979 (sections published in Esquire in April and June 1976)
Available: Online at the Library of America
Whispering Gums 
What a gem of a review, WG! Some years ago in California – from LA to San Francisco – suddenly realising how essentially ugly the landscape – the (natural?) landforms, the vegetation – the barrenness, the dryness – actually was. Pockets of green, of attractiveness (yes, Pebble Beach, Carmel – within the large cities) but otherwise? Was it all just a Hollywood make-believe make-over? Earthquakes and deserts? The San Francisco afternoon mists helped me see another side to things – galleries, eateries, gardens and a vibrant intellectual life – oh! a great brewery, too – helped bring my negative perspectives back into a kind of balance., Between you and Joan Didion – more of that balance out of extremes! (Reading it all against the background of the tragic bushfires/losses/smoke and level of disquiet we don’t normally ALL suffer here in Australia – to this vast extent, I mean. And even that is referenced from Didion’s essay.)
Thanks Jim … having lived in and visited SoCal many times, I know exactly what you mean – but it has grown on me in its own special way! As for the fires. I wasn’t expecting that when I picked it up!
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What a brilliant review! Thank you.
Thanks Carolyn, glad you liked it.
i MUST listen to a Didion – maybe this one: I remember her name’s arising with frequency during the Non-Ficition Writing unit I did at UTS.
If you want to hear this, M-R, you’d probably need to look for The white album which is the anthology this comes from. However, if you can handle it emotionally, The year of magical thinking is well worth listening to.
Thank-you, O trusted reviewer !
Let me know if you do decide to listen to it too.
The tragedy of Canberra just now, my home town of 30 years – so much so that when I visited LA in 1982 I got pleurisy from a red alert smog in Pasadena. The years of Canberra’s clean air and clear skies had invalidated me for Los Angeles, where I’d spend ten of my younger years, and though nothing of the smog. Of course, I had lived most of them not far from Malibu.
Oh thanks Sara… I can understand exactly, even from my experiences in greater LA in the early 90s. Smog was awful at certain times of the year. But never experienced anything like some of the days we’ve had here.
P.S. Always have loved Didion. Great review.
Thanks Sara. Would love to read more of her.
There’s a terrific documentary about her on Netflix. Have watched it twice. Think I’ve read all her books now.
One day we will have to get Netflix, Sara. It will happen!
Enjoyable review of a fascinating essayist. Reading about Southern California in the middle of a Scottish winter would have seemed an exercise in the exotic in the 1970s as did listening to Joni Mitchell’s masterpiece album The Hissing Of Summer Lawns (a record that would seem to go quite well with some Didion!
Haha, thanks Ian … glad to have warmed up your days. Unfortunately, we here in OZ need no warming right now. We particularly don’t want hissing summer lawns.
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What a great review! I read The White Album last year, but you’ve made me want to go back and read this essay again.
Oh this is lovely to hear Cathy … did you review it? I will come take a look.
Except, I can’t see a search option on your current layout. Is there one?
There is (if you hit the three dots in top right hand corner) but I didn’t review it.
Thanks Cathy… I hit those three dotsthinking that might have been where it was hiding, bit I didn’t see the search bar. I think the screen bounced around a bit but I’ll try again. I suspected you may not have reviewed it as you didn’t specifically day you had – but I hoped!
Enjoyed reading thins. Malibu is such a weird place, increasingly threatened by the ocean and always threatened by wildfires. But the people, when you look past all the wealthy folks, are a varied and fascinating lot. I will have to read this essay sometime for sure!
Yes, do, Stefanie. I’m sure you’d like it. Didion’s writing is so good.
Sounds interesting. I have never been to Malibu though I have been nearby. I would probably read this before visiting.
I have been meaning to read The Year of Magical Thinking. I will likely read that first.
I would too, Brian, read The year of magical thinking first, I mean. It’s pretty much a classic now I’d say.
Gidget is one of many characters from the 1960s that I knew who they were -the Man from Uncle was another – but never saw. I love the idea of southern California, desert and ocean, but I won’t ever go there and I’d never heard of Didion. But as a reader of reviews of stories I’ll never read I really enjoyed how you picked out the important elements in her writing.
Haha, Bill… Love this comment for do many reasons.
But, ah, 60s TV, such simple days they seem.niw in retrospect.
Thanks for the review. I am reading ‘Slouching towards Bethlehem’ and enjoying it. Joan Didion is insightful, acerbic and leaves you with food for thought.
Thanks Literacee. I will try to read more of her as I love this story of writing.
An enchanting review of a magical writer. As a romantic myself I enjoyed every word. I spent a lot of time in Malibu in the late 1970’s. My best friend’s family built a beautiful house up on a towering hill overlooking the roaring Pacific Ocean. The canyons, the vegetation, the wild life that roamed the area was all a beautiful thing. Malibu always held a mystique to me, like the high school kid who oozed cool without trying. I remember witnessing spectacular sunsets that the sun appeared to be a red orange fireball that immersed its self into the vast blue ocean.
So thank you for sharing words that rewound the time machine in my soul. Much appreciated. 🙏
Why thanks Discover and Explore. I’m so glad you enjoyed the post, and, more, that you shared your feelings about Malibu.
Another Malibu story….
Malibu..
I can’t talk about my time at USC without mentioning Malibu which has a mystique that I cannot totally put into words. My first time there was with my Chi Phi Big Bro, Al. Al’s Porsche had the top down as we breezed along the 405 Freeway on a golden Southern California afternoon. We soon found ourselves hugging the winding curves of Pacific Coast Highway as we made our way to the Promised Land of Malibu. On our left lay vast sandy beaches dotted with surfers, and beach bunnies. On our right the steep hills of Malibu beckoned you to pay attention. I remember witnessing large houses that cantilevered off of these steep brown mounds of dirt. And what sticks in my memory most is the golden honey light that bathed all who were fortunate to be here.
On another enchanted evening, a few months later, I double dated with my roommate, Bob and two sorority girls. In our youthful awesomeness, we plopped our firm bodies down on the sand and staked our claim, as the sunset arrived to escort us into early evening. We all sat on the sand and talked. And talked. And at some point each couple started kissing. All the while, the soft roar of the Pacific Ocean was in the background.
Nearby, a bunch of teenage groups were scattered out amidst the fine white sand, and several of them lit small ‘camp’ fires that dotted the landscape. It was almost scripted—I thought the Beach Boys would pop out behind a lifeguard tower and start playing “Surfin’ U.S.A.”
Live this, Discover and Explore, particularly your “youthful awesomeness”. The Beach Boys often came to mind when I was living in Southern California.
Much appreciated. So many stories. So many souls.
Exactly!