In California with Joan Didion: Horizons, Fears and Abysses along the West Coast
Book presentation with author Benedetta Faedi in conversation with Sara Marinelli
Thursday, May 7 | 6:30 PM
This presentation is in English
Free Admission | Registration required
On a June morning in 1948, an eighth-grade girl delivers her graduation speech to a sweltering audience at her school in Sacramento. Her name is Joan Didion. She is wearing a new dress of pale organza, green as the brief spring days when the wheat comes up. A crystal pendant at her throat wards off the heat. The speech is titled Our California Heritage, and it is the first of many works Joan will write about her land.
A fifth-generation Californian, Didion was born in Sacramento and spent most of her life in the state. She learned to swim in the Sacramento River before the dams, and to drive along its banks. And yet California remained impenetrable to her — a mystery whose contrasts, ambiguities, and contradictions she would spend a lifetime trying to explore.
Benedetta Faedi, a Californian by adoption, retraces this relentless search for understanding through Didion’s work, making it her own and weaving it into her story. It is a journey that unfolds across valleys and deserts, cliffs and oceans — touching on questions from that era that remain urgent today: the California dream, the promises and illusions of innovation, gender discrimination, the abyss of loss, and the color of endings.
ABOUT
BENEDETTA FAEDI
Benedetta Faedi is an Italian author and professor. She holds a doctorate from Stanford University and was a Fulbright Scholar at Kyoto University (2024–2025), where she researched gender equality in Japan.
She is the author of In California with Joan Didion (Giulio Perrone, 2025), as well as several picture books, including Una (2025), Coriandoli (2023), and Insieme e Uguali: la battaglia di Linda Brown contro il razzismo (2024). Her short stories have appeared in literary journals and anthologies, and she contributes to Limina and Nazione Indiana.
In English, she has published books on gender and children’s rights with Oxford University Press and Rutgers University Press, alongside numerous articles on gender discrimination and violence.
She teaches at the university and lives in San Francisco.
SARA MARINELLI
Sara Marinelli is a San Francisco–based writer who grew up in Naples, Italy. Her writing in English is published in Chicago Quarterly Review, ZYZZYVA online, New American Writing, and Blue Mesa Review; her work in Italian appears in Nazione Indiana, Leggendaria, Alias. A recipient of the 2024–2025 Brown-Handler residency at the San Francisco Public Library, Sara is a Teaching Artist at the San Francisco Opera and an award-winning educator at the University of San Francisco, where she teaches Comparative Literature and Creative Writing.