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The White Album
First published in 1979, Joan Didion's The White Album records indelibly the upheavals and aftermaths of the 1960s. Examining key events, figures, and trends of the era—including Charles Manson, the Black Panthers, and the shopping mall—through the lens of her own spiritual confusion, Joan Didion helped to define mass culture as we now understand it. Written with a commanding sureness of tone and linguistic precision, The White Album is a central text of American reportage and a classic of American autobiography.
224 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1979
About the author
Joan Didion
94 books13.6k followersJoan Didion was an American writer and journalist. She is considered one of the pioneers of New Journalism along with Gay Talese, Hunter S. Thompson, and Tom Wolfe.
Didion's career began in the 1950s after she won an essay contest sponsored by Vogue magazine. Over the course of her career, Didion wrote essays for many magazines, including The Saturday Evening Post, Life, Esquire, The New York Review of Books and The New Yorker. Her writing during the 1960s through the late 1970s engaged audiences in the realities of the counterculture of the 1960s, the Hollywood lifestyle, and the history and culture of California. Didion's political writing in the 1980s and 1990s often concentrated on the subtext of political rhetoric and the United States's foreign policy in Latin America. In 1991, she wrote the earliest mainstream media article to suggest the Central Park Five had been wrongfully convicted. In 2005, Didion won the National Book Award for Nonfiction and was a finalist for both the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Pulitzer Prize for The Year of Magical Thinking, a memoir of the year following the death of her husband, writer John Gregory Dunne. She later adapted the book into a play that premiered on Broadway in 2007. In 2013, she was awarded the National Humanities Medal by president Barack Obama. Didion was profiled in the Netflix documentary The Center Will Not Hold, directed by her nephew Griffin Dunne, in 2017.
Didion's career began in the 1950s after she won an essay contest sponsored by Vogue magazine. Over the course of her career, Didion wrote essays for many magazines, including The Saturday Evening Post, Life, Esquire, The New York Review of Books and The New Yorker. Her writing during the 1960s through the late 1970s engaged audiences in the realities of the counterculture of the 1960s, the Hollywood lifestyle, and the history and culture of California. Didion's political writing in the 1980s and 1990s often concentrated on the subtext of political rhetoric and the United States's foreign policy in Latin America. In 1991, she wrote the earliest mainstream media article to suggest the Central Park Five had been wrongfully convicted. In 2005, Didion won the National Book Award for Nonfiction and was a finalist for both the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Pulitzer Prize for The Year of Magical Thinking, a memoir of the year following the death of her husband, writer John Gregory Dunne. She later adapted the book into a play that premiered on Broadway in 2007. In 2013, she was awarded the National Humanities Medal by president Barack Obama. Didion was profiled in the Netflix documentary The Center Will Not Hold, directed by her nephew Griffin Dunne, in 2017.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 4,022 reviews
August 22, 2023
What a cunt, I love her
March 1, 2016
“We tell ourselves stories in order to live... We look for the sermon in the suicide, for the social or moral lesson in the murder of five. We interpret what we see, select the most workable of the multiple choices. We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images, by the "ideas" with which we have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience.”
- Joan Didion, The White Album
I wish I could dance like Fred Astaire and write like Joan Didion.
I find myself attracted to Joan Didion. The younger Didion, I can understand. She was a Miss shiv and a Ms shank. She was sharp, California cool, and seemed to slide clean and straight along a razor-thin line between madness and coldness that was absolutely sane, true and beautiful. But it isn't just the young Didion I find attractive. I dig the older Didion. The one who seems more hard-wrinkled priestess of the California desert than an elderly queen of cool laying in bed with another Goddamn migraine. I know this is the stuff of cults and hero worship. I know this is already a cliché. It isn't like I DON'T know my diet Coke is bad for me and that nothing is ever, EVER as advertised. But still I long, I lust, I linger too often over just the idea of Didion.
After reading her essays in 'The White Album', I think it would have been dangerous to breed Joan Didion with John McPhee. What rough New Journalism beast, its hour come round at last would awaken and slouch towards the New Yorker, the New York Times, and the New York Review of Books to be born? But where John McPhee is rolling hills and farmer's markets, Joan Didion is a raging river, breaking waves, and rock and roll. McPhee feeds you. Didion gives you the whiskey you might need after a bad dream, or bad trip. McPhee is a rocky mountain cut-through. Didion is an LA Freeway. I can't imagine my life without either. There are certain writers that make you want to read more. Didion is one of those writers that make you want to think and write more.
Be careful folks. You might fall in love with Joan Didion, but she sure the hell won't ever love you back.
- Joan Didion, The White Album
I wish I could dance like Fred Astaire and write like Joan Didion.
I find myself attracted to Joan Didion. The younger Didion, I can understand. She was a Miss shiv and a Ms shank. She was sharp, California cool, and seemed to slide clean and straight along a razor-thin line between madness and coldness that was absolutely sane, true and beautiful. But it isn't just the young Didion I find attractive. I dig the older Didion. The one who seems more hard-wrinkled priestess of the California desert than an elderly queen of cool laying in bed with another Goddamn migraine. I know this is the stuff of cults and hero worship. I know this is already a cliché. It isn't like I DON'T know my diet Coke is bad for me and that nothing is ever, EVER as advertised. But still I long, I lust, I linger too often over just the idea of Didion.
After reading her essays in 'The White Album', I think it would have been dangerous to breed Joan Didion with John McPhee. What rough New Journalism beast, its hour come round at last would awaken and slouch towards the New Yorker, the New York Times, and the New York Review of Books to be born? But where John McPhee is rolling hills and farmer's markets, Joan Didion is a raging river, breaking waves, and rock and roll. McPhee feeds you. Didion gives you the whiskey you might need after a bad dream, or bad trip. McPhee is a rocky mountain cut-through. Didion is an LA Freeway. I can't imagine my life without either. There are certain writers that make you want to read more. Didion is one of those writers that make you want to think and write more.
Be careful folks. You might fall in love with Joan Didion, but she sure the hell won't ever love you back.
October 24, 2020
I write a lot about sentimentality. Or, rather, how much I dislike sentimentality, in literature. (How annoying, my need to drone on about it. I apologize! And I apologize in advance for my future rants and repetitions on the subject.)
It's true. I can't stand it. Can't stand the experience of an author leading me to his or her beating, fluttering heart, via conveyor belt. FEEL THIS, says the author, oh, isn't it sweet?? Doesn't that make you want to cry? Cry, please, and here's a hand embroidered hankie. My mother stitched it, on her deathbed, at the tender age of 26.
It doesn't even need to be that obvious to get my panties in a knot. It just needs to be a finger, gravely pointing - look, look at this very meaningful thing, the thing I'm writing about, clutch it like a teddy bear, sleep with it at night, sniffling into the pillows. I don't want that finger pointing. I give the finger to finger pointing.
So here I am with Joan Didion, my first time with Ms. Didion, by the way, and gall darnit. She's got to be the least sentimental writer ever, or one of them (alongside Jerzy Kozinski), and I'm not having the sister-from-another-mother experience I anticipated. Don't get me wrong, I'm loving her compact style. I'm loving her powerful intellect. I'm loving her plugged in connections (she sat in on a recording session with The Doors, for goodness' sake). I also love the last line of each of the essays in this collection - always a succinct, knock-it-right-out-of-the-park summation that leaves you in admiration of the way this woman writes.
But. I wonder, often, when she mentions things like her diagnosis with MS as a passing comment that carries as much importance as the weather, seven Tuesdays ago... does this woman feel anything? How strange. Well of course she does. She's a human being. Her omissions say probably a great deal. But these essays are very hit and miss for me.
They are "hit" when they touch on subjects that interest me - the 60s counterculture, the Getty Museum, Georgia O'Keeffe and Doris Lessing - but they "miss" when the subject isn't inherently meaningful to me. LA highways. The Hoover Dam. I find my eyes crossing a bit at her over intellectualizing of these mundane topics. Even her criticism of the Feminist Movement (how dare women want childish dreams like fun, love, and fulfilment in their lives?) falls pretty flat for me, despite its daring and perhaps unique viewpoint, coming from an empowered woman.
I think it's because Joan Didion the person doesn't enter the equation much. Joan Didion's brain does, and that's a beautiful thing. But it leaves the reader in a strange place. If you aren't interested on an intellectual level about what Ms. Didion is writing about, it's unlikely that her writing will engage you. At least, that was my experience.
There's a part of "In the Islands" in which she discloses that she, her husband and daughter are on vacation in Hawaii for a week. They are there in lieu of filing for divorce. They are kind to each other. They lay on the beach. They don't say things they might have said. It's uncomfortable. Oh, I sighed. Finally, a portrait of this person's state of mind. She has a state of mind! It was a huge relief and propelled my reading forward. Never mind that the following bits about Hawaii then slowly ground my interest to a halt. Never mind the skimmed pages (I'm not proud of that, by the way). My interest resumed again a few essays later, when I learned the author suffers often from debilitating migraines. Ah! There she is again! The relief! She shares about the blinding pain, and how when it finally subsides:
"...There is a pleasant convalescent euphoria. I open the windows and feel the air, eat gratefully, sleep well. I notice the particular nature of a flower in a glass on the stair landing. I count my blessings."
It turns out this reader who laments sentimentality has learned that it's actually a necessary component. Don't tell me to care, definitely don't do that. But show me somehow that you do. Then, I'm all in.
It's true. I can't stand it. Can't stand the experience of an author leading me to his or her beating, fluttering heart, via conveyor belt. FEEL THIS, says the author, oh, isn't it sweet?? Doesn't that make you want to cry? Cry, please, and here's a hand embroidered hankie. My mother stitched it, on her deathbed, at the tender age of 26.
It doesn't even need to be that obvious to get my panties in a knot. It just needs to be a finger, gravely pointing - look, look at this very meaningful thing, the thing I'm writing about, clutch it like a teddy bear, sleep with it at night, sniffling into the pillows. I don't want that finger pointing. I give the finger to finger pointing.
So here I am with Joan Didion, my first time with Ms. Didion, by the way, and gall darnit. She's got to be the least sentimental writer ever, or one of them (alongside Jerzy Kozinski), and I'm not having the sister-from-another-mother experience I anticipated. Don't get me wrong, I'm loving her compact style. I'm loving her powerful intellect. I'm loving her plugged in connections (she sat in on a recording session with The Doors, for goodness' sake). I also love the last line of each of the essays in this collection - always a succinct, knock-it-right-out-of-the-park summation that leaves you in admiration of the way this woman writes.
But. I wonder, often, when she mentions things like her diagnosis with MS as a passing comment that carries as much importance as the weather, seven Tuesdays ago... does this woman feel anything? How strange. Well of course she does. She's a human being. Her omissions say probably a great deal. But these essays are very hit and miss for me.
They are "hit" when they touch on subjects that interest me - the 60s counterculture, the Getty Museum, Georgia O'Keeffe and Doris Lessing - but they "miss" when the subject isn't inherently meaningful to me. LA highways. The Hoover Dam. I find my eyes crossing a bit at her over intellectualizing of these mundane topics. Even her criticism of the Feminist Movement (how dare women want childish dreams like fun, love, and fulfilment in their lives?) falls pretty flat for me, despite its daring and perhaps unique viewpoint, coming from an empowered woman.
I think it's because Joan Didion the person doesn't enter the equation much. Joan Didion's brain does, and that's a beautiful thing. But it leaves the reader in a strange place. If you aren't interested on an intellectual level about what Ms. Didion is writing about, it's unlikely that her writing will engage you. At least, that was my experience.
There's a part of "In the Islands" in which she discloses that she, her husband and daughter are on vacation in Hawaii for a week. They are there in lieu of filing for divorce. They are kind to each other. They lay on the beach. They don't say things they might have said. It's uncomfortable. Oh, I sighed. Finally, a portrait of this person's state of mind. She has a state of mind! It was a huge relief and propelled my reading forward. Never mind that the following bits about Hawaii then slowly ground my interest to a halt. Never mind the skimmed pages (I'm not proud of that, by the way). My interest resumed again a few essays later, when I learned the author suffers often from debilitating migraines. Ah! There she is again! The relief! She shares about the blinding pain, and how when it finally subsides:
"...There is a pleasant convalescent euphoria. I open the windows and feel the air, eat gratefully, sleep well. I notice the particular nature of a flower in a glass on the stair landing. I count my blessings."
It turns out this reader who laments sentimentality has learned that it's actually a necessary component. Don't tell me to care, definitely don't do that. But show me somehow that you do. Then, I'm all in.
December 23, 2022
CI RACCONTIAMO STORIE PER VIVERE
C’è chi trova lo stile di Joan Didion irritante e artificioso, e la accusa di prendersi troppo sul serio, di mettersi sempre al centro della narrazione.
Io no.
A me piace la sua enfasi, mi piacciono le sue ripetizioni, il suo cominciare e finire periodi consecutivi con frasi identiche, l’uso che fa della congiunzione e (come direbbe Martin Amis, batte perfino una canzone di Leonard Cohen), il suo ritmo magnetico, la sua melodia, la sua ricerca di un’eco, il suo incedere a colpi di ‘mi ricordo’.
Amo la sua scrittura evocatrice che rispecchia sempre la sua personalità.
Scrive e riscrive, batte a macchina ogni frase e ogni pagina più e più volte, come cominciò a fare da adolescente con Hemingway, costruisce un incedere, compone una musica di parole.
C’è chi la trova snob e priva d’ironia.
Io no.
A me piace da matti questa donna che dall’alto del suo metro e cinquanta per quaranta chili scarsi affronta assassini, presidenti, star e passanti mentre mi spiega cosa mette in valigia e mi racconta il suo referto psichiatrico.
Trovo molto ironica la sua presunta mancanza d’ironia.
E mi pare che il suo essere al centro della scena e del racconto apra prospettive nuove e conceda spazio, trasformi gli oggetti in soggetti, moltiplichi le angolazioni da cui guardare alla stessa cosa.
The White Album è una raccolta di saggi e reportage giornalistici, del tipo che hanno reso famoso nel mondo il cosiddetto new journalism (Capote docet).
Didion considera la nonficton come la scultura, e cioè dare una forma al lavoro di ricerca, d’indagine. Mentre la fiction è come dipingere, acquerelli, pennellate che anche se cancellate e riscritte rimangono in trasparenza.
In queste pagine non c’è inizio, e neppure finale: in mezzo ci sono tante storie, e c’è la storia di Joan.
Fino al punto di raccontare i giorni passati a letto con malditesta micidiali, l’emicrania che la tortura sin da piccola, le cefalee, i test che ha fatto in una clinica psichiatrica di Santa Monica, il referto finale.
Scrivere della realtà, un po’ della politica, soprattutto della cronaca, della vita sociale, dei costumi, delle cose di tutti i giorni - farlo con fantasia intelligenza acume e ironia, curando moltissimo lo stile - mettere tanto di sé, la propria personalità e anche la propria vita, i propri gusti e disgusti.
Perché da bambina voleva fare l’attrice, e poi capì che scrivere è un tipo di recitazione, e cioè mostrarsi a un pubblico di lettori per pronunciare battute, solo che il dialogo è tuo e non scritto da qualcun altro, solo che stai interpretando te stessa e non un qualche personaggio.
Al Pacino in “Panico a Needle Park” di Jerry Schatzberg, 1971, uno dei film sceneggiati da Joan Didion insieme al marito John Dunne. Dunne, la cui morte Joan racconta magistralmente in “L’anno del pensiero magico”, era lo zio di Griffin Dunne, attore protagonista in “Fuori orario” di Martin Scorsese e in “Un lupo mannaro americano a Londra” di John Landis.
In queste pagine istantanee dell’anima: la casa che i Reagan si fecero costruire a spese dello stato, il sistema delle acque in California, una session di registrazione dei Doors che non comincia perché Jim Morrison non arriva, la coltivazione delle orchidee, Georgia O’Keeffe, le Black Panthers, gli assassini della setta di Charles Manson, la villa museo Getty, Doris Lessing, le Hawaii, Bogotà, Holliwood, Malibu, il vento e gli incendi, il femminismo, i bikers movies, le autostrade e il tipo di guida che richiedono…
C’è chi trova lo stile di Joan Didion irritante e artificioso, e la accusa di prendersi troppo sul serio, di mettersi sempre al centro della narrazione.
Io no.
A me piace la sua enfasi, mi piacciono le sue ripetizioni, il suo cominciare e finire periodi consecutivi con frasi identiche, l’uso che fa della congiunzione e (come direbbe Martin Amis, batte perfino una canzone di Leonard Cohen), il suo ritmo magnetico, la sua melodia, la sua ricerca di un’eco, il suo incedere a colpi di ‘mi ricordo’.
Amo la sua scrittura evocatrice che rispecchia sempre la sua personalità.
Scrive e riscrive, batte a macchina ogni frase e ogni pagina più e più volte, come cominciò a fare da adolescente con Hemingway, costruisce un incedere, compone una musica di parole.
C’è chi la trova snob e priva d’ironia.
Io no.
A me piace da matti questa donna che dall’alto del suo metro e cinquanta per quaranta chili scarsi affronta assassini, presidenti, star e passanti mentre mi spiega cosa mette in valigia e mi racconta il suo referto psichiatrico.
Trovo molto ironica la sua presunta mancanza d’ironia.
E mi pare che il suo essere al centro della scena e del racconto apra prospettive nuove e conceda spazio, trasformi gli oggetti in soggetti, moltiplichi le angolazioni da cui guardare alla stessa cosa.
The White Album è una raccolta di saggi e reportage giornalistici, del tipo che hanno reso famoso nel mondo il cosiddetto new journalism (Capote docet).
Didion considera la nonficton come la scultura, e cioè dare una forma al lavoro di ricerca, d’indagine. Mentre la fiction è come dipingere, acquerelli, pennellate che anche se cancellate e riscritte rimangono in trasparenza.
In queste pagine non c’è inizio, e neppure finale: in mezzo ci sono tante storie, e c’è la storia di Joan.
Fino al punto di raccontare i giorni passati a letto con malditesta micidiali, l’emicrania che la tortura sin da piccola, le cefalee, i test che ha fatto in una clinica psichiatrica di Santa Monica, il referto finale.
Scrivere della realtà, un po’ della politica, soprattutto della cronaca, della vita sociale, dei costumi, delle cose di tutti i giorni - farlo con fantasia intelligenza acume e ironia, curando moltissimo lo stile - mettere tanto di sé, la propria personalità e anche la propria vita, i propri gusti e disgusti.
Perché da bambina voleva fare l’attrice, e poi capì che scrivere è un tipo di recitazione, e cioè mostrarsi a un pubblico di lettori per pronunciare battute, solo che il dialogo è tuo e non scritto da qualcun altro, solo che stai interpretando te stessa e non un qualche personaggio.
Al Pacino in “Panico a Needle Park” di Jerry Schatzberg, 1971, uno dei film sceneggiati da Joan Didion insieme al marito John Dunne. Dunne, la cui morte Joan racconta magistralmente in “L’anno del pensiero magico”, era lo zio di Griffin Dunne, attore protagonista in “Fuori orario” di Martin Scorsese e in “Un lupo mannaro americano a Londra” di John Landis.
In queste pagine istantanee dell’anima: la casa che i Reagan si fecero costruire a spese dello stato, il sistema delle acque in California, una session di registrazione dei Doors che non comincia perché Jim Morrison non arriva, la coltivazione delle orchidee, Georgia O’Keeffe, le Black Panthers, gli assassini della setta di Charles Manson, la villa museo Getty, Doris Lessing, le Hawaii, Bogotà, Holliwood, Malibu, il vento e gli incendi, il femminismo, i bikers movies, le autostrade e il tipo di guida che richiedono…
June 24, 2022
”I imagined that my own life was simple and sweet, and sometimes it was, but there were odd things going around town. There were rumors. There were stories.”
The White Album centers around the implosion of the sixties, through the eyes and essays of Joan Didion. It's cool, dispassionate and devastating.
Joan Didion was unquestionably an exceptional writer. I was captivated by her unique prose. In this non-fiction essay collection, we are transported through the sixties in America, particularly in California. She possessed a magical talent for transporting her reader to a time and a place, and into a sort of time capsule that she's kept for you. The White Album takes us through a maze of American culture and exposes some of the darker sides of the American experience, and of Joan Didion's own experiences with health problems and personal tribulations.
This book feels extremely personal, like she put to paper her innermost thoughts from this time of her life. For this reason, The White Album is especially remarkable and very intimate.
A must read for everyone.
Vale Joan Didion. Thank you for the words 🙏🏻
”We tell ourselves stories in order to live...We look for the sermon in the suicide, for the social or moral lesson in the murder of five. We interpret what we see, select the most workable of the multiple choices. We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images, by the "ideas" with which we have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience."
The White Album centers around the implosion of the sixties, through the eyes and essays of Joan Didion. It's cool, dispassionate and devastating.
Joan Didion was unquestionably an exceptional writer. I was captivated by her unique prose. In this non-fiction essay collection, we are transported through the sixties in America, particularly in California. She possessed a magical talent for transporting her reader to a time and a place, and into a sort of time capsule that she's kept for you. The White Album takes us through a maze of American culture and exposes some of the darker sides of the American experience, and of Joan Didion's own experiences with health problems and personal tribulations.
This book feels extremely personal, like she put to paper her innermost thoughts from this time of her life. For this reason, The White Album is especially remarkable and very intimate.
A must read for everyone.
Vale Joan Didion. Thank you for the words 🙏🏻
”We tell ourselves stories in order to live...We look for the sermon in the suicide, for the social or moral lesson in the murder of five. We interpret what we see, select the most workable of the multiple choices. We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images, by the "ideas" with which we have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience."
Want to read
June 14, 2023the original cool girl book
April 23, 2022
As I was making my way through this one it once more occurred to me (I had thought it again during the reading of Slouching Towards Bethlehem) that it’s rather unfair that Joan Didion will perhaps be mostly remembered as a High-Priestess-of-Grieving (on account of The Year of Magical Thinking) instead of the Cool-Bitch-Chic author she was for the larger part of her writing career.
I love her prose in either of her capacities. The White Album is of the latter.
It’s engrossing and sharply written, with the detachment and empathy she simultaneously uses to observe the world around her - how does she do that???
I love her refusal to be swallowed by the trending vernacular and doctrine.
I love how she somehow finds the personal in everything, from the Hoover Dam to an orchid greenhouse in Malibu run by a highly skilled Mexican flower breeder. In fact, that’s Didion’s incomparable skill: to have you actually caring about topics you’d never thought you would care. But since she graced them with her attention you find yourself thinking that, of course, you HAD to know about Hollywood rituals and policies, Bogota’s 70s aura, the architecture of shopping malls, the social idea behind the Royal Hawaiian Hotel in Honolulu.
There is a reputation of arrogance and ostentatious name-dropping following her, and yes, she may have done that at times, but a writer who NEVER fails to end her paragraphs/ chapters/ pieces with one magnificent sentence after another affords to do that, if she so wishes.
A few of the essays are strictly of their time and place; some are equally non-relevant to our times but are fascinating to read nevertheless. And another few (like the titular one about the overall feeling of the late 60s) are both timelessly relevant and chillingly fascinating in the realization that history does indeed repeat itself and we are not that far from what we had thought we had left behind.
It’s a privilege to have had someone like Didion “a woman clean of received wisdom and open to what she sees” (her own words for Georgia O’ Keeffe in the essay for the legendary artist) describe all that has or hasn’t changed to anyone who’s willing and unprejudiced enough to listen.
Didion at the time she wrote most of the pieces in this book, at her house in Malibu, with husband and daughter.
I love her prose in either of her capacities. The White Album is of the latter.
It’s engrossing and sharply written, with the detachment and empathy she simultaneously uses to observe the world around her - how does she do that???
I love her refusal to be swallowed by the trending vernacular and doctrine.
I love how she somehow finds the personal in everything, from the Hoover Dam to an orchid greenhouse in Malibu run by a highly skilled Mexican flower breeder. In fact, that’s Didion’s incomparable skill: to have you actually caring about topics you’d never thought you would care. But since she graced them with her attention you find yourself thinking that, of course, you HAD to know about Hollywood rituals and policies, Bogota’s 70s aura, the architecture of shopping malls, the social idea behind the Royal Hawaiian Hotel in Honolulu.
There is a reputation of arrogance and ostentatious name-dropping following her, and yes, she may have done that at times, but a writer who NEVER fails to end her paragraphs/ chapters/ pieces with one magnificent sentence after another affords to do that, if she so wishes.
A few of the essays are strictly of their time and place; some are equally non-relevant to our times but are fascinating to read nevertheless. And another few (like the titular one about the overall feeling of the late 60s) are both timelessly relevant and chillingly fascinating in the realization that history does indeed repeat itself and we are not that far from what we had thought we had left behind.
It’s a privilege to have had someone like Didion “a woman clean of received wisdom and open to what she sees” (her own words for Georgia O’ Keeffe in the essay for the legendary artist) describe all that has or hasn’t changed to anyone who’s willing and unprejudiced enough to listen.
Didion at the time she wrote most of the pieces in this book, at her house in Malibu, with husband and daughter.
August 23, 2022
My first time reading Didion. I love the way she puts herself in her writing. I sometimes distrust writers who portray others while keeping themselves out of the picture, it seems kind of cold, all that objectivity. Didion seems to go the opposite way, and I find this much more stimulating, and personal. I particularly loved her writing on California, Bogota, and Doris Lessing. I will be reading much more by her.
May 6, 2022
If I had started with The White Album instead of Slouching Toward Bethlehem I might have been spared two years of blithely embarrassing myself with statements like: “Joan Didion? She’s ok.” Actually she’s amazing. The rhythms of her self-dramatization in Slouching were too arch for my taste, or perhaps for my mood. The White Album must be different, or I must have changed, because I love the persona that emerges from its rhythms. She’s brooding, migrainous, in the first essay paranoid, yet essentially tough-minded and clear-seeing—a recipe, of sorts, for my favorite kind of stylist. Baudelaire and Cioran also brazed their delicate nerves to hard, cutting styles.
I like her excitability, her habit of sudden absorption. Of late ‘60s biker grindhouse she writes, “I saw nine of them recently, saw the first one almost by accident and the rest of them with a notebook.” The book’s keynote, right there. Didion takes the stuff of recondite hobbies and autistic fixation—irrigation infrastructure, the Governors’ mansions of California—and finds the grandeur, the lyric, the idea.
And leave it to the poet of Public Works to hang out with Malibu lifeguards and delight in “the laconic routines and paramilitary rankings” of those “civil servants in red trunks,” cherish their use of “a diction as flat and as finally poetic as that of Houston Control.”
The White Album is rich in another effect, one I cannot name and so will clumsily indicate by invoking Holly’s stereopticon in Badlands and Joseph Cornell’s doll coffins, among other uncanny capsules of ephemera; also, your mother’s tasseled dance card and Flaubert’s assertion that “when everything is dead, the imagination will rebuild entire worlds from a few elderflower twigs and the shards of a chamber-pot”:
(“Many Mansions”)
(“Georgia O’Keeffe”)
I like her excitability, her habit of sudden absorption. Of late ‘60s biker grindhouse she writes, “I saw nine of them recently, saw the first one almost by accident and the rest of them with a notebook.” The book’s keynote, right there. Didion takes the stuff of recondite hobbies and autistic fixation—irrigation infrastructure, the Governors’ mansions of California—and finds the grandeur, the lyric, the idea.
Since the afternoon in 1967 when I first saw the Hoover Dam, its image has never been entirely absent from my inner eye. I will be talking to someone in Los Angeles, say, or New York, and suddenly the dam will materialize, its pristine concave face gleaming against the harsh rusts and taupes and mauves of that rock canyon hundreds and thousands of miles from where I am. I will be driving down Sunset Boulevard, about to enter a freeway, and abruptly those transmission towers will appear before me, canted vertiginously over the tailrace. Sometimes I am confronted by the intakes and sometimes by the shadow of the heavy cable that spans the canyon and sometimes by the ominous outlets to unused spillways, black in the lunar clarity of the desert night. Quite often I hear the turbines…
I walked across the marble star map that traces a sidereal revolution of the equinox and fixes forever, the Reclamation man had told me, for all time and for all people who can read the stars, the date the dam was dedicated. The star map, he had said, was for when we were all gone and the dam was left. I had not thought much of it when he said it, but I thought of it then, with the wind whining and the sun dropping behind a mesa with the finality of a sunset in space. Of course that was the image I had seen always, seen it without quite realizing what I saw, a dynamo finally free of man, splendid at last in its complete isolation, transmitting power and releasing water to a world where no one is.
And leave it to the poet of Public Works to hang out with Malibu lifeguards and delight in “the laconic routines and paramilitary rankings” of those “civil servants in red trunks,” cherish their use of “a diction as flat and as finally poetic as that of Houston Control.”
The White Album is rich in another effect, one I cannot name and so will clumsily indicate by invoking Holly’s stereopticon in Badlands and Joseph Cornell’s doll coffins, among other uncanny capsules of ephemera; also, your mother’s tasseled dance card and Flaubert’s assertion that “when everything is dead, the imagination will rebuild entire worlds from a few elderflower twigs and the shards of a chamber-pot”:
The bedrooms are big and private and high-ceilinged and they do not open on the swimming pool and one can imagine reading in them, or writing a book, or closing the door and crying until dinner. The bathrooms are big and airy and they do not have bidets but they do have room for hampers, and dressing tables, and chairs on which to sit and read a story to a child in the bathtub.
(“Many Mansions”)
She was a child on the Wisconsin prairie who played with china dolls and painted watercolors with cloudy skies because sunlight was too hard to paint and, with her brothers and sisters, listened every night to her mother read stories of the Wild West, of Texas, of Kit Carson and Billy the Kid. She told adults that she wanted to be an artist and was embarrassed when they asked what kind of artist she wanted to be: she had no idea “what kind.” She had no idea what artists did. She had never seen a picture that interested her: other than a pen-and-ink Maid of Athens in one of her mother’s books, some Mother Goose illustrations printed on cloth, a tablet cover that showed a little girl with pink roses, and the painting of Arabs on horseback that hung in her grandmother’s parlor.
(“Georgia O’Keeffe”)
July 7, 2015
The White Album was required reading for my American Experience class. I didn't love the book at first, but after a couple of essays, Didion's quiet style started to grow on me. This collection is a revealing narrative of events that occurred in the 1960's and 1970's. It examines the lives of famous and infamous people and places (Charles Manson, Ramón Novarro, the Hoover Dam, Huey Newton, the California freeway, Bogotá, Doris Lessing, and others). Didion gives candid and thoughtful snapshots of a time past, some things unique to California, others universal. She focuses on the mundane and personal in a very revealing and intimate fashion that is helpful in understanding what life was like then. Just as the author was living and reflecting on a time that was full of growth and change, these essays serve to illustrate that our time also has its similar and unique difficulties and joys.
I look forward to reading her more recent collection of essays on America since 9/11.
I look forward to reading her more recent collection of essays on America since 9/11.
May 25, 2008
I've always thought that I was somehow naïve to some sort of greater truth about reality, or at least the United States, or at least California, because I had never read anything by Joan Didion. Friends and acquaintances and strangers spoke of her with a sort of ineloquent awe as if their own descriptions could never match her lucid prose or mental acuity.
Now that I have actually read her own words I want to know, what is all the fuss about? I find Barbara Grizzutti Harrison's 1980 essay much more resonant than anything Didion writes in The White Album. The book is page after page of name-dropping. Hollywood stars, famous criminals, the super-wealthy, and anyone related by one degree. She mentions the names of the boutiques where she shops, the expensive restaurants where she eats. I couldn't care less.
The book also over-intellectualizes the mundane and I found myself skimming through several chapters unable to find either beautiful description or coherent revelation. I assume that Joan Didion's popularity stems from the fact that East Coast high society wanted New Yorker-style correspondent in the midst of California's sex, drugs, and rock & roll. Or perhaps it's her strangely placed commas. But Didion isn't the correspondent for me and it's not like there is any shortage of wealthy baby boomers trying to figure out (or remember) what the hell happened in the 60's and 70's.
That's not to say that there weren't any notes of interest in the book. I found her condemnation of carpool lanes (or "Diamond Lanes" as she describes them) fascinating. My generation grew up taking for granted the fact that carpool lanes were a universally good thing. Even in solitude at 4 p.m. on the 405, we didn't curse the carpool lanes, we cursed ourselves for traveling alone. For Didion, however, creating carpool lanes wasn't forward thinking by Caltrans, it was symbolic of out-of-touch bureaucrats spending millions of dollars on projects that the citizenry did not want. Lamenting the restrictions that Caltrans was placing on Southern Californian 'individual mobility' she practically cheers on the urban guerillas who pour paint and nails along the carpool lanes.
I will try reading at least one other Didion book, perhaps a novel, but I won't be able to approach it with anything other than skepticism.
Now that I have actually read her own words I want to know, what is all the fuss about? I find Barbara Grizzutti Harrison's 1980 essay much more resonant than anything Didion writes in The White Album. The book is page after page of name-dropping. Hollywood stars, famous criminals, the super-wealthy, and anyone related by one degree. She mentions the names of the boutiques where she shops, the expensive restaurants where she eats. I couldn't care less.
The book also over-intellectualizes the mundane and I found myself skimming through several chapters unable to find either beautiful description or coherent revelation. I assume that Joan Didion's popularity stems from the fact that East Coast high society wanted New Yorker-style correspondent in the midst of California's sex, drugs, and rock & roll. Or perhaps it's her strangely placed commas. But Didion isn't the correspondent for me and it's not like there is any shortage of wealthy baby boomers trying to figure out (or remember) what the hell happened in the 60's and 70's.
That's not to say that there weren't any notes of interest in the book. I found her condemnation of carpool lanes (or "Diamond Lanes" as she describes them) fascinating. My generation grew up taking for granted the fact that carpool lanes were a universally good thing. Even in solitude at 4 p.m. on the 405, we didn't curse the carpool lanes, we cursed ourselves for traveling alone. For Didion, however, creating carpool lanes wasn't forward thinking by Caltrans, it was symbolic of out-of-touch bureaucrats spending millions of dollars on projects that the citizenry did not want. Lamenting the restrictions that Caltrans was placing on Southern Californian 'individual mobility' she practically cheers on the urban guerillas who pour paint and nails along the carpool lanes.
I will try reading at least one other Didion book, perhaps a novel, but I won't be able to approach it with anything other than skepticism.
March 30, 2022
The White Album: Essays was the latest collection of essays that I have read by Joan Didion. I am truly captivated by her observant and edgy writing throughout the late 1960s and 1970s in these beautiful essays previously published in magazines such as Life and Esquire. Joan Didion has her own unique way of looking at American culture in such an oblique way as she attempts to understand her home state of California and the American dream. In her writing, Didion paints a picture of what life was like in California during those turbulent sixties as she searches for the meaning in the narrative.
The book is divided into several sections including The California Republic where Didion explores the J. Paul Getty Museum built above the Pacific Coast Highway to house his antiques and paintings as well as the social discomfort it raises. Didion also explores the massive governor's mansion built by Ronald and Nancy Reagan. It stands on eleven acres of oaks and olives overlooking the American River outside Sacramento and has remained abandoned since the day construction stopped in 1975.
There is a section entitled Women that includes thoughtful essays on the Women's Movement. It includes the writings of feminist Doris Lessing, highlighting her writing featuring thoughts on The Grass is Singing and her iconic The Golden Notebook. There is also an essay on the beautiful art of Georgia O'Keeffe including her beautiful and vast "Sky Above the Clouds" painting that Didion took her daughter to see in 1973 at the Chicago Art Institute. Joan Didion describes the resolve of Georgia O'Keeffe being an artist open to what she sees and her sensitivity to bright colors and her sense of self.
One of my favorite sections was Sojourns, including her time in Honolulu on Oahu where Didion describes their presence on the island in the middle of the Pacific Ocean with her husband and three-year old daughter is in lieu of filing for divorce. They are staying at the iconic Royal Hawaiin Hotel on Waikiki Beach as she explores the Royal Hawaiian Hotel, the pink palace, as a social idea giving one clues to a certain kind of American life. In a more sobering part, Didion explores what is known as the Punchbowl, the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific, resting place for soldiers killed in World War II and Korea, now with all of the American casualties coming in from Vietnam. Joan Didion later visits Schofield Barracks which she associates landmarks with the iconic book From Here to Eternity by James Jones.
The book is divided into several sections including The California Republic where Didion explores the J. Paul Getty Museum built above the Pacific Coast Highway to house his antiques and paintings as well as the social discomfort it raises. Didion also explores the massive governor's mansion built by Ronald and Nancy Reagan. It stands on eleven acres of oaks and olives overlooking the American River outside Sacramento and has remained abandoned since the day construction stopped in 1975.
There is a section entitled Women that includes thoughtful essays on the Women's Movement. It includes the writings of feminist Doris Lessing, highlighting her writing featuring thoughts on The Grass is Singing and her iconic The Golden Notebook. There is also an essay on the beautiful art of Georgia O'Keeffe including her beautiful and vast "Sky Above the Clouds" painting that Didion took her daughter to see in 1973 at the Chicago Art Institute. Joan Didion describes the resolve of Georgia O'Keeffe being an artist open to what she sees and her sensitivity to bright colors and her sense of self.
"Georgia O'Keeffe seems to have been equipped early with an immutable sense of who she was and a fairly clear understanding that she would be required to prove it."
One of my favorite sections was Sojourns, including her time in Honolulu on Oahu where Didion describes their presence on the island in the middle of the Pacific Ocean with her husband and three-year old daughter is in lieu of filing for divorce. They are staying at the iconic Royal Hawaiin Hotel on Waikiki Beach as she explores the Royal Hawaiian Hotel, the pink palace, as a social idea giving one clues to a certain kind of American life. In a more sobering part, Didion explores what is known as the Punchbowl, the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific, resting place for soldiers killed in World War II and Korea, now with all of the American casualties coming in from Vietnam. Joan Didion later visits Schofield Barracks which she associates landmarks with the iconic book From Here to Eternity by James Jones.
"Certain places seem to exist mainly because someone has written about them. Kilimanjaro belongs to Ernest Hemingway. Oxford, Mississippi, belongs to William Faulkner."
"A place belongs forever to whoever claims it hardest, remembers it most obsessively, wrenches it from itself, shapes it, renders it, loves it so radically that he remakes it in his image, and not only Schofield Barracks but a great deal of Honolulu itself has always belonged for me to James Jones."
November 24, 2022
joan didion was incredibly obnoxious in many ways, but damn could that woman write….
April 29, 2011
In one essay Joan Didion mentions Grace Cathedral Park in San Francisco. I don't know anything about the cathedral or the park except that it's the name and setting for one of my all-time favorite songs. My love for Mark Kozelek and the Red House Painters is marred a bit by what an asshole he was when I saw Red House Painters live. How does someone write such great songs and act like such a monumental douche (which apparently is his normal live persona, he yells at the audience, plays rambling things that can only be roughly called songs, yells at the audience some more, makes fun of individuals in the audience, plays some more rambling 'songs', continues this for hours on end).
This book is sort of an extended tribute to a time and place I know almost nothing about first hand. 1960's. California. She is such an amazing writer that I found myself captivated by almost every essay in this book, even if I wasn't really interested in the subject matter. This is a magical skill great writers have. It's easy to find an essay interesting if you are already interested in a topic, but it takes great skill to make a topic the reader is not interested in to come alive by the writing.
Why read about places, people and things so far distant from oneself though?
In the big scheme of things why waste even a few minutes reading about the disastrous schemes of diamond lanes on the LA freeways in the 1970's, or about how the water is moved from Colorado River, across the Mojave desert to allow habitation in Malibu? Even if the writing is beautiful and honest, even if it is filled with self-confessional sentiments about the authors own enthrallment about the way water is moved, even if the writing is so good it just makes you ache in your bones, why waste any time reading about things so utterly alien to myself. It's not because I need water to survive, or because at times my life is maybe affected by decisions of urban planners into the way to divert traffic for one reason or another (which may not be to actually get traffic to move faster), my life is not pragmatically changed one bit by knowing anything I learned in these essays. Wouldn't I do better to read a turgidly written article on how to invest money wisely or a book on how to make and cultivate contacts or how to prioritize and maximize, and how to be a more productive person. How to be happier. Make more money. How to seduce women, maybe? How to present a better more presentable me? Or maybe read the ephemera of daily news. Catch up on celebrity gossip. Find out what exactly a Teen Mom is, learn about the real housewives and harness this knowledge into being a more likable person who can join in on break room conversations instead of being a sullenly glaring at all the people making too much noise while I'm trying to get to the bottom of the the nature of violence in modern man, the decline of western civilization, why authors kill themselves, or how Doris Lessing is a writer who fails at really capturing what she sets out to do. Why should I care about Doris Lessing, I've never even read one of her books, but the essay in The White Album still captivated me, but couldn't I have spent the twenty minutes or whatever it took me to read it doing something more productive? Maybe I could have been dashing out emails on my phone to people who I never get around to emailing. Or maybe a list of things I need to do and mean to do but instead I put off, procrastinate about, in favor of reading more books like this one that maybe enrich a part of my internal dialogue but can't put any quantifiable value on. Maybe instead of aiming to read over two hundred books a year I could aim to bring home 200k, or bed two hundred women, or make two hundred new facebook contacts that will pay off by adding to some kind of social network.
This book didn't make me any better of a person than I was before I read it. It didn't add anything tangible to my life, it's not going to pay off in some way that I can hold up and show to anyone. If anything it is just another example of a great writer that I can read and then think, I'll never be able to write this well. I'll never be able to capture anything in my life, even the really important stuff like Joan Didion does for the most trivial of encounters.
This book (and just about every other book I read) won't give me anything tangible, but fuck it, her writing is such a joy to read that the pleasure of reading so well-crafted prose is a reward in itself. Maybe I should feel sorry for other people who don't get to experience things like this in their life. Their loss.
This book is sort of an extended tribute to a time and place I know almost nothing about first hand. 1960's. California. She is such an amazing writer that I found myself captivated by almost every essay in this book, even if I wasn't really interested in the subject matter. This is a magical skill great writers have. It's easy to find an essay interesting if you are already interested in a topic, but it takes great skill to make a topic the reader is not interested in to come alive by the writing.
Why read about places, people and things so far distant from oneself though?
In the big scheme of things why waste even a few minutes reading about the disastrous schemes of diamond lanes on the LA freeways in the 1970's, or about how the water is moved from Colorado River, across the Mojave desert to allow habitation in Malibu? Even if the writing is beautiful and honest, even if it is filled with self-confessional sentiments about the authors own enthrallment about the way water is moved, even if the writing is so good it just makes you ache in your bones, why waste any time reading about things so utterly alien to myself. It's not because I need water to survive, or because at times my life is maybe affected by decisions of urban planners into the way to divert traffic for one reason or another (which may not be to actually get traffic to move faster), my life is not pragmatically changed one bit by knowing anything I learned in these essays. Wouldn't I do better to read a turgidly written article on how to invest money wisely or a book on how to make and cultivate contacts or how to prioritize and maximize, and how to be a more productive person. How to be happier. Make more money. How to seduce women, maybe? How to present a better more presentable me? Or maybe read the ephemera of daily news. Catch up on celebrity gossip. Find out what exactly a Teen Mom is, learn about the real housewives and harness this knowledge into being a more likable person who can join in on break room conversations instead of being a sullenly glaring at all the people making too much noise while I'm trying to get to the bottom of the the nature of violence in modern man, the decline of western civilization, why authors kill themselves, or how Doris Lessing is a writer who fails at really capturing what she sets out to do. Why should I care about Doris Lessing, I've never even read one of her books, but the essay in The White Album still captivated me, but couldn't I have spent the twenty minutes or whatever it took me to read it doing something more productive? Maybe I could have been dashing out emails on my phone to people who I never get around to emailing. Or maybe a list of things I need to do and mean to do but instead I put off, procrastinate about, in favor of reading more books like this one that maybe enrich a part of my internal dialogue but can't put any quantifiable value on. Maybe instead of aiming to read over two hundred books a year I could aim to bring home 200k, or bed two hundred women, or make two hundred new facebook contacts that will pay off by adding to some kind of social network.
This book didn't make me any better of a person than I was before I read it. It didn't add anything tangible to my life, it's not going to pay off in some way that I can hold up and show to anyone. If anything it is just another example of a great writer that I can read and then think, I'll never be able to write this well. I'll never be able to capture anything in my life, even the really important stuff like Joan Didion does for the most trivial of encounters.
This book (and just about every other book I read) won't give me anything tangible, but fuck it, her writing is such a joy to read that the pleasure of reading so well-crafted prose is a reward in itself. Maybe I should feel sorry for other people who don't get to experience things like this in their life. Their loss.
April 23, 2018
As was the case with Joan Didion's Slouching Towards Bethlehem, certain aspects of The White Album seem hopelessly dated. I have no idea who Bishop James Pike is, for instance, and now that I've read about him I still don't really care. But another aspect of this collection irked me even more: Didion's all-encompassing weariness, her mild derision for seemingly everything and everyone with whom she crosses paths. Even in her younger years, did Joan Didion ever get excited about anything, ever, even things she loved? Seemingly not. But in this book we also learn some personal things about Joan Didion: Over the years these essays encompass, she is admitted to a psychiatric hospital for what looks to be a combination of depression and anxiety. Her marriage seems to be on shaky ground. She gets crippling migraines at least once a week. She is diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, a fact that is mentioned once and never again. I was reminded of Didion's novel Play It as It Lays--a favorite of mine--wherein the protagonist experiences her fair share of trauma and copes with it by withdrawing, a numbness and lack of affect substituting for the more expressive human emotions. It's pretty clear Joan Didion is never going to show you her whole hand, but it's a good bet she's concealing something major. So for me, the net effect of reading Didion's essays is a burning curiosity about Didion herself. To the extent that it's possible, I'm going to start satisfying that curiosity posthaste.
July 23, 2022
116th book for 2018.
I don't get why everyone loves Didion's writing so much.
She comes across as a rich outsider, who rejoices in being snarky about everyone else. Here in her collection of essays from the late-1960s/early-1970s she's snarky about the black panthers, 2nd wave feminism (enfeebling of women!), the movie industry, the music industry, and even carpool lanes. She drops names like crazy (saying she's a co-godparent with Roman Polanski didn't date well), and mentions more than once the shrimp cocktails she's eating in room service.
There are occasional essays here that dated better, in particular her discussion of a Vietnam solider's burial in Hawaii, but not enough to make reading this collection worthwhile
Now having read several of her books, I am convinced that people have mistaken her snide remarks and self-important style for actual intellectualism, which is sadly lacking in this and other collections of her work.
1-star.
I don't get why everyone loves Didion's writing so much.
She comes across as a rich outsider, who rejoices in being snarky about everyone else. Here in her collection of essays from the late-1960s/early-1970s she's snarky about the black panthers, 2nd wave feminism (enfeebling of women!), the movie industry, the music industry, and even carpool lanes. She drops names like crazy (saying she's a co-godparent with Roman Polanski didn't date well), and mentions more than once the shrimp cocktails she's eating in room service.
There are occasional essays here that dated better, in particular her discussion of a Vietnam solider's burial in Hawaii, but not enough to make reading this collection worthwhile
Now having read several of her books, I am convinced that people have mistaken her snide remarks and self-important style for actual intellectualism, which is sadly lacking in this and other collections of her work.
1-star.
February 28, 2019
The weirdest thing happened while I was reading this one--well, not weirdest I guess--I'd slog through it, see that over half an hour had passed and I'd only read ten pages. Then I took a nap, got back up, tried again and the same thing happened.
It seems that Didion has effectively recreated life in Sacramento through prose, which--through books like this, films like Lady Bird, podcasts like My Favorite Murder and testimonials from real-life people I've met who once lived there--I get the impression is, uh, not a great place.
Well, then keep me out of it, physically and mentally!
I've read more contemporary books of Didion's, and it's interesting that she has the same voice in the 21st century as she did in the late 60s. But no matter the decade, I don't like the style at all and won't read more of her books.
Her opinion or argument, no more clearly expressed in this book, is that life is confusing, bleak and almost impossible to synthesise into meaningful narratives. That we "tell stories to ourselves", to Didion, seems like some childish pursuit of comfort that can't be offered to us. Or at least that's the impression I get.
Which explains why this tiny book was such a slog. The names "Jim Morrison", "Linda Kasabian" and "Roman Polanski", among others, appear in this text--but that's not to say that anything meaningful is said about them. She writes of her multiple sclerosis diagnosis and migraine issues with an aloofness as if receiving a diagnosis is so infinitesimally more illuminating than life pre-diagnosis that there's almost no point in receiving it at all.
They say that sometimes depression is the logical response of depressing circumstances, so I don't judge Didion for her lens. It's through perhaps no fault of her own that she has chosen to present almost everything as so empty of meaning--but that seems to me at complete odds with the traditional purpose of writing. I've always thought that the very act of writing something was fundamentally in the spirit of crafting meaning and seeking connection. Therefore I can't believe Didion's argument completely, because she wrote it down. Say I did believe her anyway: what am I supposed to do with that info?
Her attitude makes her prose seem constantly stand-offish and brusque. I found a good example that I'll paraphrase here:
Someone's mother tells Didion that she got Paul Newman's signature for "her crippled son." Didion asks how old the son is, and the woman says, "thirty-four."
I haven't quite recreated it in Didion's exceptionally blunt prose, but the whole book read like this to me. "Thirty four" is seemingly presented as the punchline, with no further comment. I almost get why this is supposed to be funny? Thirty-four is supposed to be too old to care about getting the signature of a celebrity, maybe? Why mention that he is "crippled"? What does that add to this story? I might read that as it being mentioned because I'm to then assume the son could never be part of Hollywood, making the signature more important to him on account of that--but doesn't that then detract from the punchline? If the point of this example is so cryptic, what is the point of mentioning it at all? If it is a joke, it's a needlessly cruel one. Maybe there's no joke being made at all. I have absolutely no idea.
But that pretty much sums up my entire experience of reading this book. Everything read like it might be one ironic in-joke, with no explanations ever offered: you're either in or out. I was almost always out, and so it just read like a bunch of information offered at random. When I was in, it was barely worth being so.
So doggedly does Didion pursue her line of thinking that it's very difficult to work out what she feels about anything. She's endlessly disparaging of feminists in one essay, in that they go beyond equality into pipe dreams about unlikely career choices panning out successfully (wanting to be potters or work in NYC in publishing.) I have to assume Didion is for equality, but that got completely lost in her sneering. Her deep disdain was most apparent when she tears into Doris Lessing's writing for no apparent reason, throwing compliments in seemingly at random, such that the whole essay was disjointed and confused. I didn't understand the point she was trying to make: am I supposed to read Lessing, not read Lessing, or are you trying to convince me that there's no point in reading something or not reading something? In which case, why am I reading your argument?
I found this book to be a deeply unpleasant read and I cannot recommend it.
It seems that Didion has effectively recreated life in Sacramento through prose, which--through books like this, films like Lady Bird, podcasts like My Favorite Murder and testimonials from real-life people I've met who once lived there--I get the impression is, uh, not a great place.
Well, then keep me out of it, physically and mentally!
I've read more contemporary books of Didion's, and it's interesting that she has the same voice in the 21st century as she did in the late 60s. But no matter the decade, I don't like the style at all and won't read more of her books.
Her opinion or argument, no more clearly expressed in this book, is that life is confusing, bleak and almost impossible to synthesise into meaningful narratives. That we "tell stories to ourselves", to Didion, seems like some childish pursuit of comfort that can't be offered to us. Or at least that's the impression I get.
Which explains why this tiny book was such a slog. The names "Jim Morrison", "Linda Kasabian" and "Roman Polanski", among others, appear in this text--but that's not to say that anything meaningful is said about them. She writes of her multiple sclerosis diagnosis and migraine issues with an aloofness as if receiving a diagnosis is so infinitesimally more illuminating than life pre-diagnosis that there's almost no point in receiving it at all.
They say that sometimes depression is the logical response of depressing circumstances, so I don't judge Didion for her lens. It's through perhaps no fault of her own that she has chosen to present almost everything as so empty of meaning--but that seems to me at complete odds with the traditional purpose of writing. I've always thought that the very act of writing something was fundamentally in the spirit of crafting meaning and seeking connection. Therefore I can't believe Didion's argument completely, because she wrote it down. Say I did believe her anyway: what am I supposed to do with that info?
Her attitude makes her prose seem constantly stand-offish and brusque. I found a good example that I'll paraphrase here:
Someone's mother tells Didion that she got Paul Newman's signature for "her crippled son." Didion asks how old the son is, and the woman says, "thirty-four."
I haven't quite recreated it in Didion's exceptionally blunt prose, but the whole book read like this to me. "Thirty four" is seemingly presented as the punchline, with no further comment. I almost get why this is supposed to be funny? Thirty-four is supposed to be too old to care about getting the signature of a celebrity, maybe? Why mention that he is "crippled"? What does that add to this story? I might read that as it being mentioned because I'm to then assume the son could never be part of Hollywood, making the signature more important to him on account of that--but doesn't that then detract from the punchline? If the point of this example is so cryptic, what is the point of mentioning it at all? If it is a joke, it's a needlessly cruel one. Maybe there's no joke being made at all. I have absolutely no idea.
But that pretty much sums up my entire experience of reading this book. Everything read like it might be one ironic in-joke, with no explanations ever offered: you're either in or out. I was almost always out, and so it just read like a bunch of information offered at random. When I was in, it was barely worth being so.
So doggedly does Didion pursue her line of thinking that it's very difficult to work out what she feels about anything. She's endlessly disparaging of feminists in one essay, in that they go beyond equality into pipe dreams about unlikely career choices panning out successfully (wanting to be potters or work in NYC in publishing.) I have to assume Didion is for equality, but that got completely lost in her sneering. Her deep disdain was most apparent when she tears into Doris Lessing's writing for no apparent reason, throwing compliments in seemingly at random, such that the whole essay was disjointed and confused. I didn't understand the point she was trying to make: am I supposed to read Lessing, not read Lessing, or are you trying to convince me that there's no point in reading something or not reading something? In which case, why am I reading your argument?
I found this book to be a deeply unpleasant read and I cannot recommend it.
August 17, 2015
Reading Didion’s essays is not unlike unearthing a time capsule you didn’t know existed from a parallel universe that appears earthlike. Sure, there are words like California and feminism and Malibu – but Didion does things to those familiar events and locales that changes them into an unique vision, a Didionism.
Whether we’re standing with her on Oak Street below the Black Panthers’ HQ receiving a visual pat-down, retracing author James Jones’ steps along the army barracks in Honolulu or mesmerized by the flashing lights of a California water station – we are viewing the world in a clarity that only she can properly express. To brook an opposing view is an impossibility; it would shatter the magic and render the vibrant hue of the Didion world into workaday memories, pale, gray and dimensional as news viewed on library microfiche.
Whether we’re standing with her on Oak Street below the Black Panthers’ HQ receiving a visual pat-down, retracing author James Jones’ steps along the army barracks in Honolulu or mesmerized by the flashing lights of a California water station – we are viewing the world in a clarity that only she can properly express. To brook an opposing view is an impossibility; it would shatter the magic and render the vibrant hue of the Didion world into workaday memories, pale, gray and dimensional as news viewed on library microfiche.
April 5, 2012
I didn’t love these essays until about the midpoint, “The Women’s Movement”, a devastatingly good piece about the watering-down of feminism in mid-century America, about the heartbreaking shift of a vitally important revolutionary movement as it lost touch with its ideological base and became ever more a vehicle appropriated by a leisure class, its goals moving away from seeking the possibility for an individual to create their own unique destiny unfettered by traditional obstacles and bias, and moving toward something like a seeking of the possibility for the mere prolongation of adolescence, a fear of growing up- more a form of escapism than a new form of liberation. This seems to me, even today, a very important and accurate assessment of not only what happened within various egalitarian movements in the last half of the 20th century, but a shift that occurred on whole societal, generational levels in America.
After that midpoint in the book, pretty much every essay contains little revelations, little personal thunderstorms and continental illuminations. Didion does such a great job of balancing the internal and the external, the personal and the social, the personal and the political. Her cultural criticisms are downright measured but no less defanged (such intelligence and confidence need not be blustery), and what I find at the heart of many of the cultural and political essays is a distanced lamentation for an America that could have been but was lost or obliterated at some vague point in the latter days of the 60’s; could have been if we were less forgetful of history, less willing to take the path of least resistance, less entitled, less ready to meet our better selves, less easily resigned to things as they come packaged. She rarely seems angry; she often seems disappointed. Her prose is never shaken (this woman can write a hell of a balanced, beautiful sentence), but what we are given as her personality often seems on the verge of tearing in the winds of her times.
Speaking of, wind is an important element in this collection. Wind blows from the Pacific through an open hotel room window as she anticipates a tidal wave and a possible divorce in Honolulu. Wind stirs up debris in the streets of Bogota. Wind blows and stokes fires across southern California that heat to such an extreme that birds explode in mid-air. Wind ripples the surface of the ocean as she observers a diver submerging into cold water thick with kelp. Wind has aided the coastal fires in coating the surface of the water with soot. The elements are ever present and interactive. Water nourishes Amado Vazquez’s thousands of orchids before fire destroys them. Light and water on the beaches of California and Hawaii coddle the idle survivors of old money. She is a great observer of rain, rain and its antithesis, dust. Water holds special sway over her recollections; the flow of water and the absence of water; water held back by dams, flow stations, the control and release of water- as it would anyone living in the arid southwest or California’s strange meteorological zones. Light, the viscosity of air in certain places, the various colors of vegetation and vegetation’s abundance or lack, even a person's voice or posture, their slightest motion- Didion is so conscious of the tone of a setting and the settings constituent pieces, be it a forest or an airport, a hotel room in New York or student demonstration, a stretch of coast or a shopping mall, the Hoover Dam or the Getty Museum. She is a master at uncovering the telling detail of a scene, and this includes the obscure detail ferreted out that in brief is revelatory of someone or something's broader historicity.
Her voice is always re-centering in the human, the cultural, the societal- the orientation of the individual in respect to the massive undulations of the country and the epoch. A military graveyard attendant. Soldiers. Lifeguards. Botanists. Filmmakers. Painters. Writers. Politician’s wives. Radical activists. Murderers. Musicians. That she can project a totality of all of these things, and get at the heart of ideas that define a very specific time and place (California, USA, 1960’s and 70’s), and at the same time write it so that we feel that we have been allowed a purview of not only that era but of the intimate space where it touched a specific woman’s memory, is impressive indeed.
After that midpoint in the book, pretty much every essay contains little revelations, little personal thunderstorms and continental illuminations. Didion does such a great job of balancing the internal and the external, the personal and the social, the personal and the political. Her cultural criticisms are downright measured but no less defanged (such intelligence and confidence need not be blustery), and what I find at the heart of many of the cultural and political essays is a distanced lamentation for an America that could have been but was lost or obliterated at some vague point in the latter days of the 60’s; could have been if we were less forgetful of history, less willing to take the path of least resistance, less entitled, less ready to meet our better selves, less easily resigned to things as they come packaged. She rarely seems angry; she often seems disappointed. Her prose is never shaken (this woman can write a hell of a balanced, beautiful sentence), but what we are given as her personality often seems on the verge of tearing in the winds of her times.
Speaking of, wind is an important element in this collection. Wind blows from the Pacific through an open hotel room window as she anticipates a tidal wave and a possible divorce in Honolulu. Wind stirs up debris in the streets of Bogota. Wind blows and stokes fires across southern California that heat to such an extreme that birds explode in mid-air. Wind ripples the surface of the ocean as she observers a diver submerging into cold water thick with kelp. Wind has aided the coastal fires in coating the surface of the water with soot. The elements are ever present and interactive. Water nourishes Amado Vazquez’s thousands of orchids before fire destroys them. Light and water on the beaches of California and Hawaii coddle the idle survivors of old money. She is a great observer of rain, rain and its antithesis, dust. Water holds special sway over her recollections; the flow of water and the absence of water; water held back by dams, flow stations, the control and release of water- as it would anyone living in the arid southwest or California’s strange meteorological zones. Light, the viscosity of air in certain places, the various colors of vegetation and vegetation’s abundance or lack, even a person's voice or posture, their slightest motion- Didion is so conscious of the tone of a setting and the settings constituent pieces, be it a forest or an airport, a hotel room in New York or student demonstration, a stretch of coast or a shopping mall, the Hoover Dam or the Getty Museum. She is a master at uncovering the telling detail of a scene, and this includes the obscure detail ferreted out that in brief is revelatory of someone or something's broader historicity.
Her voice is always re-centering in the human, the cultural, the societal- the orientation of the individual in respect to the massive undulations of the country and the epoch. A military graveyard attendant. Soldiers. Lifeguards. Botanists. Filmmakers. Painters. Writers. Politician’s wives. Radical activists. Murderers. Musicians. That she can project a totality of all of these things, and get at the heart of ideas that define a very specific time and place (California, USA, 1960’s and 70’s), and at the same time write it so that we feel that we have been allowed a purview of not only that era but of the intimate space where it touched a specific woman’s memory, is impressive indeed.
June 21, 2023
I’ve known of this compilation of essays and journalistic pieces for a long time, but only now decided to read it when it happened to come my way. The first half of it flew by, but I found the second half not as engaging, likely because I found its topics not as interesting.
The long essay with the same title as the book sets the mood. Never hearing otherwise, I’d assumed the title had nothing whatsoever to do with the white-covered The Beatles album. But it does, though the group and their songs are never named—and rightly so. I’m left wondering if it should’ve been titled something else for even further distance; though, like the piece itself, the title was likely expected to evoke the mood of the time and at the time.
I was still a young child in the late 60s, the time period all the essays basically cover (some veer into the early 70s). I remember hearing of some of these events, but I was too young to fully understand what was going on in the United States at the time—a time of division, and threatened and actual violence—a lot like now. In my head, I sometimes still live in this time, when I listen to its music; when I read about music’s influence upon it and vice versa. Didion doesn’t delve into music, except for a short passage of being in the studio with the Doors; yet I found it beneficial to see her views of the time period, mostly formed as she’s living in it.
*
A passage that seems specifically Californian (where most of the essays are set) but reminded me of Italo Calvino (for an obvious reason):
More universal: A place belongs forever to whoever claims it hardest, remembers it most obsessively, wrenches it from itself, shapes it, renders it, loves it so radically that he remakes it in his image ...
The long essay with the same title as the book sets the mood. Never hearing otherwise, I’d assumed the title had nothing whatsoever to do with the white-covered The Beatles album. But it does, though the group and their songs are never named—and rightly so. I’m left wondering if it should’ve been titled something else for even further distance; though, like the piece itself, the title was likely expected to evoke the mood of the time and at the time.
I was still a young child in the late 60s, the time period all the essays basically cover (some veer into the early 70s). I remember hearing of some of these events, but I was too young to fully understand what was going on in the United States at the time—a time of division, and threatened and actual violence—a lot like now. In my head, I sometimes still live in this time, when I listen to its music; when I read about music’s influence upon it and vice versa. Didion doesn’t delve into music, except for a short passage of being in the studio with the Doors; yet I found it beneficial to see her views of the time period, mostly formed as she’s living in it.
*
A passage that seems specifically Californian (where most of the essays are set) but reminded me of Italo Calvino (for an obvious reason):
As I drove home that day through the somnolent back streets of Hollywood I had the distinct sense that everyone I knew had some fever which had not yet infected the invisible city. In the invisible city girls were still disappointed at not being chosen cheerleader. In the invisible city girls still got discovered at Schwab’s and later met their true loves at the Mocambo or the Troc, still dreamed of big houses by the ocean and carloads of presents by the Christmas tree, still prayed to be known.
More universal: A place belongs forever to whoever claims it hardest, remembers it most obsessively, wrenches it from itself, shapes it, renders it, loves it so radically that he remakes it in his image ...
June 15, 2021
didion is an amazing writer but this is really making me aware that i would probably dislike her if she wasn't joan didion. oh well.
December 18, 2023
I found this collection captivating, maybe because it was written about my home state of California in the late 60’s early 70’s, a time when I was old enough to be impacted by cultural changes but too young to be keeping up with any analysis of them. Didion was a native Californian, born in Sacramento and living in Southern California during this period, and I loved getting her real time astute observations.
In The White Album, she reflects on her own mental state, but also California’s, with all of its different kinds of unrest. She touched on topics from the Black Panthers to The Doors, concluding, “Disorder was its own point.”
What she said about the Sharon Tate murders, which took place not far from her home, was particularly revealing: “I remember all of the day’s misinformation very clearly, and I also remember this, and wish I did not: I remember that no one was surprised.”
This is a feeling I also remember, though I was young. There was lots of fear: fear of change, fear of violence, fear of the obvious loss of control.
So this was my favorite of the essays, but they were all good. She tackled the oddest of subjects!
The water shortage, in Holy Water
“'The West begins,’ Bernard DeVoto wrote, ‘where the average annual rainfall drops below twenty inches.’ This is maybe the best definition of the West I have ever read …”
Many Mansions, about the governor’s residence Ronald and Nancy Reagan built to replace the gorgeous older one Nancy called a “fire trap,” and what their style choices revealed about them.
Bureaucrats, where I learned of the inception of diamond lanes on California freeways.
An interesting take on The Women’s Movement
“They seized as a political technique a kind of shared testimony at first called a ‘rap session,’ then called ‘consciousness-raising,’ and in any case a therapeutically oriented American reinterpretation, according to the British feminist Juliet Mitchell, of a Chinese revolutionary practice known as ‘speaking bitterness.’”
Finally, I’ll share this quote from The Islands, which was about her trip to Honolulu with her husband and daughter in 1969 in an attempt to save her marriage:
“I tell you this not as aimless revelation but because I want you to know, as you read me, precisely who I am and where I am and what is on my mind. I want you to understand exactly what you are getting: you are getting a woman who for some time now has felt radically separated from most of the ideas that seem to interest other people. You are getting a woman who somewhere along the line misplaced whatever slight faith she ever had in the social contract, in the meliorative principle, in the whole grand pattern of human endeavor.”
I think this explains what I love about reading Didion’s non-fiction. She tells stories through her own unique lens: an outsider, peering in, reporting what she observes while at the same time trying to understand why she feels adrift from it all.
In The White Album, she reflects on her own mental state, but also California’s, with all of its different kinds of unrest. She touched on topics from the Black Panthers to The Doors, concluding, “Disorder was its own point.”
What she said about the Sharon Tate murders, which took place not far from her home, was particularly revealing: “I remember all of the day’s misinformation very clearly, and I also remember this, and wish I did not: I remember that no one was surprised.”
This is a feeling I also remember, though I was young. There was lots of fear: fear of change, fear of violence, fear of the obvious loss of control.
So this was my favorite of the essays, but they were all good. She tackled the oddest of subjects!
The water shortage, in Holy Water
“'The West begins,’ Bernard DeVoto wrote, ‘where the average annual rainfall drops below twenty inches.’ This is maybe the best definition of the West I have ever read …”
Many Mansions, about the governor’s residence Ronald and Nancy Reagan built to replace the gorgeous older one Nancy called a “fire trap,” and what their style choices revealed about them.
Bureaucrats, where I learned of the inception of diamond lanes on California freeways.
An interesting take on The Women’s Movement
“They seized as a political technique a kind of shared testimony at first called a ‘rap session,’ then called ‘consciousness-raising,’ and in any case a therapeutically oriented American reinterpretation, according to the British feminist Juliet Mitchell, of a Chinese revolutionary practice known as ‘speaking bitterness.’”
Finally, I’ll share this quote from The Islands, which was about her trip to Honolulu with her husband and daughter in 1969 in an attempt to save her marriage:
“I tell you this not as aimless revelation but because I want you to know, as you read me, precisely who I am and where I am and what is on my mind. I want you to understand exactly what you are getting: you are getting a woman who for some time now has felt radically separated from most of the ideas that seem to interest other people. You are getting a woman who somewhere along the line misplaced whatever slight faith she ever had in the social contract, in the meliorative principle, in the whole grand pattern of human endeavor.”
I think this explains what I love about reading Didion’s non-fiction. She tells stories through her own unique lens: an outsider, peering in, reporting what she observes while at the same time trying to understand why she feels adrift from it all.
July 10, 2019
"We tell ourselves stories in order to live" is the well-known first line of this collection, and of the title essay, and it has probably played a role in my avoiding Joan Didion until now. I had always attributed it to a somewhat sentimental conception of writing and reading, but now I'm glad I gave her writing a chance, and glad I decided to reread the title essay. In one section, she imagines a woman standing on a ledge on the sixteenth floor of an apartment building; on my first reading, I thought that Didion didn't attach importance to whether or not the woman would jump, or why, but to "the picture of her in my mind: her hair incandescent in the floodlights, her bare toes curled inward on the stone ledge."
On my second reading, I realized that she is not making an argument, exactly, but describing an emotional state (or an existential crisis, let's say, that threatened to become permanent), roughly coinciding with the late 60s, in which she could no longer invest life with meaning- no longer tell herself stories, in other words. She cannot convince herself of any particular reason why the woman might jump, or not. And this explains why I was disappointed on my first reading of the essay- it is not really "about" The Doors, Eldridge Cleaver, The Black Panthers or Manson, as I had originally thought, but about Didion's inability to draw connections among them, to find any coherence in the world around her- almost the opposite of a story, in other words. This turns out to have been the perfect approach to The Doors, whom she describes sitting among "masses of wires and banks of the ominous blinking electronic circuitry with which musicians live so easily", and Jim Morrison:
...unspecified tensions seemed to be rendering everyone in the room catatonic...The curious aspect of Morrison's arrival was this: no one acknowledged it. He spoke almost in a whisper, as if he were wresting the words behind some disabling aphasia...Robby Krieger picked at his guitar, and said that he needed a fuzz box. The producer suggested that he borrow one from the Buffalo Springfield, who were recording in the next studio. Krieger shrugged. Morrison sat down again on the leather couch and leaned back. He lit a match. He studied the flame a while and then very slowly, very deliberately, lowered it to the fly of his black vinyl pants. Manzarek watched him...There was a sense that no one was going to leave the room, ever.The 60s- the decade she lived through and therefore, as a writer, wanted to chronicle- end before she can understand what's happening, and then all that's left are some Scientology tracts and a copy of Stranger in a Strange Land in a closet in an abandoned seaside home. But isn't that the way time always seems to pass?
Didion has a cold detachment that is sometimes condescending and off-putting (in my opinion, at least). She has a certain way of dryly quoting others that seems to expose the hidden vacuity at the center of their endeavor, and this sometimes seems unjustified. In "Good Citizens" for example, she describes being at a club owned by supporters of Eugene McCarthy about a week before the California primary:
The Beverly Hills Eugene's, not unlike Senator McCarthy's campaign itself, had a certain deja vu aspect to it...the gesture towards a strobe light was nothing that might interfere with "good talk"...[and] there at Eugene's I heard the name "Erich Fromm" for the first time in a long time, and many other names cast out for the sympathetic magic they might work...Well okay, but there's no pleasing some people. What kind of light would have been sufficient to avoid cliche? And is it really so bad if a light helps to facilitate a "good talk"? Maybe you had to be there, but I just don't get it. Meanwhile, if a reader (like me) happens to really like Escape from Freedom by Erich Fromm, he's left to shrug his shoulders and understand that he's just not sophisticated enough to know why we should all instinctively roll our eyes at the mention of Erich Fromm- fair enough if you think he's worthless, but maybe you should engage with him, explain why. It serves here as lazy shorthand for something that I think you would have had to be part of this particular milieu to get. At her worst, I remember that Didion was a big influence on Bret Easton Ellis- on his laconic style, which has always seemed derived from the assurance that nothing really matters, nothing means anything, and it would take too much energy to look into anyway.
On the other hand, it is this same detachment that allows Didion to write so lucidly about folly, about sound and fury signifying nothing, about people who seem to be refugees from their own time- like the young professionals at something called The Jaycees' 32nd Annual Congress of America's Ten Outstanding Young Men:
There was the belief in business success as a transcendent ideal. There was the faith that if one transforms oneself from an "introvert" into an "extrovert", if one learns to "speak effectively" and "do a job", success and its concomitant, spiritual grace, follow naturally...Or the leader of a Pentecostal church, busy getting his followers ready for a drive from California to Murfreesboro, Tennessee, where God has promised they'll be safe from a coming earthquake, in "Notes Toward a Dreampolitik":
It was a cry in the wilderness, and this resolute determination to meet 1950 head-on was a kind of refuge. Here were some people who had been led to believe that the future was always a rational extension of the past, that there would ever be world enough and time for "turning attention", for "problems" and "solutions." Of course they would not admit their inchoate fears that the world was not that way any more...It occurred to me finally that I was listening to a true underground, to the voice of all those who have felt themselves not merely shocked but betrayed by recent history. It was supposed to have been their time. It was not.
He seemed to be one of those people, so many of whom gravitate to Pentecostal sects, who move around the West and the South and the Border States forever felling trees in some interior wilderness, secret frontiersmen who walk around right in the ganglia of the fantastic electronic pulsing that is life in the United States and continue to receive information only through the most tenuous chains of rumor, hearsay, haphazard trickledown...they participate in the national anxieties only through a glass darkly. In the interior wilderness no one is bloodied by history...Or fans of biker movies, in a passage that wouldn't have been out-of-place in Hunter S. Thompson's Hell's Angels.
There is always that instant in which the outlaw leader stands revealed as existential hero. There is always that "perverse" sequence in which the bikers batter at some psychic sound barrier, degrade the widow, violate the virgin, defile the rose and the cross alike, break on through to the other side and find, once there, "nothing to say"...bike movies are made for all these children of vague "hill" stock who grow up absurd in the West and Southwest, children whose whole lives are an obscure grudge against a world they think they never made.In short, she's very attuned to the dissonance among ideology, action, and the psychological motivations that drive people towards those actions, very good at something she ascribes in "The White Album" to Evelyn Waugh: "scenes of industrious self-delusion, scenes of people absorbed in odd games."
It would be nice to believe that this detachment is a purely psychic orientation towards life, a free choice made in a closed system, but I'm not sure it ever is. In Didion's case, she explains in "In Bed" that she suffers from migraines that leave her totally incapacitated multiple times a week, and in "The White Album" that it is during her period of existential crisis that she is diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. Pain is isolating. Pain, unless perhaps you are a Buddhist monk or MMA fighter, engenders solipsism. This is a very unpleasant thing to think about, but there seem to be many factors that complicate the idea that we are free to choose our orientations towards life. As Didion writes, "my body was offering a precise physiological equivalent to what had been going on in my mind." But who can say which is the cause and which is the effect?
The more I read of Didion, the more I thought that her occasional tone of condescension might be the result of identification. This seemed confirmed in the short and moving "On the Morning After the Sixties", in which the explicit subject is separation between the individual and the outside world, the passage of time and history:
I am talking about...the ambiguity of belonging to a generation distrustful of political highs, the historical irrelevancy of growing up convinced that the heart of darkness lay not in some error of social organization but in man's own blood. If man was bound to err, then any social organization was bound to be in error. It was a premise which still seems to me accurate enough, but one which robbed us early of a certain capacity for surprise...We were silent because the exhilaration of social action seemed to many of us just one more way of escaping the personal, or masking for a while that dread of the meaningless which was man's fate. To have assumed that particular fate so early was the peculiarity of my generation...we would make some money and live on a ranch. We would live outside history..I'm glad that I reread this essay as well. On my first reading, I assumed that I was reading an argument. Now I see that it's an exploration of a worldview (perhaps the hardest one to see, the most mysterious- one's own, not arrived at through any conscious or self-contained process), one that she has more ambivalence about than I first realized, although she does take a stance:
Only one person I knew at Berkley later discovered an ideology, dealt himself into history, cut himself loose from both his own dread and his own time. A few of the people I knew at Berkley killed themselves not long after. Another attempted suicide in Mexico and then, in a recovery which seemed in many ways a more advanced derangement, came home and joined the Bank of America's three-year executive training program. Most of us live less theatrically, but remain the survivors of a peculiar and inward time. If I could believe that going to a barricade would affect man's fate in the slightest I would go to that barricade, and quite often I wish that I could...I'm not sure it's the right one. When I compare her with a contemporary like Mailer, they seem like two sides of the same coin. Mailer threw himself into everything, tried to be everywhere, participated in the game to the fullest. In other words yes, perhaps it's all a game- might as well go for broke. Or as Mailer once put it, "a true actor enjoys his life in any station." That at least seems a little more, well, fun.
Flip the coin a second time, however, and maybe you get Chomsky or Baldwin on the other side. In this case, Didion's worldview could seem especially impoverished. Protesting Vietnam, for instance, may not have changed man's fate in the sense she's talking about, and in fact I don't believe that anything can, but it did change the fates of individuals. And yes, it's probably true that any social action I ever take part in will be "just one more way of escaping the personal"; but even if that's the case, even if Didion has correctly pinpointed the genesis of all human endeavor in a desperation to escape (which sounds uncannily like Erich Fromm, by the way), maybe in some cases the variant of escape is more important than the motivation. There is something distasteful about her formulation: "Yes, I would risk my freedom and my life trying to better society with the rest of you, if only I weren't smart enough to realize it's all for naught..."
And yet I can't help feeling that she is probably right to be wary of our odd games. I can empathize with her, which I think is why I found this short (4 pages) essay so affecting. I would also like to join the world, the barricade, deal myself into history, sit down at the table with Mailer knowing the stakes, knowing that I might be wrong- what else is there to do? But I also share Didion's hesitation- you might be wrong.
In the similarly short "At the Dam", she tells us that, at seemingly arbitrary moments in her life, she receives visitations from the Hoover Dam; in New York, in Los Angeles, it materializes in front of her, and she hears the turbines. On one visit (she visits the dam, that is), she writes,
I walked across the marble star map that traces a sidereal revolution of the equinox and fixes forever, the Reclamation man had told me, for all time and for all people who can read the stars, the date the dam was dedicated. The star map was, he had said, for when we were all gone and the dam was left. I had not thought much of it when he said it, but I thought of it then, with the wind whining and the sun dropping behind a mesa with the finality of a sunset in space. Of course that was the image I had seen always, seen it without quite realizing what I saw, a dynamo finally free of man, splendid at last in its absolute isolation, transmitting power and releasing water to a world where no one is.And that is about as good a description of her writing as I can imagine.
September 14, 2022
didion is always able to tap into this feeling that is so totally and eternally western;she just dips into the southern californian subconscious and scratches awake hot winds and cracked tile and dry bougainvillea, fingering something so wholly and unchangeably California that it makes me stop and think: yes, exactly that, how’d you know?
November 30, 2023
I really thought I’d enjoy this but I did not, it was fine. I loved the women’s right section and I can appreciate the utter skill of Didion’s prose, however I found it really hard to get through and it just didn’t connect or interest me as much as her prior book “play as it lays” (that I read the other week)
A solid collection of essays that no one but Didion could write and I do withhold appreciation for her writing and storytelling. This just wasn’t for me
A solid collection of essays that no one but Didion could write and I do withhold appreciation for her writing and storytelling. This just wasn’t for me
January 17, 2023
These essays- published mostly in magazines such as The Saturday Evening Post, Esquire, Life- were written from 1968 to 1977. They serve nicely as vintage time capsules, snapshots from an era. Didion as a writer encompasses both the objectivity of the journalist and the subjectivity of a memoirist. In other words, she writes like a master of the Tao.
Personal favorites:
The Women's Movement
In the Islands
In Bed
On the Road
At the Dam
Quiet Days in Malibu
With her reporter's eye, she never misses a detail. Whether sitting in on a Doors studio recording or at Nancy Reagan's house and yet there is no celebrity worship. Actually, it's her portrayal of ordinary people that stands out the most. Amado Vasquez, the greenhouse grower is listened to with the utmost respect. The piece on Nancy Reagan feels comical but it's in such a subtle way that you never feel that Didion is mocking her.
Most journalists keep sealed the goings on behind the scenes; Didion rips away the facade and shows you. This, she says, is the reality. The driest essay here is what you may expect to be the juiciest, "In Hollywood." Here she is overtly explaining how things are not how they are often perceived. And it puzzles her why no one else ever says the truth in front of everyone's faces. So much of this sentiment is true still.
Didion is a Stoic in many ways and at the same time she presents herself authentically. Which is rare to see. She even shares word for word her diagnosis and medical notes from her stay in a psychiatric hospital. She comments how this seems to her "an appropriate response to the summer of 1968." A pretty ballsy response and I wouldn't say she's wrong.
Personal favorites:
The Women's Movement
In the Islands
In Bed
On the Road
At the Dam
Quiet Days in Malibu
With her reporter's eye, she never misses a detail. Whether sitting in on a Doors studio recording or at Nancy Reagan's house and yet there is no celebrity worship. Actually, it's her portrayal of ordinary people that stands out the most. Amado Vasquez, the greenhouse grower is listened to with the utmost respect. The piece on Nancy Reagan feels comical but it's in such a subtle way that you never feel that Didion is mocking her.
Most journalists keep sealed the goings on behind the scenes; Didion rips away the facade and shows you. This, she says, is the reality. The driest essay here is what you may expect to be the juiciest, "In Hollywood." Here she is overtly explaining how things are not how they are often perceived. And it puzzles her why no one else ever says the truth in front of everyone's faces. So much of this sentiment is true still.
Didion is a Stoic in many ways and at the same time she presents herself authentically. Which is rare to see. She even shares word for word her diagnosis and medical notes from her stay in a psychiatric hospital. She comments how this seems to her "an appropriate response to the summer of 1968." A pretty ballsy response and I wouldn't say she's wrong.
November 6, 2020
At its best, this essay collection reveals just how amazingly perceptive, thoughtful, and eloquent a writer Joan Didion is—a writer I am ashamed to be making a most belated (but now fanboyish) acquaintance with, I must add. What's more, many of these pieces make the west coast of the USA in the late 60s and early 70s come to life in ways both expected and wholly surprising: the latter being represented by the title essay, in which we follow the author on an apparently random tour of LA at its most LA-esque (most celebrity obsessed!) but also its most violent (the Manson murders) and most musical (as we hang with her hanging with The Doors—"the Norman Mailers of the top 40" while they struggle to keep Jim Morrison focused on recording that most LA-in-the-60s of sounds of theirs); as we interrogate the parallel/perpendicular careers of Black Panther Huey Newton, the pseudo-radical students at San Francisco State College, and Linda Kasabian of the so-called Manson Family; as we accompany the author as she attempts to delve into her own neurological dysfunction; as, finally, she attempts to weave all this into some kind of meaningful whole—viz., her coining of the phrase "we tell ourselves stories in order to live", because "we live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images, by the “ideas” with which we have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience. Or at least we do for a while."
To that end, Didion is always painstakingly precise in her telling, self-critical in her reflections, and wide-ranging in her gathering of those disparate images—most of which still manage to be completely resonant so many decades later despite their apparent encasing in the amber of a time long past (e.g. her trolling of Reagan's white elephant new governor's house, her celebrations of orchid growers, Georgia O'Keefe, the California water system [twice!], shopping mall planning [her dream career!] and the Getty museum), her taking us with her on her travels on book tours, Colombia, and, numerous times, to Hawaii…if that all sounds almost too disparate, I hear you, but when you read this book you will find that its implicit narrative line somehow manages to do what all good literature does: ask good (i.e. poignant, careful, and above all specific) questions about that most disparate and slippery of universals: life
4.5* rounded up
To that end, Didion is always painstakingly precise in her telling, self-critical in her reflections, and wide-ranging in her gathering of those disparate images—most of which still manage to be completely resonant so many decades later despite their apparent encasing in the amber of a time long past (e.g. her trolling of Reagan's white elephant new governor's house, her celebrations of orchid growers, Georgia O'Keefe, the California water system [twice!], shopping mall planning [her dream career!] and the Getty museum), her taking us with her on her travels on book tours, Colombia, and, numerous times, to Hawaii…if that all sounds almost too disparate, I hear you, but when you read this book you will find that its implicit narrative line somehow manages to do what all good literature does: ask good (i.e. poignant, careful, and above all specific) questions about that most disparate and slippery of universals: life
4.5* rounded up
June 25, 2018
A fine example of juxtaposing public cultural events with personal experiences, a kind of journalism Didion practically invented (and Hunter Thompson took over the top). By putting her reflections on political and social events in the context of her interests and activities at the time, the social impacts of the events are made more particular in an intimate way. But is their significance made more meaningful or universal with such a method? I couldn't help wondering that with each essay Didion dished up in this collection targeting the 60's. Her range of topics for commentary is broad and kaleidoscopic, ranging among adaptations to migraine headaches, California water management, LA traffic management, biker movies, Charles Manson, Doris Lessing, and Georgia O'Keefe. She is gifted in stirring up a sense of significance between unrelated spheres of activity, in the same way we connect life events in memory with the coincidence of hearing a song from the Beatles or Dylan at the time. Yet the connections she makes in her essays are more evocative than elucidating, like mental snack food with dubious nutrition.
July 24, 2018
4.5 Everybody likes Didion. All intelligent females I know like her. All intelligent males I know would most likely like her, if they could be bothered to read more female authors. Or maybe ‘like’ is the wrong word, as it’s a word that does not suit Didion at all. Anyway, I fully expected The White Album to be sharp and well observed and elegantly written. And it was. What I did not expect - and what endeared her to me as soon as I realised what was going on - is that Didion is an obsessive nerd. Not in the most traditional sense (there is no talk of Star Trek), but she’s capable of relentlessly focusing on everything from California water systems and traffic control to biker movies and the design of shopping malls. It is my personal theory that this is a symptom of an acute need to make sense of things, to analyse how the world works; and proof of comfort to be had in cause and effect, in something tangible to rely on. Having two major tenants in the mall will solve the problem with the parking lot placement, no doubt about that. The Hoover Dam will continue to operate even when humans are gone.
I almost never quote, but: “Water is important to people who do not have it, and the same is true of control.”
I almost never quote, but: “Water is important to people who do not have it, and the same is true of control.”
February 25, 2020
lei si piace di sicuro molto, a me questo è piaciuto così così: il rapporto tra egocentrismo (più aneddotica di superficie) e sostanza è troppo sbilanciato a favore del primo. che è poi - più o meno - uno dei motivi principali per cui a suo tempo didion stroncò sia woody allen che j.d. salinger (ma altrove ne ebbe anche per fellini, bergman e luchino visconti).
insomma il coraggio non le manca di sicuro, ma lo zoom è troppo (sempre) sul proprio ombelico.
insomma il coraggio non le manca di sicuro, ma lo zoom è troppo (sempre) sul proprio ombelico.
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