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

Beautifully written and structured. When I was interested in the topics of the essays, I adored this, but sometimes I really wasn't interested at all (water management in California? Really not for me).

joan didion is the blueprint. i’ve never read someone who is so blunt in her observations, so poetic when being informative, who just effortlessly comes across as cool and approachable. i have been told that the white album is not her best piece of work, and yet it was so well done, but a few of the essays went completely over my head. all in all i think i’ve found a new favorite author, and i’m excited to read more of didion’s work!!

“We tell ourselves stories in order to live.”

I love the ease with which Joan Didion writes, or at least it appears as such. It’s borderline conversational yet flawless. Here, she presents us mostly with snippets of 60s and 70s America. Such a fascinating time period. My favorite essay was the Georgia O’Keefe. I’m a fan. This was only my second Didion and I can’t wait to read more.

Pod kilkoma względami nierówny zbiór- bardzo ciekawy początek, potem spadek i ciągłe wahanie poziomu. Przede wszystkim dla miłośników kultury amerykańskiej przełomu lat 60. i 70., których klimat czuć tu na każdej stronie. Niestety jest tu też wszystko to, co mi do tej pory przeszkadzało u Didion, czyli bardzo głębokie osadzenie w wyższej warstwie społecznej, a ja niekoniecznie czuję potrzebę (po raz kolejny) czytania o tym, gdzie autorka zjadła lunch, z jakimi znanymi osobami się spotkała lub co napisano o niej w gazecie. 2,5

Exceptional writing devoid of judgment by Joan Didion, capturing an era of societal disorder questioning the core principles of American values. The author observes the assault on norms that resulted in advancements for women, truths of racism in our culture, criminal justice realities, the terminal results of overdoses in the young, the radicalization of students toward authority, AND notes on Ronald and Nancy Reagan. The era that predicted the mobilization of discord for the rest of the century and captures the roots of today's discords is presented without conclusions for the reader to consider.

3.75 stars

Recently I read Slow Days, Fast Company by Eve Babitz and decided to read The White Album in conjunction to compare and contrast two different view points of the prolific writers hoping to get a better pictures of late 1960s-70s LA and California. Although I thoroughly enjoyed both books, I enjoyed this one slightly more. This is a collection of essays that focus on the chaos and paranoia of the time period and that reads as almost a continuation of Didion's Slouching Towards Bethlehem.

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"We tell ourselves stories in order to live.'

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Didion's writing brings me to life. The entire first paragraph of the titular essay was orgasmic. She muses upon the subjective and inquisitive nature of reality: how the same objective event can be differently characterised in order to make sense of our reality which she describes as a "shifting phantasmagoria". Although essays in the rest of the book were sometimes written years apart I loved how they were hand-picked to all have similar ideas running throughout. I loved especially the motif of life being like a theatre production and with some people knowing their cues and their scripts, but Didion feeling like she has 'lost' hers recently. In general, in my opinion, there is more first-person narration here from Didion than in Slouching Towards Bethlehem if only it appears because she incorporates many of her on musings into the works. Overall, the writing here is exquisite and Didion's prose is slowly becoming one of my favorites.

Other than that I enjoyed the subject matter of all the different sections. Even though I found some essays to be long winded (for example the essay about Hollywood in her "Sojourns" section), overall each had something different and interesting to say. Moreover there was surprisingly a lot of ideas explored that were similar to the topics in popular modern discussions (for example the differences in waves of feminism).

The one thing that really knocked my enjoyment down, though, was the repetitive nature of the themes in the essays. Where in Slouching Towards Bethlehem there were really high highs for and low lows, here all the essays were more at a similar level but I missed the ones I thought reached excellence.

Overall, I really enjoyed this book despite the repetitive nature of the themes. Didion is quickly becoming one of my favorite non-fiction writers and I will definitely be reading more from her soon.

listened on audiobook. fourth didion and I felt the same way about this one as I did for the others, some essays I love and others don’t care for. nonetheless she has such a unique voice and perspective and way of storytelling that I find profound and difficult to describe

This was a struggle to get through. Some very boring to read essays (about how much she loves water?) interspersed with some gems.

A disappointing read after Slouching Towards Bethlehem, which in my opinion is a much stronger (and dreamier) book of essays.

dnf 10% what am i even reading

Obviously was going to be 5 star material! :)
Super resonance.

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.