Very interesting, as were the rest... I am hoping to read the last two from this collection soon.

Not among my favorites due to the majority of the subject matter, but I'm always in awe of her observational skills and analysis.

Caveat for the three-star rating; There were two essays within the book I would rate as five-star, but there were several hyper-specific essays of which the topics weren't interesting enough for me to enjoy (the one about the Los Angeles Times might not even be interesting if you lived in LA it was so detail-oriented).

That being said, the essay "In the Realm of the Fisher King" about Ronald Reagan was intriguing. The focus on Reagan as an actor, and Nancy Reagan's mannerisms and social etiquette as a first lady were super interesting. There is also some focus on a more general theme of politics as theatre.

The final essay in the book, "Sentimental Journeys", about the Central Park Five, and New York City in the 80s as a broader theme, is one of my favorite reads by Joan Didion. She dissects the media and criminal justice aspects of the trial and relates it to the overall economic and social environment of the city at large. A quote from the essay:

"Here was a case that gave this middle class a way to transfer and express what had clearly become a growing and previously inadmissible rage with the city's disorder, with the entire range of ills and uneasy guilts that came to mind in a city where entire families slept in the discarded boxes in which new Sub-Zero refrigerators were delivered, at twenty six hundred per, to more affluent families."

Overall, an OK read, with a few gleaming gems.

Didion’s ability to transport the reader to California is the whole heart of this book. Washington and NY sections were harder to grasp/relate to.

"It'll blow a hole in your retina"
-- Joan Didion, "Pacific Distances" in 'After Henry'



"Writers are only rarely likable. They bring nothing to the party, leave their game at the typewriter. They fear their contribution to the general welfare to be evanescent..."
-- Joan Didion, 'After Henry'

Joan Didion is a prose knife fighter. God love whoever/whatever finds their slow side trapped in a corner, facing the pointy end of Didion's prose. She is especially talented in writing about place (especially California, Washington, Hawaii, New York, Los Angeles) politics, and people. But these are just the prose steps, the shifting geology, the temporary coordinates of her attacks. The thrust of her compressed prose is directed at narrative: the narrative of politics, the narrative of cities, city papers, journalists, actors, etc. She knows language and cliché and can smell Waimea bullshit from a busy "4+lib" near Brentwood Park. She is both gift and god. She is both bounty and blessing. She is both shake and tremor. It is obvious she loves things, but isn't afraid to pull the scab directly off the things she most loves. She doesn't have time for sentimental niceties. She ain't got time for you to bleed.

In the 80s she was maturing, but losing none of her grace and none of her excellence. These stories or narrative essays or whatever are all taken from her seasoned years (1979-1991) after her long-time editor Henry Robbins died (1979). They were written as evidence to herself that she could still write after he died, that she could 'do it without him.'

Hmm. Not grabbing me the way all of her other books have. Too political, too journalistic, too uninvolving? Even the Patty Hearst essay seemed more of an exercise/assignment. I’m sure there are good bits, but I am not digging out as many as I’d like. Some other day.

i liked this better than slouching toward bethlehem

“childhood is the kingdom where nobody dies”

“Perhaps Mrs. Reagan’s most endearing quality was this little girls fear of being left out, of not having the best friends and not going to the parties in the biggest houses.”

“But this was not in fact Silicon Valley: this was San Jose…”

“A good part of any day in Los Angeles is spent driving, alone, through streets devoid of meaning to the driver? Which is one reason the place exhilarated some people, and floods others with an amorphous unease.” !!!!!!!!! sometimes I feel like she is inside my brain and this is one of them

“Some time who i stopped trying to explain to acquaintances on the mainland the ways in which the simplest routines of a day in Honolulu can please and interest me, but on these winter mornings I am reminded that they do.”

“Directors and actors and producers, I should have understood, havé floor passes. Writers do not, which is why they strike” interesting how a piece published so long ago reads like it could have been written just this past summer with the 2023 writers strike.

really enjoyed the section on LA and Honolulu. the New York section was an interesting bit of writing that I felt was really reminiscent of her Salvador and Miami publications. first book of 2024! yay

Joan Didion's 1992 essay collection "After Henry" feels disturbingly contemporary. In the age of Trump, its coverage of the Reagan white house, Michael Dukakis' failed campaign and the "new world order" of George Bush opens an evocative window on an earlier, less threatening conservative insurgency. Largely apolitcal but predictably jaundiced, Didion views the 80s to early 90s political landscape with incisive disbelief as she exposes the essential surrealism of American government. Elsewhere, she returns to familiar meditations on California culture and New York's infamous Central Park jogger rape case of 1989, a dark incident whose many mythic tendrils are explored in a lengthy, ambitious study worlds away from the crass "wilding" exposés of its time.

Whenever you think Americans have given up on reading you find yourself rediscovering Joan Didion. Indeed, the best if this essay collection is her dissection of the arrest and trial of the Central Park 5 in New York City. Ms. Didion illustrates the battle between a Black culture that is focused on the oral word versus a legal system that, more often than not, relies on the written word to decided who is guilty and what is justice. All these essays gaze at power in America, who has it and who does not, and therefore never go out of style or timeliness.

Ormai essendo alla terza raccolta di saggi di Didion che commento in relativamente poco tempo, mi sento di ripetere quello che ho già commentato le altre volte.
È uno sguardo veramente molto tagliente e insolitamente preciso quello che mette a fuoco l'America nei suoi saggi. Dal presidente Regan alla moglie di Aaron Spelling (storia che mi ha fatto molto ridere, considerando che sono cresciuta a botte di Beverly Hills 90210, dove recitava la figlia Tori), dagli sceneggiatori precari (chi lo andava a dire alla Didion che nel 2007-2008 l'argomento sarebbe tornato di assoluta attualità) che alla fine sollevano questioni che potrebbero essere quelle di ogni giovane precario di oggi in altre realtà, al crimine e alle questioni razziali e a quelle climatiche (leggi: incendi in California).
Non c'è niente che non torni di attualità nelle tematiche scelte, segno del grande fiuto per le storie (o per la storia, forse) dell'autrice.

This was dope she really goes for the jugular. The Patty Hearst essay especially was sooooo fucking good. The thing about Joan Didion is that she’s gonna write about what she wants to write about and unfortunately for us she really just wants to write about California lmaooo… Still, as I make my way through WTOSIOTL, it’s been such a joy to witness her progression. as the stakes get higher her authority gets stronger. It’s really something to see and I’m hype asf for political fictions now.