As I was making my way through this one, it once more occurred to me: how unfair that Joan Didion will be mostly remembered as the High-Priestess-of-Grieving (on account of The Year of Magical Thinking), instead of the Cool-Bitch-Chic author she had been for the better part of her writing career.
I love her prose in either of those capacities. The White Album is of the latter.
It’s engrossing and sharply written, brimming 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 makes everything personal, 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 be doing 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 irrelevant to our times but 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 is 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 on the legendary artist), describe all that has, or hasn’t, changed to anyone 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.

ok well i liked some essays a lot more than others (the fact that the dislikes outweigh the likes is what makes this a 3-star book) but mostly this inspired me to start writing essays because apparently i can just say anything! i have thoughts too!!

I’m convinced there’s not a better living prose stylist than Joan Didion. What’s left to say that hasn’t been said? Even when I don’t pick up on all of the references of the time (though I’ve at least been to the Getty Villa), it’s hard not to be enraptured by the language. If I could hand pick my favorite essays from this and Slouching Towards Bethlehem, that would easily be a five-star book.

n  

We tell ourselves stories in order to live.

n

I really loved the titular essay and thoroughly enjoyed the others. Some of this is kind of dated now, but don't let that put you off - I'd still highly recommend checking it out because of how fantastic Joan Didion's non-fiction writing is.

we tell ourselves stories in order to live… or whatever joan didion said.

didion creates a vivid portrait of california in the 60s. some essays were very intriguing, while some I couldn’t care less about. half the time I did not know what she was talking about, though. that is partly because it was too american for me to understand, and partly because sometimes she just talked out of her ass.

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mother is mothering

a solid essay collection of joan didion’s musings on life and culture in late 1960s california. didion is literally one of the most celebrated writers of our generation, so i really don’t need to sing her praises here. for me, the sections about her personal life were the most enjoyable, so i’m definitely interested in picking up her memoir soon.

Not quite as memorable as Slouching Towards Bethlehem, but this collection of essays certainly demonstrates Didion's range and prowess, to portray the extraordinary as well as appreciate the commonplace. From the Manson murder trials, tributes to the likes of American Painter Georgia O'Keeffe, family vacations in Hawaii, and a Mexican gardener raising orchids in Malibu; to Hollywood, the Getty Museum, the Hoover Dam, and a rather fascinating trip to Colombia, including that of a salt mine with a cathedral carved into the mountain 450 feet below the surface, Didion is always immensely readable and this kept my high level of interest from its first page to its last. She often defines this sort of battleground where her steady eyes observing the new California are overshadowed by her memories of the old California that won't let go.

I absolutely adored Didion's Slouching Towards Bethlehem. It is because of Didion (in addition to an other select few) that I want to write essays. But whenever I read her, I'm not entirely sure why.

Didion's background is as a journalist. Her essays in this collection, as in others, are very journalistic in approach as many of them were written for various publications. Often, however, the individual essays make me feel cold, devoid of much other feeling. Her writing does not always inspire me, in other words. But she is still a power-horse in the world of essays, I adore her as a person, and I find her an interesting human being.

In this collection she writes a variety of different topics: from suffering from chronic migraines to the Manson murders to the Black Panther Party. In other words, Didion captured the 1960s and 1970s in a way that many of her contemporaries could not. She has an ear for dialogue which cannot be rivaled (except, perhaps, in David Mamet). She shares a directness and an honesty that is astounding, whether it's a passing comment about the state of her marriage or about social events in which she was expected to be a part.

What I appreciate most, I suppose, is that I see the different topics Didion has written about over the years. She is not a one-trick pony. Whether she was given an assignment of topics on which to write or she used her own personal curiosity, she appears to delve into the story as she sees it and struggles (often on the page) to make sense of it all. The Sixties and Seventies were tumultuous times in American history, and I'm glad that Didion's voice was there recording much of it.

“We tell ourselves stories in order to live . . . 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 . . . Quite often I reflect on the big house in Hollywood, on ‘Midnight Confessions’ and on Ramon Novarro and on the fact that Roman Polanski and I are godparents to the same child, but writing has not yet helped me to see what it means.”

Joan Didion just is California and the 60s. She had her foot in every door of everyone that would become famous (including, naturally, the Doors) from that place and era.

But the strange thing is, I don’t love her journalistic essay books. I didn’t like Slouching Towards Bethlehem, and I didn’t love this. I moderately liked this.

By contrast, her more recent, more personal books, The Year of Magical Thinking and Blue Nights, I adored. The less personal ones, the more journalistically framed Didion anthologies, just don’t grab me or connect with me on the same level.


~~~~~BOOK RIOT'S READ HARDER CHALLENGE~~~~~
#22: An essay anthology.

This is my first Joan Didion book, and for me, it's a hit and miss. An enjoyable read and obviously a good writer, but I don't feel any sense of passion or deep interest. I was curious to read "The White Album" because I live in Los Angeles. I remember the Charles Manson times as being very scary in Los Angeles, and Didion captures those horrifying moments as it happened. One gravely suspected things are not entirely OK, which was a direct contrast with the Hippie thing at the time. A bad vibe comes over the landscape. Didion captures the essence quite well, but it doesn't explain why one would feel dread. It's hinted at but not fully explained. And perhaps something like that can't be fully explained. I do like her curiosity in subjects such as biker exploitation films, water, dams, and flowers. She does make everything she writes about as part of her character. Her travel writing and I do think of her in that field or genre of writing are quite observant. I'm not sure why I don't find her that fascinating.