A sort of sequel to SLOUCHING TOWARDS BETHLEHEM. Ms. Didion continues her search for where, when, and how America went off the rails during the Sixties, with portraits, among others, of the Manson murderers to the Rev. Sloan Coffin, anti-war activist and, oddly, a figure of fun. The jaded Seventies allowed Didion to appreciate the tumultuous Sixties in a fresh light and ditch her conservatism, in 1964 she had voted for Barry Goldwater, in favor of a critical liberalism, soon to find a voice in her two long essays, SALVADOR and MIAMI.

the original cool girl book

“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.

My reading of this was broken into two segments because my loan ran out and I had to return it to the library and wait for it to come back around a couple months later.

Turns out that this week—coming home from vacation to a badly bruised Los Angeles and feeling the joy of travel fade into the interminable haze of jet lag—was the ideal time to wrap up a book that loves LA and knows her so well.

In lieu of more thorough set of thoughts on this, I'll add here the final passage from the book that really bowled me over to be reading it right now:

"One morning during the fire season of 1978, some months after we had sold the house on the Pacific Coast Highway, a brush fire caught in Agoura, in the San Fernando Valley. Within two hours a Santa Ana wind had pushed this fire across 25,000 acres and thirteen miles to the coast, where it jumped the Pacific Coast Highway as a half-mile fire storm generating winds of 100 miles per hour and temperatures up to 2500 degrees Fahrenheit. Refugees huddled on Zuma Beach. Horses caught fire and were shot on the beach, birds exploded in the air. Houses did not explode but imploded, as in a nuclear strike. By the time this fire storm had passed 197 houses had vanished into ash, many of them houses which belonged or had belonged to people we knew. A few days after the highway reopened I drove out to Malibu to see Amado Vazquez, who had, some months before, bought from the Freed estate all the stock at Arthur Freed Orchids, and had been in the process of moving it a half-mile down the canyon to his own new nursery, Zuma Canyon Orchids. I found him in the main greenhouse at what had been Arthur Freed Orchids. The place was now a range not of orchids but of shattered glass and melted metal and the imploded shards of the thousands of chemical beakers that had held the Freed seedlings, the new crosses. "I lost three years," Amado Vazquez said, and for an instant I thought we would both cry. "You want today to see flowers," he said then, "we go down to the other place." I did not want that day to see flowers. After I said goodbye to Amado Vazquez my husband and daughter and I went to look at the house on the Pacific Coast Highway in which we had lived for seven years. The fire had come to within 125 feet of the property, then stopped or turned or been beaten back, it was hard to tell which. In any case it was no longer our house."

n  '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 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.' n

Obviously a very well-written collection of essays. Didion's writing is precise, and of very high-quality, but I'm not used to her style and tone, I think. I've only read two books by Didion so far. Still not 'moved', but it doesn't make me want to read her other books any less (on the contrary, I want to read at least few more). Might try Slouching Towards Bethlehem next.

i'm not a joan didion girlie i fear... i'm sorry women

elegant, though-provoking, vulnerably aware of what being a woman means

i am definitely too dumb to understand what i just read but i def recommend it! it’s a very interesting journey thru the 60s & 70s US and even a lil cameo from my home country Colombia

Several essays stand out here, but by-and-large this seemed dated and excruciatingly aware of its own intellectualism to me.

Didion comes across as someone completely unaware of her own privilege; a snake oil salesman for rich, pseudo-intellectuals.

She write so well but says nothing. The ultimate magazine contributor, immaculate and forgettable.

And who uses the word "inchoate" four times in one book?

Sometimes I think the idea of reading Joan Didion is much better than actually reading Joan Didion.

some essays i loved, some not so much

faves: The White Album , James Pike, American , The Women's Movement , In Bogotá , At the Dam , Quiet Days in Malibu