Joan Didion’s Malibu moments

It was “…the kind of day when Catalina floats on the Pacific horizon and the air smells of orange blossoms and it is a long way from the bleak and difficult East,” wrote Joan Didion of the languid, carefree days she spent in Malibu with her husband John Dunne and daughter Quintana Roo.

The influential journalist and author found her spiritual home there during the ’60s and ’70s, where she recalls barefooting it across the Pacific Coast Highway in a bikini straight from the beach to the old Trancas market. It was a lifestyle that was both casual and imbued with a spirit “of shared isolation and adversity”, she wrote. Today, Malibu is still as much a state of mind as it is a 27-mile slice of California coastline.

One of Didion’s favorite Malibu experiences, as immortalized in her 1979 collection of essays, The White Album, was visiting Amado Vasquez’s Zuma Canyon Orchids on Bonsall Drive – Vasquez even named an orchid the ‘Quintana’. Stocked with thousands of white butterfly orchids and rare yellow, red, gold, and fuchsia hybrids, the orchid nursery is still open to visitors today.

However, to really experience Malibu’s wild coast like Didion, rent a yellow Corvette Stingray from Legends Car Rentals and drive out to Neptune’s Net seafood shack for Sunday lunch, where bikers and surfers come for the weekly clam chowder parties. The best place to stay is the Malibu Beach Inn, a charming gathering of beachside apartments, where you could imagine Didion’s signature 1969 yellow Corvette parked in the driveway, and the writer herself hanging over the stone balustrade, cigarette in hand, listening to the waves crash below.