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Mira Reese, who gave birth to Didion’s father, Frank, on January 1, 1908. Two hundred and forty-five graves pocked the land near the American River Grange, among pyracantha, oleander, and wild blackberries, on what had once been Matthew Kilgore’s 154-acre farm.
    At the Kilgore Cemetery, Eduene Didion, dropping her usual diffidence, impressed upon her daughter the meaning of being a fifth-generation Californian: It lay in the sacrifices etched into the stones with the bold strokes of chisels; in words such as faith, fidelity, courage, and integrity. Didion’s ancestors had come for the bounties of the land, spilled their blood among its blooms, and their burial in its soil anointed it—or so the story went. As an adult, Didion would learn that the family cemetery had been sold amid ugly bankruptcy proceedings, the way so many ranches in the valley had been subdivided and auctioned off. So much for sacred ground. In November 2011, recounting for a Los Angeles audience the day her mother told her of the sale, Didion choked up. It was the “selling of what I had preferred to think of as heritage,” she said: the end of the fairy tale, “a total collapse of the narrative.” As part of that collapse, an auto-salvage yard, America Auto Wreckers, would set up shop next to Sacramento’s Home of Peace Cemetery, antifreeze leaking and spreading into some of the oldest Jewish graves west of the Mississippi River; in the mid-1950s, the remains of more than five thousand pioneers would be exhumed from the Helvetia Cemetery and dumped in mass graves in order to accommodate urban growth. The old headstones would be scattered in people’s backyards for children to play among. Perhaps at this point, Didion’s mother began to relinquish what little faith she had had in the promise of California. Her depression grew, along with a grim recalcitrance. In succeeding years, she would threaten to leave the state “in a minute. Just forget it,” Didion recalled.
    As a child, though, Didion learned from her mother to revere the pioneer past, to bear solemnly the memories of those who had come before. Eduene may have doubted anything was worth recording, but as a mother she had to stick to family rituals; if nothing else, the family’s social standing depended on an allegiance to the past. It was a descendant’s duty to preserve the elders in the form of inscriptions, jottings in journals, as well as in the weavings and quilts, the smoothed rocks and blue glass bottles they left behind, objects lining the dark rooms of Didion’s childhood homes. A quilt, a page of prose: Both were talismans, reminders of what is and is no more. Perhaps this is why Didion never kept diaries of her own: She was taught that writing was not self-expression or indulgence; it was history.
    At the Kilgore, kneeling in the shadows of granite spires, Didion saw the costs of where she was from, the losses of so many parents and their need to mark the days of their children: “Our darlings,” one year and nine weeks, two years and ten months, stillborn, here and gone.
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    Writing did not get more precise than in tombstone inscriptions. Beloved Daughter, Wife, and Mother, Born, Died. Facts, as lightning-sharp as the strike of a snake.
    When she was twelve, and had been scrawling in notebooks for six or seven years, Didion discovered similarly sharp writing in the work of Ernest Hemingway. She had been going to the local library with a note from her mother saying it was okay for her to check out “adult” books (she had free reign in the library but “wasn’t allowed to listen to the radio because there were scary things on it”—that is, fallout from World War II). Mostly, she read biographies. “I think biographies are very urgent to children,” she would say later. They “told how you got from the helpless place I was to being Katherine [ sic ]