In 2005, I read Joan Didion’s “Year of Magical thinking.” I didn’t get it. Not really. Didion’s personal tragedy was so far removed from my own life at the time shimmering with promise. My husband was still alive, and our little girl had just started the 3rd grade.

Some years later, I reread the book. This time, I got it. By then, I had been shattered by a breast cancer diagnosis. Newly widowed and overwhelmed by a grief for which there are still no adequate words, I too lived a year of “magical thinking,” persisting with little rituals and obsessions, pretensions that, together, helped me move forward to an uncertain future. Yes, it was a kind of madness.

Perusing the images out of Los Angeles in recent days, I am reminded again of Joan Didion. She is the writer wholly responsible for shaping my fascination with Southern California. While hers is an incomplete portrait of Los Angeles, it is nonetheless the one that has stayed with me since I was a young woman, stepping into the world with all boldness.

In a second-hand paperback copy of her 1968 Slouching Toward Bethlehem, I first learned of the Santa Ana winds. “It is the season of suicide and divorce and prickly dread, wherever the wind blows,” she wrote. It is the season of fire.

It is hard for people who have not lived in Los Angeles to realize how radically the Santa Ana figures in the local imagination. The city burning is Los Angeles’s deepest image of itself. Nathaniel West perceived that, in The Day of the Locust, and at the time of the 1965 Watts riots what struck the imagination most indelibly were the fires. For days one could drive the Harbor Freeway and see the city on fire, just as we had always known it would be in the end.
Los Angeles weather is the weather of catastrophe, of apocalypse, and, just as the reliably long and bitter winters of New England determine the way life is lived there, so the violence and the unpredictability of the Santa Ana affect the entire quality of life in Los Angeles, accentuate its impermanence, its unreliability. The winds shows us how close to the edge we are.

It is so difficult to see the edge when there’s an empty space where your life used to be.

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