wrote Caitlin Flanagan, referring to what she called “Didion-mania.” Flanagan was fourteen in 1975. Her father, chair of the Berkeley English Department, was hosting Didion as a Regents’ Lecturer, a position established with the aid of Didion’s old teachers Mark Schorer and James Hart to bring to campus, for a monthlong teaching appointment and culminating public address, a scholar or artist who worked outside academia. Though Didion had published only two novels and a book of essays at that point, she had achieved a higher profile than most of her former classmates, and there was “the impression that she had returned to Berkeley a prodigal, but ready at last to put herself on the right path,” Flanagan said. Schorer had never relinquished his hope that she would come back to him from the crass magazine world, “put her nose to the grindstone of Henry James criticism,” earn her Ph.D. (better late than never), and take her proper place in front of a classroom. “Who can blame those two old teachers for wanting to bring their bright-eyed girl back to Berkeley, who can blame them for wanting to keep her forever in Wheeler Hall with the transom windows and the parquet floors and the Beaux Arts balconies and the perfect bay views?”
