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Cornell, say.” But then she read the first paragraph of A Farewell to Arms. She took the book home and typed the first paragraph of A Farewell to Arms on a solid Olivetti Lettera 22 typewriter. Four sentences, four commas, one hundred and twenty-six words, only twenty-three of which contained more than a single syllable. For the first time, another writer’s rhythms filled her like a tide and she gave herself to the motion. It was a solemn cadence, like something you’d hear at a funeral. As in the crossing stories she’d first encountered, much of Hemingway’s power came from leaving out information. “In the late summer of what year? What river, what mountains, what troops?” she asked herself. Unlike the pioneer mythmakers, Hemingway avoided abstractions. “I was always embarrassed by the words sacred, glorious, and sacrifice…” he wrote. “I had seen nothing sacred, and the things that were glorious had no glory…” He went on to say, “There were many words that you could not stand to hear and finally only the names of places had dignity.” This was a new perspective on the past—what would the stories really say if you scratched out the words sacrifice and courage ? If you stripped the stories to their place names? As she read more Hemingway—teaching herself typing skills by copying his “magnetic” words—she toughened her style. She began to hear a stronger music, to see a grander purpose, in writing, beyond just keeping records, though the impulse to note everything remained, along with the storm and the figure at its center. As Virginia Reed, a Donner Party survivor, wrote in a letter to one of her cousins, a passage Didion cherished and might have claimed as a credo, “I have not wrote you half the trouble we’ve had, but I have wrote you enough to let you know what trouble is.”

 
    Chapter Two
    1
    The California of Didion’s girlhood, during the Depression, offered enough open space to appear to be Eden still, especially to a child. The Sierra, where the Donners met their limits, still defied people’s efforts to tame them. The moody weather of the Sacramento Valley, which dictated the inhabitants’ physical and emotional rhythms, proclaimed daily its uncontrollability. In and around the Donner Pass, North America witnessed its heaviest snowfall, an average of thirty-seven feet a year. This formed an icy reservoir on the Sierra’s western exposure, which melted annually around the first of May, filling and sometimes flooding the Feather, Bear, Yuba, American, and Cosumnes Rivers, offsetting the baked summers, nurturing wheat fields, rice paddies, and orchards, sprouting berries, sugar beets, melons, plums, tomatoes, peaches, pears, walnuts, olives, cherries, and grapes.
    But this Eden was industrial. Silver irrigation pipes sprawled among wheat stalks sliced by whirring steel blades—and anyway, the wheat was beginning to thin. Bad planting practices had exhausted the valley soil. When Didion was a girl, the crusading writer Carey McWilliams lamented California’s “factories in the fields”; his calls, in newspapers and books, for better care of the land and the people who worked it guided John Steinbeck’s hand as he drafted The Grapes of Wrath. In the pioneer myths Didion grew up on, no mention was ever made of the gold rush as a technological enterprise, a drive to develop the mechanics of moving water across hostile terrain to support the miners. In her teenage years, Didion would hear from her mother, her teachers, and Sacramento’s leaders that newcomers, the federal government, and corporate bosses from the East were ruining California’s once-perfect environment, but, in fact, the land was already an android, artificial tendrils fused with the natural, sustaining an unholy agricultural system.
    That life in the valley was not pure or preordained was impressed most