Joan DIDION

It’s 1975, and the head of the English Department at the University of California, Berkeley is waiting for Joan Didion to arrive for dinner. He doesn’t know much about the magazine writer and novelist who spent her formative years at Berkeley, trudging around in a dirty raincoat and eating nuts from her pockets. Twenty years after graduating, she has been offered a prestigious teaching appointment at the university, and so this formal faculty dinner is in her honour.

Eventually, Didion walks in: five-foot-two at an exaggeration, dressed in a Chanel suit and white-knuckling a purse that she won’t set down the entire evening. She’s 41, but the vibe she’s giving off is of someone trying their best to look like an adult, but who might duck under the table any second. Once she leaves, the faculty decides this woman – ostensibly miserable, inarticulate, unsure of herself and wearing the entirely wrong thing (who wears Chanel to a dinner party? Apparently, no-one in the ’70s) – will be eaten alive in the classroom.

The department secretary, seeing an opportunity to humiliate Didion,.