This project traces how Joan Didion engages with disorder and the breakdown of narrative telos in twentieth-century California. I consider how her work contends with the difficulties in maintaining a sense of center in a state whose founding myth involved chasing new frontiers—and how this myth and its failings have become part of the mythical geography of California. By analyzing Didion texts that set out different experiences of California, including the nineteenth-century Gold Rush, the 1960s counterculture, Hollywood and the advent of electronic media, and Cold War geopolitics, I show how she undertakes a progressive attempt at aesthetic experimentation through the manipulation of literary form, seeking to harness disorder as a powerful weapon against these myths and the sentimental Californian sensibility they have engendered and perpetuated. As part of this analysis, I place her work in dialogue with the emergent trends, critical conversations, and historical developments that shaped it, and which she sought to shape in turn. I show how treating Didion's corpus through the lens of her technical experimentation through form, and her repeated attempts to use Californian disorder as a bulwark against myth, establishes the distinct nature of her contribution to the ongoing postwar debate over representations of reality in a disordered America.