I loved this collection of essays and Didion’s concise and stylish writing. This is a snapshot of a specific time in American history and culture that both seem so vivid that you can easily visualize it and undeniably lost to time.

3.5 stars.
The writing exemplifies the sentiments and mood of the counter culture of the 60's, Didion does indeed capture it exceptionally well. Dry and sharply delivered and filled with references and dissections of social issues she is definitely the voice of a generation albeit it comes across a little dated now. I wish I could say I liked this collection as a whole, not all essays resonated with me and left me underwhelmed more often than not, I had high hopes for this so maybe my expectations were set too high. Her more personal accounts left me wanting more so for this reason I will explore more of her work as she clearly has something to say and delivers it extremely well.

Joan Didion, where have you been all my life? My husband has been trying to get me to read her books for years, and I see now how blindly stupid I've been in not reading her sooner.

Most of the essays in "Slouching Towards Bethlethem" are wondrous; there were only a few that didn't amaze me. (The piece on the Haight-Ashbury district, for example, dragged on way too long and wasn't as interesting as it would have been when it first appeared in 1967. Similarly, the 1964 piece on Hollywood was so enmeshed in the present that it doesn't seem relevant some 40 years later.)

But the rest of the book awed me. My favorite essays were "John Wayne: A Love Song," "On Self-Respect," "On Keeping a Notebook," "On Going Home" and "Goodbye to All That."

Joan Didion's writing moved me the most when she got personal. The story of celebrating her daughter's first birthday was bittersweet, knowing that in real life, Didion's only daughter died young from septic shock. And yet, I treasured that moment of Joan gazing at her baby in her crib, hoping for the best for her.

I can't finish this review unless I mention the author's preface, which I confess I've read and reread several times to fully appreciate it. One night I read a paragraph of it to my husband, who said, "That's my favorite paragraph of hers." Here is a section of it:

"I am bad at interviewing people. I avoid situations in which I have to talk to anyone's press agent... I do not like to make telephone calls, and would not like to count the mornings I have sat on some Best Western motel bed somewhere and tried to force myself to put through a call to the assistant district attorney. My only advantage as a reporter is that I am so physically small, so tempermentally unobtrusive, and so neurotically inarticulate that people tend to forget that my presence runs counter to their best interests. And it always does. That is one last thing to remember: writers are always selling somebody out."

I could pull a great quote from every one of the essays in this book, but that would ruin the fun of you discovering it for yourself.

Everyone I know who reads a lot or considers themselves writers has told me to read Joan Didion. I always cringe and go the other way when too many people tell me to do the same thing. I’m not sure where, or when, this resistance to Didion started. But it has somehow manifested itself in my psyche.

During my first semester at Antioch University, Rob Roberge, in one of his brilliant seminars, made a few comical references to her. Not her writing, but of Didion, or more precisely the cult of Didion – much to the disapproval of my fellow students – so furthering the hype that I figured I had to finally discover just what all the brouhaha was about.

Didion can write. Her descriptive narratives that make up the chapters in Slouching Towards Bethlehem prove that she can. Yet it is the “her” in her descriptive narratives that I tend to not want to experience. Maybe I’m just too jaded with preconceived ideas, or I’ve set my expectations too high. Whatever the case, I can appreciate the craft – yet find her attitude/ego too much to wade through.

Funny, but this is probably what people say about my writing. Hmmmmmmm.......

Just unbelievably good. I'm not the right person to write about Joan Didion, but my God, she is real and she can write.

“...I think we are well-advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not. Otherwise they turn up unannounced and surprise us, come hammering on the mind's door at 4 a.m. of a bad night and demand to know who deserted them, who betrayed them, who is going to make amends. We forget all too soon the things we thought we could never forget. We forget the loves and the betrayals alike, forget what we whispered and what we screamed, forget who we were.”

I loved these essays. I could go on quoting Didion on and on, there are just too many great passages, great insights from her.

The truth is that I am full of envy. I envy Joan Didion’s facility with words. In a vernacular that is erudite without being stuffy, poetic without being overly romantic, extremely precise and sharp, she distill her thoughts skilfully.

I actually listen to it in audio format, and I know I am going to listen to one or another essay when I need something short to amuse me. But I am also going to buy the book because I want to highlight some passages, and because I want to give my own cadence to her voice. Diane Keaton narrated the version I listened and I did enjoy her voice. She sounded youthful, and made Didion’s monologues less cultured or intellectual than I perceive Didion to be. Which, surprisingly, I felt worked well. It gave Didion’s thoughts a new layer, more accessible and amicable.

This collection is said to capture the essence of 1960’s America, and I think it does. We have John Wayne, Joan Baez, San Francisco and hippies… yet, the personal essays will stay with me longer: self-respect, immorality and the power of going home are obviously more material to me than historical commentary on America.

I don’t know what I will read next, because it will be such a letdown after this book. I feel I am coming down from a high, and right now all I wanted is more of Didion’s words. Like a junkie I may just start from the beginning again. Someone please help me!

some pieces were amazing but in the whole i found this quite underwhelming

The kind of read where you have to slowly digest over a span of days, I don’t think Didion is necessarily my taste however I think this was a really interesting and well thought out read, each essay was incredibly well written and planned I preferred her more personal essays towards the end of the book & it has made me more interested her personal work, such as my year of magical thinking… adding that to my cart next…

My 2nd read. A classic. Many joys here but particular faves are Where the Kissing never stops (about Joan Baez's school for non-violence which her neighbours went to court to get banned), On Morality (why if you find a dead body in the desert you shouldn't just abandon it - kind of a precursor to Raymond Carver's So Much Water So Close to Home and the film Jindabyne that was made from it) and On keeping a notebook (self-explanatory). Listened to the audiobook - Diane Keaton's delivery is perfect, deadpan with occasional quirky curlicues which (apparently) some on audible found irritating - but if you read those reviews you'd never listen to an audiobook!

like with any didion work, she always approaches her subjects with such precision and purpose. every language choice is intentional, every sentence is so eloquent, every detail is meticulously written. she perfectly captures the essence of 1960s california and its cultural politics, somehow making me nostalgic for a place and time i never even experienced. i haven’t read much else on the subject, but i can’t imagine anyone writing about california as well as joan didion.

my fave essays were: ‘some dreamers of the golden dream’, ‘slouching towards bethlehem’, ‘on keeping a notebook’, ‘goodbye to all that’.

I realize what is disturbing about these essays and what leaves the acrid aftertaste on the leftist tongue about Didion. And I don't think it has much to do with her relatively measured take on the drug-addled Haight-Ashbury scene. For better, but admittedly and sadly often for worse, the radical leftist imagination has been characterized by a willingness and a desire to leap out of our skin into the skin of others, to experience a jump of radical empathy in which the concerns of "they" become the concerns of "we," to see through many eyes the way Virginia Woolf allows us to do. Which is why, especially if we are white, we vilify our roots because we often see in our own family histories, a palimpsest of larger histories of injustice and oppression. We have a melancholic view of history, in which moments of utopian potential are consistently being snuffed out in the name of "order" and "tradition," the very values, in other words, which Didion spent much of her time in the 1960s eulogizing. She is writing funeral speeches for the passing of milieus whose only apparent meaningfulness is that they are connected to her own biography. Why we should lament the disappearance of the pathetic stagings and affectations of a dusty fake aristocracy is not clear to me, why we should take the survivalist grit of the pioneer generation as ethical models for the present even less so. The Indians are amongst us, protect your own, defend your lifestyle against all costs. These are the imperatives of the Right, old and new, Goldwater and Bush. Circle the wagons against the strange and the new. I admire Didion for the razorblade incisiveness of her critique but her unwillingness to open her subjectivity up to the world makes it difficult to think of her as an ally.

I cannot understand who would not love reading Joan Didion. To my mind, there is not another writer who is her equal in evoking a sense of place, an evocation that calls on all of one's senses. To set such a gifted observer and writer loose in the wilds of late 20th century America was a stroke of genius and a gift to all of us. I love how she has this veneer of urban elegance that covers a rather parochial Sacramento girl. She is like a jordan almond, but less sweet. Didion would not argue that point, I don't think. She says, "I think we are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not. Otherwise, they turn up unannounced and surprise us, come hammering on the mind’s door at 4 a.m. of a bad night and demand to know who deserted them, who betrayed them, who is going to make amends."

I liked these essays best when they focused on a moment in a specific place. She captures Southern California like no one else, but she also gives us personal, immersive moments in other places, including Sacramento, San Francisco, and New York.

Didion's lens on her hometown of Sacramento was delightful. To illustrate this point, I will just pick my favorite passage on the topic and let it speak for itself:

“What happened in New York and Washington and abroad seemed to impinge not at all upon the Sacramento min. I remember being taken to call upon a very old woman, a rancher's widow, who was reminiscing (the favored conversational mode in Sacramento) about the son of some contemporaries of hers. 'That Johnston boy never did amount to much,' she said. Desultorily, my mother protested: Alva Johnston, she said, had won the Pulitzer Prize when he was working for The New York Times. Our hostess looked at us impassively. 'He never amounted to anything in Sacramento,' she said.”

I appreciated the title essay drawn from Joan's experience of the Haight in the summer of love. The hippies were ridiculous, sure, but Joan also brings us examples of the malevolence and cruelty that abounded in that scene, and the spectacular selfishness that was at the very heart of all of it. (Those are the people who brought us the country we have, the now 80 year olds who started there justifying endless self-indulgence and rejecting any responsibility to community or country.) And Joan takes down those people in their own language which is exponentially more effective than screeching at them with a critic's voice. Genius.

I was an even bigger fan of Some Dreamers of the Golden Dream, a true crime story that is really a portrait of a moment where California was the heart of all that was golden for many Americans. Didion shows how false and rotten that vision turned out to be. When a man dies and the police believe his wife has killed him, the trial becomes a press frenzy. Didion focuses less on the events of the husband's death and more on what came before: "It seemed that the marriage had reached the traditional truce, the point at which so many resign themselves to cutting both their losses and their hopes."

The final essay on her New York years and how they ended with her submersion into depression was not my favorite, but there were some passages within that piece that are beyond perfect -- if I could write but one of those sentences, I would consider my life one well lived. Just after she lands at Idlewild (now Kennedy Airport) and makes her way to a cheap East Side hotel, she calls her boyfriend in California: "I would stay in New York, I told him, just six months, and I could see the Brooklyn Bridge from my window. As it turned out the bridge was the Triborough and I stayed for eight years." And though we ended up feeling differently about living in New York in the end, she captured the way I never stopped feeling about the city:

Quite simply, I was in love with New York. I do not mean “love” in any colloquial way, I mean that I was in love with the city, the way you love the first person who ever touches you and never love anyone quite that way again.”

My favorite essay, ostensibly about Howard Hughes but really about the decline of character, included the line:

"That we have made a hero of Howard Hughes tells us something interesting about ourselves, something only dimly remembered, tells us that the secret point of money and power in America is neither the things that money can buy nor power for power’s sake (Americans are uneasy with their possessions, guilty about power, all of which is difficult for Europeans to perceive because they are themselves so truly materialistic, so versed in the uses of power), but absolute personal freedom, mobility, privacy."

That thought is as relevant now as it was then. We just have an avatar other than Howard Hughes to illustrate the point.

This is filled with moments of pure unquestioned genius interlaced with some very good but less impactful pieces (the Joan Baez piece is one I would name as not as compelling as the most perfect moments in the collection, and also the one about notebooks, and maybe the John Wayne piece). All in all, a very worthwhile read. Didion is a legend for a reason.