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Joan Didion's Lifelong Obsession With Snakes

Joan Didion was a bit of a goth. Beginning with her first short story about death in the desert, she was drawn to dark subjects: cannibals, bikers, Jim Morrison, Dick Cheney. Her favorite house was the old governor's mansion in Sacramento, a towering compendium of gothic arches and Victorian cupolas. As a teen, and for years afterward, she would drive to the outskirts of Sacramento, park next to the Matthew Kilgore Cemetery, sit on the fender of her car, and read a book. In these three acres of white marble gravestones, her connections to the land ran deep. Her great-great-great grandparents, Matthew and Massa Kilgore, and their children and grandchildren are buried in the cemetery's southeast corner. The Kilgores tried to build a ranch in this area east of Sutter's Fort, but the deluges defeated them, so they moved closer to the Sacramento River, where earthen levees were being built. The obelisk that marks the final resting places of the Ohio-born patriarch and matriarch remains. Its inscription marks the precise ages of Matthew (81 years and two days) and Massa (77 years, four months, and 29 days) on their deaths in 1882 and 1876.

Decades later their pensive descendent regularly drove to this still-quiet refuge to read in the company of dead souls. Then one day, as Joan pulled up to park, a rattlesnake slithered from behind a broken stone only to disappear in the grass. "I never again got out of the car," she wrote in Where I Was From.

Joan Didion had an obsession with snakes. They are almost comically prevalent in her writing—or rather, fear of their presence is everywhere.

Snakes make their first appearance in the third paragraph of her first book, set in Sacramento, Run River. Everett, the husband of the central character, Lily, has a .38 with which he once shot a snake, a foreshadowing of worse violence to come. In chapter six, Lily recalls being afraid of possible snakes in an irrigation ditch and Everett picking her up and holding her to soothe her. In Didion's famous "love song" to John Wayne, "There had been ahuehuete trees in Durango; a waterfall, rattlesnakes." Snakes are so central to Play It As It Lays that the original cover features a coiled serpent; Quintana called it "the snake book." In her essay "Los Angeles Notebook," Didion's neighbor hears a rattlesnake. In Blue Nights the house cleaner yells "Vibora!" to rattle a nosy social worker. Joan recalls running over a black snake in "On Keeping a Notebook." In "California Notes" she writes of "rattlers in the dry grass" and of the California novelist Gertrude Atherton "cutting snakes in two with an axe." (Here was a feminist role model Didion could embrace!) Writing for Vogue in 1961, she references the superstition that "self-respect is a kind of charm against snakes." In 1965, she is in Death Valley and she imagines she hears a rattle-snake, "but my husband says that it is a faucet, a paper rustling, the wind." Also that year, writing about her childhood in "Notes from a Native Daughter," she admits, "I was a nervous child, afraid of sinkholes and afraid of snakes, and perhaps that was the beginning of my error."

In the documentary The Center Will Not Hold, the director, her nephew Griffin Dunne, asks Didion about her reptilian obsession. "They were always on my mind," she says. "You had to avoid them."

Then she turns the tables on her questioner: "Do you have snakes?" she asks, grimacing.

"I just take a rake and kill them," Dunne attempts to reassure her.

"Killing a snake is the same as having a snake," she says, not mollified.

Snakes are an extremely common literary motif, of course, playing the main villain in the Book of Genesis itself, and in her youth, Didion bought into pastoralism. In a 1962 review of Evelyn Waugh for the National Review, she wrote, "the banishment from Eden is our one great tale," adding that "hardness of mind"—the moral clarity whose rarity she lamented—is "almost invariably held at arm's length, the way Eve should have held that snake."

Courtesy of HarperCollins Publishers

The obviousness of the serpent metaphor may seem beneath the rhetorical talents of the queen of literary journalism. But for Didion, the fear was real, not merely symbolic. She grew up in a landscape where snakes were plentiful. California has almost 50 species, including seven types of venomous rattlers. Snakes were more than a literary device for Joan: They embodied a very real but also primal, even ancestral, fear.

It was Joan's grandfather—Herman Jerrett, a miner and writer—who taught Joan the "code of the West" when it came to rattlesnakes: If you see one, kill it. If that meant getting out of the car and going into the brush after it, so be it. That was your duty to the next person who might come across this vermin and not have the luxury of a car or a shotgun or an axe.

Joan Didion relentlessly hunted snakes in human form, even as she spread the fruit of knowledge. You could say it was her prime objective: to expose corruption, lies, cruelty, hypocrisy, and the abuses of power.

Read More: Joan Didion Wrote About Grief Like No One Else Could

Because she hosted Hollywood parties where authors, politicians, artists, and stars mingled, then carried on this tradition on New York's Upper East Side, and because she wrote about LA, and New York, and Miami so memorably, we tend to think of Joan Didion as an urbane, urban figure. But it is fundamental to her identity that she grew up in a natural environment. At one point she wanted to be an oceanographer, and in a world where STEM is encouraged for girls, maybe she would have been. A love of nature—particularly flowers, ocean, and sky—as well as a fear of nature—fires, floods, and snakes—animate her writing and are central to the core of who Joan Didion was. "Don't you think that sometimes people are formed by the landscape they grow up in?" she said in a 1971 interview. "There's a picture of the valley there, that particular look of absolutely flat land and that sense of things growing, it formed everything I ever think of or ever do or am."

A close reading of Didion's work reveals that a prime agenda was to expose the moral bankruptcy of the myth of the golden land and the entire rhetoric of westward expansionism. Her subject was the American empire. It took her years to fully grasp and articulate this, in part because she resisted it, especially as long as her parents were alive. "I didn't want to figure out California because whatever I figured out would be different from the California my mother and father had told me about," she said in 2006. There are topics—the fate of the Miwok Indians, the exploitation of Mexican immigrants in the fields that her family owned, for instance—that she never did publicly address. But in incremental pieces—speeches, essays, notes—that were then gathered together in 2003, after her parents' deaths, as Where I Was From, she clearly and overtly reveals and removes her blinders on her own past. She deconstructs the fallacies of her own first novel, Run River, and its perpetuation of frontier myths. She interrogates California narratives written by authors from Josiah Royce to Frank Norris to William Faulkner to Joan Didion. She documents exclusionary institutions from the Bohemian Club to the Spur Posse.

Released from her loyalty to her mother, Eudene Didion—the woman who gave her the tools and instructions to start writing at age five, and to whom she was so deeply bound that she interred Eduene's remains in the same columbarium as her husband John Gregory Dunne, her daughter Quintana Roo, and finally, herself—Joan Didion lets it all go: "All of it . . . The dream of America, the entire enchantment under which I had lived my life." Like her foremothers, she breaks clean with everyone and everything she knew.

Herman Jerrett taught his children to kill rattlesnakes on sight. Years later, when Joan Didion saw the rattler at Kilgore Cemetery, she never even got out of the car. The Didion women violated the code of the West.

There are other ways to handle phobias, ways to kill your fears not their subjects. As a child, Didion may have seemed scared, weak, nervous. But beneath that external frailty, she developed a core of iron. She eventually learned not to try to run from or annihilate her terrors. She faced them. She stared them down.

Adapted from THE WORLD ACCORDING TO JOAN DIDION by Evelyn McDonnell. Copyright © 2023 by Evelyn McDonnell. To be published by HarperOne, a division of HarperCollins Publishers. Reprinted with permission

Cat-Eating Albino Python Terrorizes Trailer Park

A gargantuan 13-foot albino python has been wreaking havoc across an Oklahoma City trailer park, devouring several felines during its time on the run.

Trevor Bounds of Red Beard Wildlife Control, who was hired to catch the snake from the Burntwood Mobile Home Park, estimated that the snake is a yellow-colored reticulated python around 13 feet long.

Bounds was hired by the park last week, but stated that the snake has been roaming the area for up to five months, and was responsible for the spate of missing cats.

Stock image of an albino reticulated python. A 13-foot albino reticulated python is on the loose in a trailer park in Oklahoma City. ISTOCK / GETTY IMAGES PLUS

"We're talking, that thing has been eating opossums, foot-long rats, and cats," Trevor Bounds of Red Beard Wildlife Control, who was hired to catch the snake from the Burntwood Mobile Home Park, told local news station KFOR last week. "The mouth on that thing is the size of your foot and when it opens up you're going to be able to fit something pretty large in there."

Residents of the park told KFOR that management urged them not to speak to the media about the snake, and even threatened some with eviction if they did.

Reticulated pythons are the longest snakes in the world, and are native to South and Southeast Asia. These huge snakes are non-venomous, instead killing their prey by suffocation, winding their long muscular bodies around their victims.

"The constricting is what can be the dangerous part," said Bounds. "You can't have small children or pets going near this thing, that's why this should've been tackled a whole lot sooner. Things could have gotten much worse."

"They can get up to 24 feet if you let them, maybe longer. The body on this snake is like Mike Tyson's bicep but 13 feet long," he said.

The snake is likely an escaped pet, Graham Alexander, a professor of herpetology, at the University of the Witwatersrand in South Africa, told Newsweek.

"Given that the snake is an albino, it is likely that it was a pet snake," he said. "Thus I would guess that it would not be inclined to see human children as potential prey, but you cannot be sure. I would guess that a 13-foot Burmese python would be able to ingest only a pretty small child (probably max 3 years old). However, I can not be categorical about this (people tend to exaggerate when it comes to snake size although based on the photo, it seems it is about that size)."

Alexander agrees that a snake of this size is likely responsible for the missing cats, as it would be capable and willing to eat pets.

"I would assume that a snake like this would consider domestic cats as prey and so it would not surprise me if it consumed cats and small dogs," Alexander said.

Bounds initially found signs that the snake had made a den below one of the houses at the park, discovering animal carcasses in the coral space. However, since his first visit, his hunt has been delayed, and the snake is nowhere to be found. He set up cameras to spot the tricky reptile, but has not caught sight of it yet.

Alexander suggested that using a sniffer dog might be a good way of finding the elusive reptile.

"Pythons are ambush predators—typically, the snake will remain in one spot waiting for a meal to come passed. This means that if it is in a suitably concealed spot, it would be very difficult to find. However they will move around and when active it would be far more detectable (especially since it is an albino)," Alexander said. "Pythons are detectable by trained sniffer dogs, and using a dog would probably be the most efficient method of locating the snake."

Newsweek has contacted the park's management company Yes! Communities for comment.

Do you have a tip on a science story that Newsweek should be covering? Do you have a question about pythons? Let us know via science@newsweek.Com.

What Do Dreams About Snakes Mean? 13 Different Snake Dreams Decoded

The mere thought of a snake slithering into your dreams may very well make your skin crawl, much in the same way as a dream about your teeth falling out. As with any dream, dreams about snakes may be your subconscious mind's way of sending you a message—and it's a message that you don't want to ignore. According to astrologer and dream interpreter Stephanie Gailing, author of The Complete Book of Dreams, dreams about snakes are a "big deal." What a dream about snakes might mean for you

Many people might be quick to write off a snake dream as a bad dream, perhaps due to the serpent's reputation, but it may also be a good dream that points to something positive in your life, like a personal transformation. Indeed, there isn't one way to interpret a snake dream; the meaning of a snake dream will largely depend on the thoughts and feelings of the dreamer and the context of the dream itself.

To figure out what a snake dream might mean for you, Gailing suggests a two-pronged approach. First, consider how your dream made you feel. For instance, were you afraid or fascinated by the sight of a snake in your dream? Your feelings may also be influenced by how you perceive snakes in your waking life. If you have a negative association with snakes, a dream about snakes may feel negative, too. Conversely, someone who views snakes in a positive light is likely to have different dreams about them. Dreams about snakes are less often about snakes themselves, but your own relationship with the serpents—and figuring out your own thoughts and feelings about snakes can help you land on a snake dream meaning that's specific to you.

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Secondly, you'll want to look at the context of your dream. According to professional dream analyst Lauri Loewenberg, author of Dream on It, the context of a dream, regardless of its theme, is the most important factor in decoding its message. "The biggest thing as to what the snake will mean is the context of the dream," she says. You might want to think about what the snake is doing, for instance, or what it looks like and whether it's venomous—all details that make a difference in the interpretation of a dream.

8 common dreams about snakes and what they mean

Snakes may present themselves in our dreams in various ways, and each dream will have its own unique message for the dreamer.

"Your dreams are your own messages from you to you in order to improve you, so in order for you to be able to figure out what you're telling yourself through the dream, always pay attention to what's said in the dream, or even more importantly, what you're thinking in the dream," says Loewenberg.

To start, here are eight common dreams about snakes and what they might mean, according to Loewenberg and Gailing.

1. If a snake is shedding its skin

If you have a dream about a snake shedding its skin, it could signal a personal transformation. "If the snake is shedding its skin, this would likely be about you shedding some old beliefs or old attitudes to reveal the new, shinier, sleeker version of you," says Loewenberg. It could also be a sign that you're afraid of change, particularly if you perceive the serpent as scary, says Gailing.

2. If you see a snake on a walk

Dreaming about a snake on a walk could imply that there's something in your life that you've been ignoring, says Gailing. Depending on the person, it might be a wake-up call to face an unresolved fear about something or an impending conflict or issue that you've been avoiding dealing with, she says, and the sight of the snake might be a sign that you need to address it.

3. If you see a dormant snake

A dormant snake can symbolize something or someone in your life that you perceive as a threat, says Loewenberg. Knowing that a snake is lurking nearby can set anyone on edge, so consider what might be causing you a similar feeling of stress in your waking life. It's not yet as urgent as a snake attacking you, but it's something to keep an eye on.

4. If a snake is attacking you

"If a snake is attacking you, the action of being attacked will correlate to somewhere in your life where you're feeling attacked," says Loewenberg, and the snake could potentially symbolize that situation. She adds that if the snake (or any creature, for that matter) is biting you, it might be that you were on the receiving end of someone's critical or "biting" remarks.

5. If a snake is attacking someone

"It is very possible that if you're witnessing a snake attack, it could be that there is someone around you whom you're witnessing being in a difficult situation with someone else," says Loewenberg, and if that dream is accompanied by feelings of concern rather than fear, it could reflect your worries about someone that you care deeply about, like a family member or a friend.

6. If you see a snake in your bedroom

If you dream about a snake in your bedroom and it leaves you intrigued rather than distressed, it may be reflective of your "creative life force or sexuality," says Gailing. It could be that you're dedicating too much creativity to an aspect of your life, or you lack creativity. In terms of your sexuality, it might suggest that you're being dishonest about your sexuality or you are uncertain as to whether a current situation is sexually satisfying.

7. If you see multiple snakes

"If there are many snakes in your dream, it could mean that you're in a toxic environment or that there are many toxic elements around you," says Loewenberg, with the snakes symbolizing the toxicity. As you interpret your dream, consider if you're in a current situation in real life—and if you are, it might be your subconscious trying to tell you to free yourself from whatever is causing you to feel uncomfortable or unsafe.

8. If you keep seeing snakes in your dreams

Whether you're having recurring dreams about a snake or some other thing, your subconscious is telling you to pay more attention, says Gailing. Loewenberg previously told Well+Good that dreams are often linked to an unresolved point of conflict or tension or an unhelpful behavior pattern in a person's life. As such, it might be a telltale sign that you need to face the situation that is causing you distress or break old patterns of behavior.

4 other possible meanings of snake dreams

If your specific dreams about snakes don't fit into any of the above dream scenarios, your dream might signify something else altogether. Below, Gailing and Loewenberg outline four overarching themes that are typically linked to snake dreams.

1. Healing

"Snakes are an incredible symbol of healing," says Gailing, who calls to mind the caduceus staff, which has long been a popular symbol of medicine. A snake can symbolize physical or emotional healing that's beginning to take place, says Loewenberg, and in your dream, this could manifest as a snake biting on a specific part of your body.

2. Temptation

Snakes have earned a devilish reputation due to their associations with the fall of man in the Bible. "Think of the snake tempting Eve to eat the apple," says Gailing, an association that instigated the idea of the snake as a "creator of chaos." Consider if you're purposely keeping a certain temptation at arm's length or you're protecting yourself from your own urges in your waking life.

3. Creative life force

"In many cultures, snakes are a symbol of … creative life force, says Gailing. The Ancient Greeks, Egyptians, and Native Americans, for instance, view snakes as symbols of fertility, rebirth, renewal, and immortality. "For some people, the snake can represent a spiritual shift," says Loewenberg, such as in the common dream of the snake shedding its skin, which could symbolize "the deeper and more spiritual self."

4. Factors outside your control

Snakes are mysterious creatures—they are secretive and often lie out of sight, and though not all snakes are harmful, some of them are venomous. Their mystery may give rise to intrigue, but for many people, it might bring fear—and our unknowingness of the serpent may symbolize factors outside our control, says Gailing. With this in mind, it could reflect worries about a lack of control in waking life.

5. A toxic force in your life

"In my many years of research and experience as a dream analyst, the most common thing that causes a snake dream is connected to someone in the dreamer's life that is toxic," says Loewenberg. The snake, she says, can be symbolic of "someone who exhibits low down dirty behavior," she says, so consider your thoughts and the context of the dream to figure out if there's a person in your life who is making you uncomfortable or unsafe.

What to do when you dream about snakes

"As with any dream, it's important to pay attention to it and unpack it," says Loewenberg, in order to understand its message. "You want to compare it to what's going on in your life right now, or particularly, what went on in your life the day before the dream because your dreams are a continuation of your thought process from the previous day," she says. Again, since the symbol of the snake will mostly depend on your personal associations with the serpent, consider how this type of dream applies to your unique situation so you can land on an interpretation that is specific to you.

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