What I've gathered from this is that the 60s were a weird and crazy time.
What I've also gathered is that Joan Didion is a wonderful writer.
Some of the essays felt definitely "of their time", others were weirdly relevant, some I didn't connect with at all, others spoke to me in a way I didn't expect. Overall, this if a fascinating book and a slice-of-life literary experience unlike anything I've read before.

I learned about Joan Didion from a fellow Goodreads member several years ago and have been planning to read her ever since. Her death in December of 2021, motivated me to finally do so.

So, where to start? Well, why not her first work. Since I had been slouching to read her, Slouching Towards Bethlehem made sense. I wonder if she ever made it to Malakoff Diggings.

I have to admit, it took me a few chapters / essays to really begin to appreciate the scope and beauty of her writing. And once I took my time to really absorb her prose, it clicked and I got it. What vivid descriptions and emotions across a number of interesting people and places. Some famous and others, like Malakoff Diggings, less known or unknown.

One thing that struck me about many of these essays is that a lot things, places and the way people act and behave from her stories haven’t really changed all that much since the 1960’s when she wrote them. While some of the drugs of choice may have changed (but not all) and certainly the technology has, much remains the same.

This book is such an interesting glimpse into the past, especially California. From LA to San Francisco and Sacramento too, plus many additional places throughout the State, including, of course, Malakoff Diggings.

But her stories are not just limited to California. She writes such a vivid description of New York City, accurate in many ways to how I have experienced it myself like this:

“ It pleased me obscurely walking uptown in the mauve eight o’clocks of early summer evenings and looking at things, Lowestoft tureens in fifty-seventh windows, people in evening clothes trying to get taxis, the trees just coming into full leaf, the lambent air, all the sweet promises of money and summer.”

Now if you are curious as to why I wonder if she ever made it to Malakoff diggings, it’s because I live in the Sierra Foothills just about 20 miles or so from this long closed mining operation, which is one of the least visited and most obscure state parks in California. Today It’s a stunning landscape. Healed literally from massive scars of terrible offenses to the environment from hydraulic mining during the Gold Rush. I was so intrigued that she mentioned it as a planned destination while she wrote from Haight Ashbury during the Summer of Love.

However, from the story it seems the drugs and the time slipped away and I don’t know if she ever made the trip. But I appreciate the trip she took me on with these stories.

A collection of essays mostly originally published in the 1960s. Some of these I had read before, perhaps in anthologies.

Joan Didion has a clear voice, and I especially liked the last piece, "Goodbye to All That."

even though the description of LA sounds like gibberish to me, who has never stepped a foot in the US, this collection of essays still managed to be quite interesting !

Hard to believe but this is the first Joan Didion book I have ever read. In this book, a series of essays, Didion takes on the sixties and the many different components that makes this time period so memorable. Her wide range of subject matter is amazing, from a courtroom and a trial. to Las Vegas weddings, from Haight-Ashbury to John Wayne and much more. Her writing is so clear and concise, basically I loved it. This is my first, but not my last Didion.

Joan Didion is technically an excellent writer. Her essays are admirably precise and considered. Observant, insightful even. But so dispassionate. Occasionally, I'd get slightly pulled into one... which mostly meant I didn't have to reread each paragraph several times because I'd forgotten to pay attention. I realize this is blasphemy, and saying this probably means I'm just somehow uninitiated or anti-intellctual, but I WAS SO BORED. I had to force myself to finish it so I'd feel less like a plebe.

Didion explores an almost random series of social scenes, mostly around California, and mostly in the supposedly exciting 1960s. In observing her subjects, she shows no regard for any conventions of sociable positivity. She just watches people with a disturbingly candid eye, noting their habits of mind, their fragmented loyalties, their banalities, and even their potential for depravity. In 1965, during the era of the Beach Boys, she writes:

"... when we start deceiving ourselves into thinking not that we want something or need something, not that it is a pragmatic necessity for us to have it, but that it is a moral imperative that we have it, then is when we join the fashionable madmen, and then it is when the thin whine of hysteria is heard in the land, and then it is when we are in bad trouble. And I suspect we are already there."

I loved the sheer beauty and rigor and power of the sentences. I'd never read anything by her before but I'd heard great things. I picked this up for 50 cents on a lark and found it to be ideal subway reading.

I don't say this lightly, mind- I spend a lot of time reading on subway ( ars is pretty longa and vita is DEFINITELY brevis ) and having a book that meshes well with the overal mise en scene is key. It might be that Didion seems to be uniquely fascinated with urban landscapes and the ephemera of modern people, or that she wrote many of these pieces for magazines and thus erred always on the side of accessibility and flow, or just that she's a damn fine writer. Does it matter?

"Goodbye To All That" was as luminous and poetic and tough-minded and vivid as its reputation insisted. I haven't had the depth of experience with NYC that she obviously does but I flatter myself to think that I could really relate to what she was writing. I could see myself in the prose as in a particularly well done movie; the silent second lead, as it were. Pretty much every time she was either reminiscing or leaving some place or reminiscing about leaving some place her prose really started to hit these amazing, subtle, breathy and breathtaking cadences.

The in-person profile of John Wayne was also interesting and somehow economically true-to-life. She writes that when she was young she saw a movie where Wayne states that he'll take the girl he fancies to the place where the water-lilies grow- she has always dreamed, albeit ruefully, that someone would take her there someday. It's a sweet, subtle, sneakily personal moment which caught my breath when I read it.

There's something to the way she can quietly inject herself into the tone and flow of what she's writing about so that the seam between herself and the world, objective/subjective voice becomes miniscule, not to say meaningless. I love this kind of writing- magazine profiles are always a special treat- and I guess Didion deserves much of the credit for pioneering it alongside the more borborygmous practitioners of the New Journalism, your Mailers, Thompsons and so on. She makes it severe, language-wise, rationing out her lyricism to distill it for maximum impact. The reader learns pretty quickly not to mess with their author's judgments.

And this is my gripe, with this book at least (the only non-fiction of hers I've read): she seems to only pick up the pieces of the most annoyingly shoddy, vapid and delusional characters. Californians of all stripes come out for the freak show on Didion's home turf: be they drippy hippies, Joan Baez's radical chic socialist summer camp, dogmatic and humorless commies selling nickel newspapers by the beach, or murderous adulterous couples who make big, ill-alibi'd splashes in their adenoidal misadventures- possibly the only great moments in their whole boring lives.

Everybody here seems a caricature. It might be true to life- I wouldn't and couldn't know, having never set foot in Cali- but it seems to be very much a shit on a shoe situation, w/r/t Didion's brilliantly lucid all-seeing-eye. It might be me, but I couldn't shake the feeling that these characters and scenarios are interesting to her because they are so fucked-up, drained, and wasted. The cumulative effect is one of aggregated enervation leading to slight but distinct exasperation.

I mean, pointing out the hollowness of the 60's counterculture is all well and good, but what with the portentious, doomy title and the near-callous, scornfully raised eyebrow of disapproval I start to take Didion's judgments with ever-increasing grains of salt. You can either shake your fist in the street or you can get some kicks out of laughing your ass off, and wouldn't it be more interesting, all Modern Urban Malaise considered, to crack a joke once in a while?

Plenty of artists and writers satirized the same social and moral landscape with seemingly similar values in mind (one might think of West, Wilder, Pynchon and Zappa, just to name a few, not to mention HST, a near-peer whose zest for the absurd only partially redeems the fact that he can't write a paragraph, or even a sentence, on Didion's level) but they did in their own ways with a bit more bravura, wit, and sympathetic understanding.

Didion doesn't need to like these people- I mean, really, who could?- but she could easily have disliked the people she writes about with less of a scowl and overblown intimations of apocalypse. Didion can write masterfully- I wonder if she can laugh half so well.

There's an interesting article I read awhile back in The Atlantic magazine that delves into Didion's role as a literary and cultural presence from a totally different and interesting perspective which might be worth reading, if you're reading this:

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/a...

For the record, I don't think Didion is being narcissitic or maudlin, I really got the sense that her social anxieties were real (rather than the hipster confections we see every friggin day on the tv or eavesdropping confabs over vegan coffee beans under paintings of sad koalas) and that most importantly they made her a better writer. Mirror to nature, fly on the wall.

Man, do I ever feel that, btw. Reading her took me back to undergrad (or last week) when I spent many interminable evenings sociologically trying to interest myself in the company I kept, bored out of my sockets, silently sitting cross-legged and watching everything everybody did, ostensibly storing it up for future reference but coming away feeling bored, despondent, and a little lost. Where have all the good times gone? As she herself remarks, in one of her many brilliantly wise, mordant aphorisms, "writers are always selling somebody out."

It's not a gender thing, either. I could give a hoot in hell for the overblown HST theatrics and the exaggerated clowning for addled insights which were never truly there where it counts, where it has always counted, IN THE PROSE. I had more friends than I cared to who thought he was the second coming of Christ and that his books qualified as real bona-fide literature. Some do, surely, but the reach exceeds the grasp for decades at a time. HST yearned with all his little heart to write like Fitzgerald and suffered the unlucky fate of being more or less the kind of writer who people who don't really cherish literature for its own sake assume to be great writing.

Didion seems the stronger writer by far in terms of (and precisely because of) her openly acknowledged subversive, steel-spined modesty. Her shit detector seems solid, shock-proof and substantial, as grizzled papa's was so rarely. My (major) beef is that, in STB at least, it's constantly blinking red.

I first read Joan Didion's Slouching Towards Bethlehem a half a century ago, when my friend Stephanie recommended it to me. Upon re-reading it, I was amazed to find that the book had not aged. I have, but the Didion's essays were as fresh as they day they were written. The title essay, "Slouching Towards Bethlehem," about the Hippies of the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco, was so fresh because there were no attitudes present in writing which would tend to age it.

In the essay "Where I Was From," she writes about the typical misapprehensions that Easterners have when visiting the Golden State. They think they have seen California, but have they?

They have not been, and they probably never will be, for it is a longer and in many ways a more difficult trip than they might want to undertake, one of those trips in which the destination flickers chimerically on the horizon, ever receding, ever diminishing.

How true! Back in 1971, when I first read the book, I had no idea of where I had been living for the previous four or five years. I thought I knew, but I didn't.

I was delighted that the book hit me as being so fresh, when so many of the books I re-read tend to be anything but.

I was so close to dnfing this book. Allow me to summarize the book and save everyone else the pain from reading it:
"I'm Joan Didion and I hate everyone and everything on this plant. I'm only happy when I'm by myself with no other humans around me. I wish we could go back to the good old days when Hollywood wasn't a thing. The Golden Dream isn't real and everything is bad."

I don't mean to be super fangirl about this collection, because a lot of the essays were fine but didn't blow my socks off. However, the ones that I really liked? I really fucking liked. And I know that a couple of months from now, probably even a few years from now, even with my shitty-shit memory, I will look back at this collection and think happy thoughts because of the essays that made my little Grinch heart explode into brightly flavored fireworks of flowers and sunshine and unicorns.

I don't mean to be dismissive about the essays that I thought were merely fine, but that's probably how it will come across. Let's just lay out here: I don't care that much about California. I know people who live there, one of my brothers used to live there, that's all great, they're good people. But when I think about places I have an active interest in visiting, California isn't high on that list. Even when a lovely person like Joan Didion writes about California, it doesn't make me want to hop on a plane and head there. So those essays didn't do so much for me, much like her other collection, Where I Was From, didn't do so much for me. I blame all of this not on Didion or her writing, but the entire state of California. Because, duh.

That's right, California, I'm throwing shade your way.

There's that one, Slouching Towards Bethlehem, for which this collection is named, that was really powerful. Didion spent time with the hippies of the original Sixties in Haight-Ashbury, and okay. That was a really decent essay. But that was more about Haight-Ashbury and counter-culture than it was about California.

But the other ones that were amazing and did funny things to my heart were the ones that were even more personal, personal to Didion and to who Didion is as a person. Most of the entire second section, Personals, made me nod out of familiarity. I knew exactly what she was talking about. On Keeping a Notebook, an essay every notebook-keeper should read; On Self-Respect; On Morality; On Going Home. And in the final section, Seven Places of the Mind (such a great section title), the final essay, Goodbye to All That hit me in all the feels. ALL THE FEELS, guys.

I want to curl up with this book and re-read all my favorites over and over again. But right now I can't even.

So five glowing stars for the ones I liked the most and I'll just pretend the other ones that felt lackluster in comparison were from that other essay collection of hers that I gave two stars.

While I personally prefer the magazine reporting mode of Didion over the more personal essay type mode, it is very easy to see how her distinctive voice carved out her place as a definitive non-fiction author of the 20th century. I particularly enjoyed her stuff on Hollywood in the 1960s in this collection, and I look forward to more from her in the future