“My Hands on the Turbine”: Joan Didion, Water, and Control

Abstract

Water – California water – is a recurring presence in Joan Didion’s work, both her fiction and nonfiction; it is, indeed, an “obsession. In this article I argue that water control – as epitomized by the Hoover Dam and California water history – has its counterpart in control over writing, the total command of Didion’s obsessively honed prose. I do so by analyzing two essays of the 1970’s (“At the Dam”, “Holy Water”) and her 2003 memoir Where I Was From.

Keywords

• joan didion
• water
• control
• the white album
• where i was from