I just wanted to pass along an article published by Deadline Hollywood a couple of days ago, “Few Words: Joan Didion Knew How To Report A Malibu Fire“.

The author pointed back to Didion’s taut description of an earlier fire in 1970.

But mostly, these Malibu fires make me think of Joan Didion. At the tail end of The White Album, in a piece called “On The Morning After The Sixties,” she described the big fire of 1978. It took her all of one paragraph, just 349 words. But I never forgot it, especially that sentence in the middle: “Horses caught fire and were shot on the beach, birds exploded in the air.”

No Twitter. No Facebook. That sentence had fewer words than the writing credits on this year’s version of A Star Is Born, wherein Didion and her late husband, John Gregory Dunne, share the honors with seven fellow contributors. But it said everything you needed to know about the ferocity of a fire that started in Agoura, got whipped by a Santa Ana wind, and then pushed across the hills toward Zuma Beach, burning 25,000 acres and 197 homes—remarkably like the current fire storm.

“Houses did not explode but imploded, as in a nuclear strike,” wrote Didion. Few words, and mostly short ones. But enough.

Coincidentally, among my flight reading on our long journey from Honolulu to Atlanta was another book of Didion essays, “After Henry”.

I can’t help returning to the title essay from time to time. It’s just an awesome bit of writing about life, people, relationships, and writing.

And I’ve been digesting another essay on writing in that same collection, “On keeping a notebook.”

She caught me off guard with an aside, as she described scrawled notes from one of her earlier notebooks.

“He was born on the night the Titanic went down.”

A simple phrase that prompts a long journey by the reader through history and memory.

According to one online comment, the sentence appears, in modified form, in a poem, Portrait of Viola by William Reichard.

“He was born the year the Titanic sank,” in Reichard’s version.

I like Didion’s better. It’s more specific. The birth, she says, was at night. A particular night. A closer connection.

What similar sentence would describe your birth?

I was going to write something, and then realized that I’ve got to check my memory on the time of day that I appeared on this earth. I think it was around 10 a.m., but it could have been p.m. That’s what I’ll have to recheck.