This kitchen is in the Malibu house where Didion lived for eight years with her husband John Dunne and daughter Quintana – it stood equidistant from Hollywood (where the two wrote films together) and the San Andreas Fault.
Every morning, Dunne would rise, make a fire, give Quintana breakfast, and take her to school. “Then I would get up, have a Coca-Cola, and start work,” Didion remembers, in a recent documentary by her nephew, Griffin Dunne. The Coca-Colas were kept ice cold, and appear as essential to her writing routine as quiet and light. Those who pledged $50 or more to the crowdfunding of Griffin’s film received a copy of her personal cookbook. A scrapbook of food clippings from magazines, menus of the meals she served at dinner parties (for Patti Smith she made chicken hash with roasted yellow peppers and baguettes) and food-stained recipes, handwritten, with terse crossing-outs, its most revealing page was the recipe for a parsley salad, less as an illustration of her diet, or even for the way its sparse style reflects her prose, but more as an insight into her social reach: the salad feeds up to 40.
It’s not just that her recipes reveal her – reading her work you see Didion discovers herself this way too. In the notes she scribbled when covering the Patty Hearst trial in 1976 she unpicks her privilege through memories of fancy meals, mid-flight, “Lunching Aloft on Beltsville Roast Turkey with Dressing and Giblet Sauce,” then, “Stuffed Celery au Roquefort over the Rockies”.
Though she dwindled to 75 pounds, cooking seems to be for Didion, now 83, one of the rituals that helped her keep on living when everything (John died at the dinner table as she mixed a salad; Quintana died two years later, at 39) had shattered around her. After Dunne’s death there was a period when all she ate was congee; in the documentary she cuts the crusts off a cucumber sandwich while she reads from The Year of Magical Thinking, her report from the frontline of grief. Translating it into a play, David Hare took the opportunity to plump her up. He set up a table in the theatre, and a sign: Cafe Didion. Here he’d insist she ate, croissants and jam in the morning, sandwiches at lunch.
It seems reductive to tie Didion so tightly to death, but it’s there even in her recipe book. From the parsley salad for 40, the quantities shrink as time passes, to 12, to 8, to the cucumber sandwich, for one.
