Appreciation: How Joan Didion punctured California narratives about manifest destiny ... with a potato masher
LOS ANGELES — Can a single object contain within it the narratives of a family and an entire nation? If so, for Joan Didion that item may have been a potato masher.
The masher in question — a humble kitchen implement whose creation dates to the first half of the 19th century — made the arduous overland journey west some time in 1846-87 with her ancestors, the Cornwalls, a faction of the Donner-Reed Party that had been smart (or lucky) enough to make for Oregon instead of California once they hit Humboldt Sink, Nev., thereby avoiding a winter impasse in the Sierra Nevada, not to mention one of the most infamous episodes of cannibalism in American history.
Sacralized by family lore and more than a century and a half of American history, the masher served as deadpan
