My hands on the turbine": Joan Didion, Water, and Control

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 1970s (“At the Dam,” “Holy Water”) and her 2003 memoir Where I Was From.