Uggghhh...what a punishing read....

Ah ..... California

I love Joan Didion, I read 'the year of magical thinking' first and all her other stuff afterward, I recommend anything of her's to anyone who asks me what I recommend. This collection conveniently ties it all together ... her writing is masterful!

It's kind of odd to review this as if it's just one book of Didion essays. It's actually seven books. And I enjoyed some of them so much more than others, which is not Didion's fault—her writing is always superlative—it's just that some of the subjects she writes about aren't my thing. "Salvador," for example was really hard to finish. The stand-outs (surprising no one) are "Slouching Towards Bethlethem" and "The White Album," with honorable mention going to "Where I Was From." "Political Fictions" is also very good. I wouldn't recommend reading all this Didion in one go; I did get a little fatigued toward the end. But her writing is just so great, I kept chugging on through. I'm glad I finished it.

Ok, so I got three quarters of the way through the book, but after reading through the first couple sections in Political Fictions I finally just gave up and "accidentally" left the book at my parent's house. Certainly, Joan Didion is really insightful and there is some very beautiful writing in the book. Unfortunately, way too much of her best work is concentrated in the first two parts of the collection which are introspective, while also having a certain time capsule effect of the era she was documenting. After The White Album, she meanders through the political conflicts going on in El Salvador and Miami in a way that was both difficult to understand as someone not fully aware of all the background nuances of the time period and just generally not nearly as strong of writing or thought on the issues. All of Didion's political writing is kind of miserable to read. For one thing, unlike with her earlier works where she found a way to combine her very personal, semi-autobiographical reflections with larger cultural and political issues, her later work is bloated with lethargy and it is often unclear what she's doing covering stories like this in the first place other than to appease her publisher. When she writes about her coverage of presidential elections she writes with a bemused tone about how little connection she feels to the political process and how out of place she is trailing along with the campaigns. As a reader, you can't help but wonder along with her since the writing is full of jaded, bitter, fatalism more than anything else. As you read the chronological progression of the work you can't help but sense her becoming more and more numb to her surroundings and more and more hopeless about what meaning, personal or not, there might be in any of it.

One of the longest running arguments between myself and a close friend is our reading habits. I read haphazardly, with not much regard to following an established canon or order. I reread, for one thing, an action that is unconscionable in his eyes.

He picks an author and reads nearly everything by that author in chronological order. I buy books cheaply and in individual copies, whereas he saves and buys the Everyman or Library of America anthologies.

This is the one instance in which I believe he is correct. We Tell Ourselves Stories In Order To Live is not an easy travel volume. I frequently found it too heavy to even prop against my legs in bed, and vaguely wished for a reading podium (like an English lord).

At $35 I would call this a "gift card buy" (because I'm cheap) but it's absolutely worth it for Didion lovers.

This is the last book to have rocked my world. Before this I'd only read "The White Album" and upon beginning this book I felt the same thrill that I felt discovering some of my other favorite authors, people like Harry Crews or Dennis Cooper.

Didion is quite unlike the writers I tend towards. She's much more a child of the New Yorker reading, grad school attending, fans of Saul Bellow and more recently David Foster Wallace set, if that makes sense to anyone besides myself. People consider her sparse. I consider her wordy, but in a good way. She's got a way for pentrating the blood/brain barrier with her sentences. Her non-fiction has a way of feeling like fiction and vice versa. She's got a way of summing up the crux of her stories with these haulting beautiful sentences that seem to come out of nowhere. I'd say that her story endings can feel a bit abrupt at times though.

Read this big fat book.

She is so good. I especially love the collections The White Album and Slouching Towards Bethlehem. When I first started reading this collection I pretty much devoured it, but as I've gotten toward the end (I'm in Political Fictions now), I've slowed down, just so I'll still have some left to look forward to...

Impressive observational skills, intense perspective analysis and enlightening disclosures.

I WANTED to read this book, and badgered the library until they found it for me. However, as I started reading I realized my limitations. The print is small and fairly light, and my bifocals just didn't do the job well. I am an eclectic reader and get much pleasure from it, but this was just too much work to be a pleasure. Sadly, I stopped reading.

A perpetual "currently-reading." Slowly, but surely, I am working my way through this magnificent collection...though not chronologically. Thus far, I've tackled *The White Album* and am presently finishing up *Slouching Toward Bethlehem.*

My Thoughts:

Joan Didion is one of my favorite nonfiction authors. I dislike the term fan because I have a mental image of an Elvis or Beatle’s fan screaming and crying and pulling on their hair. I’ve read some of the books in this volume before. I have read what I can find about her online. Several times I have watched the Netflix original, The Center Will Not Hold. I’m so thankful her nephew directed it.

Several reasons why she is a favorite!

1. She is an approachable type of person. She is someone I’d smile at if we met at a grocery store. She is a person I’d love to scan her bookshelves or listen to her talk about Ernest Hemmingway or George Eliot. Those are favorite authors of ours.
2. She is a person I can related to, to an extent. We both had lengthy marriages to hot heads. We are writers. We come across as people who don’t have much to talk about (people tend to overlook.) Yet, our inner dialogue and writings have much to say.
3. She is a varied writer. She writes about subjects that are from personal experience or political or celebrities or true crime. She stretched her writing to beyond what she thought capable. She was encouraged to do so, but it took courage. She wrote about personal sufferings. She wrote in hopes of understanding or at least as a way to process what had happened.
4. Joan Didion was born in 1934. My mother was born in 1926. This is a generation of women who did not talk about the hard experiences and sufferings of life. They kept things to themselves. Joan chose to write about certain life experiences. For example, contemplating divorce, and the adopting of a child. This reason is significant and can be overlooked by our saturated social media world where people tend to talk too much about some things and miss other ideas all together.

If I could ask her one question it would be: what stories did you not write (and wanted to) or have published?

I read the book cover to cover. The political essays were my least favorite because I am not a political reader (I don’t consider myself to be.)

My favorite essays are Some Dreamers of the Golden Dream, John Wayne: A Love Song, Slouching Towards Bethlehem, On Keeping A Notebook, On Morality, On Going Home, Letter From Paradise, Rock Of Ages, Goodbye To All That. All of that list is from Slouching Towards Jerusalem. The second book is The White Album. The first essay I love, and it’s titled the same as the book. Other essays I love are The Women’s Movement, Georgia O’Keeffe, In the Islands, On the Morning After the Sixties, and Quiet Days in Malibu. I enjoyed the piece on Salvador. I did not think I’d enjoy reading it. It is informative and a keen observer of various people she met. These people are from different walks of life. I enjoyed reading After Henry. It is piece that shares the remarkable friendship and his legacy. New York is a piece about the white middle class woman who went running in Central Park New York City and was brutally beaten and raped. Didion examines a bit further, rapes of black women who are raped more often and the media did not impress upon their readership to pay attention. The last essays of the book are about her parents, and it ends with her mother’s death and the sorting through of her things.

I love Joan Didion’s writing style. The sentences are often short, crisp, and to the point. Aptly chosen words that do not rush me through the sentence. There is a patience and calmness to her writing, even if there is chaos in the subject. She is a keen observer of people. The first sentence is often memorable, and replays in my mind long after I’ve finished. That first sentence grabs hold of my attention, and it sets the tone for the rest of the essay.

There is an old saying “this goes without saying” but I don’t really know Joan Didion. However, I feel there is a humanity and vulnerability and realness in her, and it shows in her writing. She expresses enough for me to get a glimpse of her life and views and subject material. But in that glimpse, she allows me to move towards her a bit by the knowledge that she understands, she is listening, and observing quietly, and she has valuable and cherished words to share.

Genre: Nonfiction. Essays. Memoir.
Pages: 1122.
Format: Hardcover.
Source: Self-purchase.
Audience: Nonfiction readers. Essay readers. Readers of Joan Didion.
Rating: Excellent.