Joan Didion’s Egg

“So that she would not have to stop for food she kept a hard-boiled egg on the passenger seat of the Corvette. She could shell and eat a hard-boiled egg at seventy miles an hour (crack it on the steering wheel, never mind salt, salt bloats, no matter what she remembered her body)… “

Joan Didion - Play It As It Lays

This isn’t her most known passage but it’s the one that changed my life. In high school - New Haven - my English teacher said, you don’t understand what it means to crack a hard boiled egg on the steering wheel while you’re driving on the LA freeway. No. I don’t. And now I need to. Maybe I always needed to. But now I know I do.

When people ask me why I came to Los Angeles I usually cite love and following a husband with a blossoming screenwriting career. But today I am remembering Joan Didion’s egg. On the wheel. And all that it meant about what I could never know about life if I didn’t move here. To this mysterious place. To this place with so much sun that you know that the darkness is all your own.

I’ll be rereading. Grateful for being lead to her at a tender age, for this body of work and the inspiring human who created it.

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