Didion's point

Over time Didion realized that the myth of the West was Janus-faced. On one side was the heroic pioneer, capable of bending the landscape to his will. On the other was the lonesome wanderer, who could appreciate her insignificance on a geological scale. In a review of Norman Mailer’s The Executioners Song, Didion applauded Mailer for capturing “that vast emptiness at the center of the Western experience, a nihilism antithetical not only to literature but to most other forms of human endeavor, a dread so close to zero that human voices fade out, trail off, like skywriting.” But those voices don’t disappear immediately. As she read Mailer’s novel, Didion also “remembered that the tracks made by the wagon wheels are still visible form the air over Utah, like the footprints made on the moon.” Even if the traveler couldn’t control the world, she could leave a lasting record of her solitary passage through it. 

Didion received this half of the Western mythos, like its more heroic elements, from her mother, who first gave her a notebook and told her to write down what she saw and felt. The purpose was to “remember what it was to be me: that was always the point.” Fierce loyalty to her own experience entailed being at odds with what others said it ought to be, but it also laid the foundation of her aesthetic vision. Didion admires the modernist painter Georgia O’Keeffe because O’Keeffe is “simply hard, a straight shooter, a woman clean of received wisdom and open to what she sees.” When critics offered their own interpretations of O’Keeffe’s paintings of flowers, she rebuked them: “I made you take time to look at what I saw … and you hung all your associations with flowers on my flower and write about my flower as if I think and see what you think and see—and I don’t.”

Paul Gleason, The Picture in Her Mind.