I’m somewhat late to the party on this one as ‘The White Album’ is my first Joan Didion. And I mean… talk about icon!

This collection of essays is superb! She’s so smart… so, so smart. And cool. I don’t use that term very often… but she really is bloody cool. (At least I think so!)

I wanted to read ‘The White Album’ first, as I’ve read that people consider ‘Slouching Towards Bethlehem’ to be ‘better’… and want to have read them both, so I have a good sense of her writing, before reading ‘The Year of Magical Thinking’. Both of which are on order!

But even after just this one title, I’ll consider myself a fan!

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.

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"Ancient marbles were not always attractively faded and worn. Ancient marbles once looked as they do here: as if dreamed by a mafia don." 76

I didn't even finish this book. I made it to page 155 and couldn't take Didion's scatterbrain style and name dropping anymore.

I enjoyed this dystopian look at a far future California under attack:

“the “rescue-boat operation” at Paradise Cove, the “beach operations” at Leo Carrillo, Nicholas, Point Dume, Corral, Malibu Surfrider, Malibu Lagoon, Las Tunas, Topanga North and Topanga South. Those happen to be the names of some Malibu public beaches but in the Zuma lookout that day the names took on the sound of battle stations during a doubtful cease-fire. All quiet at Leo. Situation normal at Surfrider.”

And its terrible aftermath:

“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.“

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

I've been circling around this author like a bee reading books by her friends Eve Babitz and Susanna Moore, but never read a Didion book until now. This book cover has also been a shiny object for me, as I'm a Beatles fan- so the title "The White Album" always grabs my attention. So I checked out a compendium of Didion's books from the library and finally sampled her writings. The first essay was "Slouching Towards Bethlehem" which bored the hell out of me and I DNF'd it fairly quickly. Then I moved on to "The White Album" which was more digestible as it discussed topics I was interested in such as The Manson murders and Jim Morrision of The Doors. However, I still dislike her writing style and even partially skimmed this essay. I prefer spare and concise writing that is free flowing and easy to read. Reading is a relaxing refuge for me and I don't want to feel like I'm working to get through it. I read someone's review of a Didion essay on Amazon, and they talked about how they had to practically pore through her writings with a fine tooth comb, but it was worth it in the end. I disagree. This is too intellectual and "prosey" for me and I prefer things delivered in a straightforward and no-frills manner. I'm reading a book about Eve Babitz and Joan Didion, so I wanted to see what all the bugaboo was about. I wasn't missing anything.

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.

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.

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.”

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.

I need a moment to figure out how I felt about this as a whole. But I’ll say Didion has a way of making you care about things you didn’t think you’d care about.