“bless each door that opens wide”: how living in 1960s Los Angeles heightened Joan Didion’s anxiety
“We tell ourselves stories in order to live,” proclaims Joan Didion in The White Album, a collection of essays published in 1979. What was the opening line of the book’s titular essay has now become almost a rallying cry for writers everywhere living with depression and anxiety. This is what we do when we have no remaining will to live, when it feels as though our clock has run out, when death feels imminent and unavoidable. We tell ourselves stories of a life yet to be lived, of hopes and dreams that have not yet come to fruition but still might someday, of an existence more appealing than our own, because that is how we protect our sanity when life no longer feels worth living.
The prolific writer spent her life in portions, lost and found between New York, Los Angeles, Sacramento, and even an “eccentric amount of time in Honolulu.” While Didion’s physical location surely had an impact on her life, the state of her mental health — namely her experiences with depression and anxiety — serve as a more accurate indicator of how Didion interpreted her surroundings. When she is living in Hollywood, Didion finds herself fascinated by Los Angeles County murder trials — namely that of Paul and Tom Ferguson as well as the Manson Family. She is particularly enrapt with their stories as they pertain to a framed poem at her mother-in-law’s West Hartford, Connecticut home. “God bless the corners of this house,” began the verse she avoided on each visit, ending with, “And bless each door that opens wide, to stranger as to kin.”
But Connecticut is not California, and Didion wouldn’t dare to bless any door that opened to strangers. After all, that is the very way in which the Ferguson brothers and the Manson Family preyed upon their victims, by arriving at their doorstep of their homes and devising a reason for entry. Didion took to writing down the license plate numbers of the panel trucks that would cross her path, convinced that there would come a time that the police would need to utilize her records as evidence. Her anxiety recorded these numbers — of “panel trucks circling the block, panel trucks parked across the street, panel trucks idling at the intersection” — a realization she would only come to after the fact.
Didion spent those years of her life in a haze, noting that it was difficult to surprise her or gain her attention. And understandably so. After all, that’s what mental illness does, it causes loss. It’s easy to lose parts of yourself to depression or anxiety, and existing with both at once can often feel like an erasure of self. It makes you fearful and also disinterested, curious about the future but terrified about what might come your way. And so Didion collected license plate numbers, determined to protect a future version of herself that might have faced the same fate as the victims she read so much about.
written for literary journalism at loyola marymount university
