Writing on the Wall

What Joan Didion knew.

Joan Didion in Los Angeles on Aug. 2, 1970. Sources: Kathleen Ballard / Los Angeles Times

In the summer of 1968, a woman checked herself into the outpatient psychiatric clinic at St John’s Hospital, in Santa Monica, California, after suffering what was described as an “attack of vertigo and nausea.” But it was something far more terrible than that, something that lives with all of us today.