The immutable shadowed silhouette of Didion's coup cut moves threateningly across the dusted walls of a Californian city sprawl at dusk. A cackling laugh is heard as she overhears the still developing speech of a young budding counterculture, a broad image is spun in bland prose and then haughtily dismissed from her West coast perch of pure aestheticism. Everyone knows Joan Didion is better than them, but that you can physically experience that fact so strongly while simultaneously feeling as if you must be endeared by her provincialism leaves you paralysed. But Didion has already moved on, the bourgeoise eye of Sauron turned upon the last frontier, a rough beast that slouches towards Bethlehem.

it is perhaps a comforting thought that joan didion was at her most boring—her most unimaginative, her most insular, her most spoiled—in her thirties. barely a 2.5/5.

Life is competition, or so I keep hearing- from a mysterious Greek in the Watergate Hotel bar on New Year's Eve, from my friend's father, who told him years ago, "by the time you're 35, you know whether you're a winner or a loser", from my own internal monologue. And yeah, the impulse is to dismiss it, but how do you know that you're not just trying to console yourself (that friend of mine, incidentally, is scheduled to get married this year at the approximate age of 34 years, 10.5 months)? It's easy enough to find examples of meaningless existence and pointless ambition- just log onto Facebook and look at photos of your high school classmates smiling with their young children in football jerseys- but harder to come to the conclusion that every victory is pyrrhic; or rather, that there's something not quite right about all this talk of victory and defeat, winning and losing. But let's say you do. The problem with opting out was neatly summed up for me about six years ago by a Ukrainian friend a decade older than me. "People spend zeir lives looking for ze vay, ze meaning", he told me. He smiled. "And, as a rule, is all in vain."

"Naturally", I agreed.

"But ze irony is zat if you do not make your decision, you end up working for someone else's vision, someone else's dream."

I didn't understand him then, but I think I get it now. Earlier on New Year's Eve, I went to the DC Holocaust Museum. It seemed to me suggestive of the problem with ceding power; you never know what that other dream is going to be.

Then again, there's this Didion passage about Howard Hughes:

That we have made a hero of Howard Hughes 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...but absolute personal freedom, mobility, privacy. It is the instinct which drove America to the Pacific, all through the nineteenth century...Howard Hughes is the last private man, the dream we no longer admit.

Maybe that's it, then. Victory is to protect yourself- through distance, wealth, or guile- from the dreams of others, simultaneously relieving you of the necessity of imposing yours on them. But in some way you still have, haven't you? Isn't it true that there is no true escape from the arena? And don't you have some responsibility to try to shape the world for the better, in whatever minor way you can? Well, Didion has an answer for that, too:

Of course we would all like to "believe" in something, like to assuage our private guilts in public causes, and of course it is all right to do that...But I think it is all right only so long as we do not delude ourselves about what we are doing and why...only so long as we recognize that the end may or may not be expedient, may or may not be a good idea, but in any case has nothing to do with "morality." Because when we start to deceive 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 is when the thin whine of hysteria is heard in the land...

Didion's worth reading. You may not always agree with her- I'm not sure I do- but she gets you thinking.

Series of twenty essays that reflect the zeitgeist of the 1960s in (mostly) California. It is about dreams and ideals and changes. These essays were published in magazines and were brought together into this collection by the author. It speaks to the many difficulties in adapting to the major changes taking place in America at the time. Topics include drugs, hippies, teen runaways, and the Vietnam War, as well as famous people of the time such as Joan Baez, John Wayne, and Howard Hughes. Didion has a unique voice. She evokes a time and place, and her writing is eloquent. It feels like she is assembling a collage of scenes she has witnessed. She captures the fragmentation of social mores as they morph from the rigidity of the past to a rather chaotic future. Some are more appealing to me than others but together they provide a view of the widespread social changes of the 1960s.

The Year of Women--in which I'm devoting 2021 to reading female authors only--continues with Joan Didion and Slouching Toward Bethlehem: Essays. Published in 1968, the book is a compilation of pieces commissioned mostly by the Saturday Evening Post in the 1960s, ranging from exposés on John Wayne or Michael Laski (founder of the Communist Party USA) to essays on herself to the title piece, which documents runaways in Haight-Ashbury in 1967.

"Slouching Toward Bethlehem" is a wonderfully grimy long-read documenting the Flower Power era as it was turning ugly. I abandoned the book at the 70% mark, though. I don't feel that I was doing Didion's literary journalism any favors by binging one article after another. I wish I could've read these pieces as they were published in the 1960s, one per month. Taken together, I didn't feel they added up to much, except that every thinking person in every decade feels they're living in the end of times.

Joan Didion was born in 1934 in Sacramento, California. Her father was an Army Air Corps officer and the family relocated often. Didion discovered reading at a young age and began writing at the age of five. In 1956, she received a BA in English from the University of California, Berkeley. Her senior year, Didion won 1st place in an essay contest sponsored by Vogue and was awarded a job as a research assistant, working her way up to associate feature editor.

She relocated to California in 1964 after marrying fellow writer John Gregory Dunne, with whom Didion wrote assignments for magazines like The Saturday Evening Post to pay the bills. Essays, novels, non-fiction, memoirs and screenplays (Dunne & Didion adapted the Barbra Streisand-Kris Kristofferson version of A Star is Born) would follow. Since her husband's death in 2003, Didion maintains residency in both Los Angeles and New York City.



Previous reviews in the Year of Women:

-- Come Closer, Sara Gran
-- Veronica, Mary Gaitskill
-- Clothes, Clothes, Clothes, Music, Music, Music, Boys, Boys, Boys, Viv Albertine
-- Pizza Girl, Jean Kyoung Frazier
-- My Year of Rest and Relaxation, Ottessa Moshfegh
-- Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe, Fannie Flagg
-- The Memoirs of Cleopatra, Margaret George
-- Miss Pinkerton, Mary Roberts Rinehart
-- Beast in View, Margaret Millar
-- Lying In Wait, Liz Nugent
-- And Then There Were None, Agatha Christie
-- Desperate Characters, Paula Fox
-- You, Caroline Kepnes
-- Deep Water, Patricia Highsmith
-- Don't Look Now and Other Stories, Daphne du Maurier
-- You May See a Stranger: Stories, Paula Whyman
-- The Secret Lives of Church Ladies, Deesha Philyaw
-- White Teeth, Zadie Smith
-- Eva Luna, Isabel Allende

"The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;"
- The Second Coming, Yeats



“I know something about dread myself, and appreciate the elaborate systems with which some people fill the void, appreciate all the opiates of the people, whether they are as accessible as alcohol and heroin and promiscuity or as hard to come by as faith in God or History.”
― Joan Didion, Slouching Towards Bethlehem

I'm sure at some point Joan Didion will disappoint. I'm positive the honeymoon period will run out. I'll discover a fatal flaw, a series of articles, or a minor novel that she just 'phoned in', but not yet bitches.

Seriously, if prose could make me pregnant, I would now be Nadya Suleman.

I know this is just the normal hormonal response I get whenever I really seem to mesh or synch with an author or artist. I felt this way when I first read DFW's and McPhee's nonfiction. This is the same brain-storm that happened when I first read Delillo & Bellow's fiction; the same awe I felt when I walked into the Paris Opera and saw that giant Chagall ceiling hanging beyond that infamous, 7-ton bronze and crystal chandelier. Those same chills ran down my spine and flushed my face the first time I swallowed a Vicodin. I felt just as complete the first time I watched a Coen brothers movie. I also felt this the first time I discovered my arm naturally guided my hand to my lap. No, this isn't a revolution. It isn't even revolutionary. It a euphoria and I know it. I get it. I'm already cooling down. But I'm just going to leave the book here on my chest for awhile until my heart slows down a bit.

This is the book that made me fall in love with Joan Didion. Her prose is like a razor. What style she has. Her essays in this collection prove that it's not what you write but how you write it. Of course, I appreciated her subject matter too and her eye for a good story, and the way she cut through social issues, as she did the hippie myths of Haight-Ashbury during the 1960s in San Francisco.

One of my favorites is one called, "On Keeping a Notebook," where the great Didion talks about writing (and notebooks):

"How it felt to me: that is getting closer to the truth about a notebook...See enough and write it down, I tell myself, and then some morning when the world seems drained of wonder, some day when I am only going through the motions of doing what I am supposed to do, which is write— on that bankrupt morning I will simply open my notebook and there it will all be, a forgotten account with accumulated interest, paid passage back to the world out there..."

I first read this collection years ago and loved it, which is proof that there is an ever changing time and place for books. This time, I appreciated the vivid snapshots Didion created but with the exception of the last essay, about her twenties in NYC, the essays did not resonate with me.

"I went to San Francisco because I had not been able to work in some months, had been paralyzed by the conviction that writing was an irrelevant act, that the world as I had understood it no longer existed. If I was to work again at all, it would be necessary for me to come to terms with disorder."



Slouching Towards Bethlehem is Joan Didion's seminal essay collection detailing life in Northern California, most notably the 1960s counter culture. The title essay contrasts Didion's impressions of San Francisco hippie culture with its most idealized utopian representations. The "Slouching Towards Bethlehem" title comes from W.B. Yeats' poem "The Second Coming." Yeat's famous line from that poem, "The center cannot hold" works brilliantly in this essay and (in my mind at least) echoes through the rest of the collection. Through Didion's words, we feel transported to this time and place, but it was already a transitory place when Didion was writing about it, and you feel that it is already fading into story: “The stories are endless, infinitely familiar, traded by the faithful like baseball cards, fondled until they fray around the edges and blur into the apocryphal.”

Attending UC Berkeley and living in a student co-op (Barrington Hall) that was called "the last bastion of 60s counter culture," I felt something like nostalgia at the feel and the texture of these stories, and the sometimes idealized but deeply imperfect past Didion describes. “Nothing was irrevocable; everything was within reach... I could make promises to myself and to other people and there would be all the time in the world to keep them. I could stay up all night and make mistakes, and none of it would count.” 4.5 stars

I have sort of read Joan Didion backwards, beginning with her masterful memoir, The Year of Magical Thinking, and now working my way back to Slouching Towards Bethlehem--one of those books that casts a long shadow over contemporary nonfiction. I picked up this book as a companion for a recent trip back to Los Angeles, both because Didion is one of those rare creatures who is a "native" of California, but also because California figures prominently in these essays. But I became so absorbed in the book I didn't sleep on my redeye flight and finished it while taxiing at LAX.

As I understand it, Didion was sometimes mistaken for a reactionary conservative because of her unflinching depiction of the Haight-Ashbury district in the summer of '67 (the title essay in this volume). This is clearly to misread her. Indeed, Didion cringes at her own inability to capture the essence of the summer of love in that essay, but she also laments misreading:

I suppose almost everyone who writes is afflicted some of the time by the suspicion that nobody out there is listening, but it seemed to me then (perhaps because the piece was important to me) that I had never gotten a feedback so universally beside the point.

This is part of the allure of this volume: it is both a collection of stellar nonfiction writing as well as reflexive commentary on the vocation and task of writing. Hence the more confessional, autobiographical moments of the book (on keeping a notebook, on going home, on leaving New York). Even these are packed with suggestive nuance. (For example, in commenting on the faith a young communist in Watts who seems driven by dread, Didion confesses: "I know something about dread myself, and appreciate the elaborate systems with which some people manage to fill the void, appreciate all the opiates of the people, whether they are as accessible as alcohol and heroine or as hard to come by as faith in God or History.")

In these pieces from the 60s, Didion is both a powerful stylist and a crisp observer. Her writing couples bravura and insight as few can. In fact, in this sense she often reminded me of Norman Mailer (imagine Norman Mailer with a vagina!). There are paragraphs in here (especially in "Some Dreamers of the Golden Dream") that left me almost breathless from their energy--a virtuoso performance that captures both a zeitgest and a geography in 3 pages of fire. But there are crystallized one-liners that nail reality to the wall (of Joan Baez she says, "until she found Carmel, she did not really come from anywhere").

California is a quarry for Didion precisely because California is where Americanism goes to die--though it goes there thinking it will achieve eternal life. Didion often frames this in terms of the "dream": the American dream, the dream of the Gold Rush, the buttoned-down dreamers in the Valley or the turned-on dreamers in the Haight. So the spiral of a disaffected marriage in southern California becomes "the revelation that the dream was teaching the dreamers how to live"--and kill and die. Or in a remarkable piece on John Wayne, a younger Didion confesses: "when John Wayne rode through my childhood, and perhaps through yours, he determined forever the shape of certain of our dreams." Or she sees Howard Hughes as a projection of our dreams:

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 [...], but absolute personal freedom, mobility, privacy. [...] He is the last private man, the dream we no longer admit.

I suppose the line on Didion as a reactionary or a 'conservative' of sorts stems from a kind of memory or quasi-nostalgia that sometimes comes to the surface in this collection. For example, she recalls the scene of John Wayne's "discovery" by director John Ford: "There, a meeting with John Ford, one of the several directors who were to sense that into this perfect mold might be poured the inarticulate longings of a nation wondering at just what pass the trail had been lost." The same sense of loss and errancy gets a kind of imprimatur on her reflections on the history of Sacramento, her home town--a town founded on a curious mixture of hope and history, that things started downhill pretty much just after the "Eureka" moment of discovery:

Such a view of history casts a certain melancholia over those who participate in it; my own childhood was suffused with the conviction that we had long outlived our finest hour. In fact that is what I want to tell you about: what it is like to come from a place like Sacramento. If I could make you understand that, I could make you understand California and perhaps something else besides, for Sacramento is California, and California is a place in which a boom mentality and a sense of Chekhovian loss meet in uneasy suspension; in which the mind is troubled by some buried by ineradicable suspicion that things had better work here, because here, beneath that immense bleached sky, is where we run out of continent.

The lament/memory/nostalgia is most famously expressed in the opening of "Slouching Toward Bethlehem" where Didion observes "children who were never taught and would never now learn the games that had held the society together." This opening gambit is completed by the end of the essay when she concludes:

At some point between 1945 and 1967 we had somehow neglected to tell these children the rules of the game we happened to be playing. Maybe we had stopped believing it ourselves, maybe we were having a failure of nerve about the game. Maybe there were just too few people around to do the telling. These were children who grew up cut loose from the web of cousins and great-aunts and family doctors and lifelong neighbors who had traditionally suggested and enforced the society's values. They are children who have moved around a lot, San Jose, Chula Vista, here. They are less in rebellion against the society than ignorant of it, able only to feed back certain of its most publicized self-doubts, Vietnam, Saran-Wrap, diet pills, the Bomb.

[It is a straight line, I think, from this observation to the stinging satire of Shteyngart's Super Sad True Love Story.]

So Didion regularly looks back, laments something lost, wonders whether we've taken some wrong turns. For those who think any glance back amounts to some kind of ideology (this assumption itself being ideological), this is enough for Didion to qualify as a reactionary. But is all memory nostalgia? And could our memory sometimes be right? Certainly Didion is no Whig; and only whiggish ideals of progress consider historical laments as false de jure. But some of us just refuse such simplicities. Perhaps Didion is a Burkean we need now more than ever.

Days after Manson died, I kept thinking about him, how he and his Family had summoned the darkness at the heart of the Summer of Love. I remembered how surprised we all were, that the drugs and the smiles and the flowers had come to this, but then I thought, no, not all of us. Joan Didion would have understood; Joan Didion would not have been surprised.

Slouching Toward Bethlehem, a collection of magazine essays and Didion’s second book, is about many things, but mostly it is about ‘60’s California. In its first section “Life Styles in the Golden Land”—slightly longer than half the book--every piece but one is set in California: a San Bernadino Valley murder, profiles of California icons (John Wayne, Joan Baez, Howard Hughes), characteristic California political institutions (the Communist splinter group the CPUSA, the now defunct liberal think tank the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions), and the California nexus of the Hippie Explosion, San Franciso’s Haight-Ashbury district during the Summer of Love. (Even the short piece not set in California, “Marrying Absurd,” about the Las Vegas wedding industry, is about California and its culture too.)

But the California connection does not stop there. Didion was a product of the Sacramento Valley, the descendant of settlers who—before the Gold Rush—crossed the plains in a covered wagon (Joan’s great-great-great grandmother travelled with the Donner party, but, unlike the Donners, her family avoided the fatal short cut and instead followed the old Oregon Trail.) Thirty additional pages of Bethlehem, some of the most personal of the book, describe her California and how it has shaped her character and her perspective.. She recognizes that, even for a Native Daughter like herself, the oldest of California traditions are too recent to constitute roots, that the culture of the ‘60’s Golden Land is always changing: from orange groves to real estate to aerospace (and, later, to high tech and beyond). In her title essay, Didion lays bare the predispositions of the lost freeway children who inhabit the Haight in the late '60's: aimless, disconnected from culture, lacking the principles that might help them fashion a viable alternative, they are people for whom any hypnogogic amusement, any superficial enlightment, even a dark savior, will do.

You can learn much about the ‘60’s from this book, but its real pleasure lies in its elegant, sinewy prose. If there is a single clumsy sentence in this book, I failed to find it (and I am one of those irritating fellows who looks). Here is just a taste, from “Some Dreamers of the Golden Dream,” a description of the San Bernardino Valley:

n  This is the California where it is easy to Dial-A-Devotion, but hard to buy a book.  This is the country in which a belief in the literal interpretation of Genesis has slipped imperceptibly into a belief in the literal interpretation of Double Indemnity, the country of the teased hair and the Capris and the girls for whom all life's promise comes down to a waltz-length white wedding dress and the birth of a Kimberly or a Sherry or a Debbi and a Tijuana divorce and return to hairdressers' school.  “We were just crazy kids” they say without regret, and look to the future.  The future always looks good in the golden land, because no one remembers the past.  Here is where the hot wind blows and the old ways do not seem relevant, where the divorce rate is double the national average and where one person in every thirty-eight lives in a trailer.   

Here is the last stop for all those who  come from somewhere else, for all those who drifted away from the cold and the past and the old ways.  Here is where they are trying to find a new life style, trying to find it in the only places they know to look:  the movies and the newspapers. n

3.5 stars. as usual i loved didion's writing but not all essays resonated with me (which i'm sure i would have liked more if i had known what she was talking about haha) regardless, i'm still excited to read more of her works.

my favorite essays:
some dreamers of the golden dream
on keeping a notebook
on self-respect
goodbye to all that