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reach a person for whom nothing mattered? How else to record events for a woman who doubted anything was worth recording?
    Eduene is often an unspoken presence in Didion’s prose. For example, in 1979, in a review of Norman Mailer’s The Executioner’s Song, a novel whose concerns include the lives of desert women, Didion wrote, “The authentic Western voice … is one heard often in life but only rarely in literature, the reason being that to truly know the West is to lack all will to write it down.” It is easy to see her mother’s listless shadow in the bones of that sentence (and to ponder the irony of her mother’s gift of a notebook). There is a “vast emptiness at the center of Western experience,” Didion wrote, “a nihilism antithetical not only to literature but to most other forms of human endeavor, a dread so close to zero that human voices fade out, trail off, like skywriting.” Mailer’s take on Western females impressed Didion with its dead-on accuracy: The women in the book are strong, depressed, unwilling to invest too much in words. They are “surprised by very little. They do not on the whole believe that events can be influenced. A kind of desolate wind seems to blow through the lives of these women.”
    As the daughter of such a woman, Didion may have felt hers was “one of those lives,” so prevalent in the West, “in which the narrative would yield no further meaning.” In the notebook essay, claiming impairment, she presented herself as the weak one in the family, the one discarded on the trail, perhaps seeing herself through her mother’s eyes. Yet she was also the survivor, the journalist, the one who noted the loss. “I have already lost touch with a couple of people I used to be,” she wrote near the end of the essay. And: in describing others, we attempt to trace ourselves. The “presentiment of loss” afflicting writers (and the children of Western mothers) is the sharp awareness of impending change and death, as clear as the color of day or the cold blue of an empty medicine bottle tossed from a covered wagon. The abandonment of the weak is the shedding of our own skin. So we leave our mark along the trail, though it makes little difference to those who come after us. A bent twig. A circle of rocks. A word in the sand. This is where I was from.
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    Didion never forgot she was a Westerner, never lost sight of her birthright’s grammar and its relationship to a particular worldview. In the Sacramento Valley of her childhood, rattlesnakes were common. They were part and parcel of the paradise her ancestors yearned for. So it was that she learned to equate facts with objects on the ground, and proper behavior—ethics, morality—with their placement. In this world, abstractions got you killed. You always kept a snake in your line of sight so it couldn’t surprise you. As a girl, Didion translated this advice to writing. Don’t dither and overlook the facts. If you miss them, the facts will rise up and bite you. If you see a rattlesnake, kill it so it won’t harm others. This, Didion’s grandfather (a former Sierra miner) taught her, was the “code of the West.” For her, it became a code of language: Nail the specifics. Imprecise expression was not just sloppy; it was harmful.
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    Snakes slithered around the Didion family cemetery when Didion was a girl but rarely ventured near the tombstones until she was a teen and vandals began ruining the graves, an activity that reached alarming proportions in the early 1980s, when someone dug up and stole a skull. The Matthew Kilgore Cemetery, east of Sacramento in Rancho Cordova, which became a rocket-manufacturing community for Aerojet General following World War II, was named after Didion’s great-great-great-grandfather. He left Ohio and settled in Sacramento in 1855. From him was descended Ethel