‘The domestic details spring to memory…’
Just thought I’d share one of my favorite openings to an essay written by one of my favorite writers, Joan Didion.
Rereading Vintage Didion today, a book of collected essays from throughout her career, I’m always astonished by the rhythm of Didion’s writing, the rising and falling cadences, her impeccable ear for dialogue, her piercing interpretations of the lives of her subjects and the times in which they—and she—lived. Not to mention what writer Michael Cunningham described as Didion’s “lethally perfect sentences, which she seems to sculpt out of dry ice.”
Anyway, here’s the opening section of her essay “Girl of the Golden West,” concerning the bizarre history of Patty Hearst.
***
The domestic details spring to memory. Early on the evening of February 4, 1974, in her duplex apartment at 2603 Benvenue in Berkeley, Patricia Campbell Hearst, age nineteen, a student of art history at the University of California at Berkeley and a granddaughter of the late William Randolph Hearst, put on a blue terry-cloth bathrobe, heated a can of chicken-noodle soup and made tuna fish sandwiches for herself and her fiancee, Steven Weed; watched ‘Mission Impossible and ‘The Magician’ on television; sat down to study just as the doorbell rang; was abducted at gunpoint and held blindfolded, by three men and five men who called themselves the Symbionese Liberation Army, for the next fifty-seven days.
From the fifty-eighth day, on which she agreed to join her captors and was photographed in front of the SLA’s cobra flag carrying a sawed-off M-1 carbine, until September 18, 1975, when she was arrested in San Francisco, Patricia Campbell Hearst participated actively in the robberies of the Hibernia Bank in San Francisco and the Crocker National Bank outside Sacramento; sprayed Crenshaw Boulevard in Los Angeles with a submachine gun to cover a comrade apprehended for shoplifting; and was party to or witness to a number of less publicized thefts and several bombings, to which she would later refer to as “actions,” or “operations.”
On trial in San Francisco for the Hibernia Bank operation she appeared in court wearing frosted-white nail polish, and demonstrated for the jury the bolt action necessary to chamber an M-1. On a psychiatric test administered while she was in custody she completed the sentence “Most men…” with the words “…are assholes.” Seven years later she was living with the bodyguard she had married, their infant daughter, and two German shepherds “behind locked doors in a Spanish-style house equipped with the best electronic security system available,” describing herself as “older and wiser,” and dedicating her account of these events, Every Secret Thing, to “Mom and Dad.”
