Joan Didion's 'lost' commencement address, revealed

The late author's 1975 talk is considered one of the best of its kind:

I’ve never talked to this many people, but this is not my first engagement as a Commencement Lecturer. I spoke at my eighth grade graduation in 1948, and my topic then was “Our California Heritage.” I was graduating that year from an elementary school in Sacramento County that was in a district that was just in the process of changing from rural to suburban. You know, the kind of school in which some of us had sheep dogs – dogs that ran sheep – and some of us had fancy Old English Sheep Dogs.

When my talk on our California heritage began, my mother saved it for me. It was written out in pencil: “One hundred years ago our great-grandparents were pushing America’s frontier westward to California. Those who came to California were not the self-satisfied, happy and content, but the adventurish, the restless and the daring. They were different even from those who settled in the other western states; they didn’t come for homes and security, but for adventure and money.”

There was more in that rather predictable vein. There was a part about how our great-grandparents had pushed over the mountains and built golden cities. And there was the part about how those great-great grandparents of ours had come to make a killing instead of a community, that maybe there might be some ambiguities in this heritage of ours, a little serpentine among the gold in those golden cities our relatives had built.

But I believed, ambiguities to one side, that California was my heritage. And I also believed that it was the heritage of everybody else in the auditorium in Arden School that day.

My great-great-grandparents HAD come across the mountains a hundred years before, and I sincerely believed that everybody else’s had, too. I believed that we were all – every child, and every parent, and every teacher in the auditorium that day – children of the same frontier, participants in the same myths, communicants in the same social sacrament.

Now, of course, we were not. I didn’t know that at the time, but I know it now. I see the day very clearly: I was wearing a pale green organdy dress that my mother had made for me, and I had on a crystal necklace which I remember because it was a hot day in Sacramento and crystals are cold on your neck, and if you’ve got something cold on your neck in the afternoon sun in Sacramento, you think you have made it.

Read the entire address here