I received this book from NetGalley. I picked it because Joan Didion is on my book club list (The Year of Magical Thinking).

There were parts of this book that I really enjoyed - the California section and the New York section especially. I learned facts about each that I was not previously aware. The California section particularly because I lived outside Los Angeles for 28 years and remember a lot of what the author was writing about.

The thing that bothered me about this book was that I had to keep a dictionary beside me the whole time reading the book - made me feel a little dumb, but I learned new words! The author also writes LONG sentences using commas, semi-colons, and parenthesis abundantly. I was constantly having to reread and breaking down the sentences in order to absorb what she was saying.

I think I'm officially an adult now, giving 4 stars to a collected non-fiction crosses some kind of threshold.

I. After Henry
What a smart way to start this collection and hook me from the start. I really had no clue who Joan Didion was or what to expect from her and I definitely had no idea who Henry Robbins was but I wish I had. This was a moving and eloquently written tribute.

II. Washington
-In the Realm of the Fisher King
I was pretty young during the Reagan era. This article was informative and personal at the same time with a brush of politics thrown in.

III. California
-Girl of the Golden West
Interesting take on the Patty Hearst case
-Pacific Distances
1. Culture
2. Success?
3. Nuclear reactor
4. Earthquake laser
5. Hawaii garbage housing
6. Hong Kong refugees
-Los Angeles Days
1. Earthquake
2. Housing
3. Housing
4. writers strike
-Down at City Hall
Tom Bradley's mayoral tenure racial contributions. The more things change, the more they stay the same.
-L.A. Noir
Roy Radon murder trial coverage. Oh Robert Evans (face palm)
-Fire Season
Scary how prevalent and how like clockwork the fires come
-Times Mirror Square
Newspaper history

IV. New York
-Sentimental Journeys
Central Park Jogger rape/assault trial, race relations. Again, interesting how themes pervasive today were so clear already in 1989

I love how Joan writes. She seems to just tell it like it is from her perspective in a very down to earth way. Reading this felt like talking with a friend about current events (not so current anymore) over a beer.

Here is an older (50ish to 60ish), wiser and denser Joan Didion, really buckling down on the biggies: politics, especially, but also society and even race. "After Henry" is bookended by two of my favorite Didion pieces: The opening essay meaningfully explores the relationship between a writer and her editor; it's about where to go and how to write when your favorite editor is no longer there to catch you when you fall. "Sentimental Journeys," the last essay in "After Henry," is a reported analysis of the Central Park Jogger trials (the Trayvon Martin case of its time), with a deeper step-back about New York and its landmark green space.

The book is an important part of a trilogy beginning with "Slouching Towards Bethlehem" and continuing in "The White Album." People will always like her earlier stuff, but Didion really did get better with age and experience; we all do.

Published in 1992, the book is a collection of her writings written after the death of editor and friend Henry Robbins in 1979. Her writings cover Henry, the Reagan White House, the Dukakis presidential campaign, Patty Hearst, revisiting the Berkeley campus, the LA "community", the 1988 writers’ strike, the then enduring mayorality of Tom Bradley, the drug-related murder of film producer Roy Radin, forest fire management and preparation, the enduring LA Times business and the vicious bashing of a jogger in Central Park and subsequent trial or her attackers.

Well written, these reflections and observations hold up well, especially for those who lived through that period of time. What particularly struck me was how, in her account of the vicious assault on the jogger in Central Park, she used the events as a springboard to portray the class structure, race relations, pervasive low-level corruption and other aspects of life in New York city.

Hard to rate this one, because "In the Realm of the Fisher King" and "Sentimental Journeys" are excellent, "After Henry" is sweet, "Girl of the Golden West" is good Didion, and the second section of "Pacific Distances" contains an extremely poignant passage that I'll return to, but there's also a lot that is forgettable in here about the real estate markets in Los Angeles and Hawaii in the 1980s. As an overall collection, I'd rate it lower than her earlier works, despite the real highlights.

Just when you thought this country was reaching its breaking point, Joan Didion reminds you that America has always been totally fried.

As we gear up for another season of Who's Going to be President, the essays here on politics are evermore poignant. And yet, who will read them that doesn't already agree? Didion's biggest weakness might be her perpetual lot of a saint preaching to the choir.

The essay "LA Noir" manages to be more interesting, mysterious, and entertaining than all of True Detective season 2 by about a million x. Good non-fiction is better than almost all fiction.

Didion can write journalistic pieces with a novelist's flair and somehow not come off as fake or covered in treacle. She does, however, rely more than a bit too much on parenthetical clauses, which may be why Bret Easton Ellis had to spend time on it with her editor. BEE... I see more and more how influenced he is by Didion, from the casual namedropping of celebs and big shots to the matter-of-fact recitations of violence. Still prefer JD.

Tons of good stuff. Even the less interesting essays are extremely readable.

J'avais très envie de retrouver Joan Didion et c'est chose faite. Son intelligence, la pertinence de ses mots, quelle plaisir !

J'ai lu les deux-tiers de cette collection d'essais, j'en parle sur mon blog. J'ai lu ceux consacrés à la Los Angeles, deux à la campagne présidentielle (nous sommes dans les années 80) et une qui a donné son titre au recueil écrite en hommage à son ami Henry. Et ce fut si touchant.

There’s no other storyteller like Joan Didion. She can take the most boring fact and spin a narrative yarn around it that boggles the mind. She can tie so many elements together in telling a story and making a point about politics, culture, or the identity of a place that reading her essays feels like being schooled in an art. In this collection, she even manages to make topics like Hawaiian real estate of decades gone by interesting.

The titular Henry was Didion’s longtime trusted and beloved editor, who passed away relatively young and suddenly in the 14th street subway station in New York. He’d guided her so much, artistically and personally, that it was a significant moment for her to first publish after he was gone.

The intriguingly-titled “In the Realm of the Fisher King” looks at the Reagan administration years through the eyes and experience of Peggy Noonan, his speechwriter. She tells anecdotes that show the former President and First Lady in an honest, down-homey, mostly less than flattering light. The one about their experience attending a church and taking communion is priceless.

All of the essays are like time capsules, opening up to show richly described, detailed records of events that were major national current events of the time. The standout pieces for me were “Girl of the Golden West”, about the kidnapped Patty Hearst and how society viewed her when she returned from her Stockholm Syndrome-experience; and “Sentimental Journeys”, about the infamous Central Park jogger rape case and the miscarriage of justice that occurred.

This was of course written before 2002, when DNA made known that another man outside the group of convicted suspects was actually responsible for the crime, igniting another firestorm of controversy in an already contentious and hotly debated case. And yet Didion’s prose casts a suspicious eye over the entire situation and its greater cultural context, even without the benefit of this new evidence.

What I love most in reading her is the seemingly effortless beauty of her words, that she can tell something so emotional and evocative and touching in such a simple, aching way. It’s what brings me back over and over to another essay (not from this collection) “Goodbye to All That”.

That quality crops up throughout After Henry too, like in her describing speaking at her daughter’s school, telling when she knew she would be a writer – “…we never reach a point at which our lives lie before us as a clearly marked open road, never have and never should expect a map to the years ahead, never do close those circles that seem, at thirteen and fourteen and nineteen, so urgently in need of closing.”

Of course, in addition to that writerly richness, she also has her trademark brand of biting, acerbic wit that manages to paint a person or scene so vividly: “The airport looked Central American, between governments.”

Didion also has always had a fascinating ability to draw surprising but relevant parallels, and the best displayed here is the Patty Hearst essay, where she highlights the California background and connection of the kidnapped heiress with the emigrants who originally settled the West Coast state.

Quoting a letter from a surviving member of the Donner party and an emigrant diary entry from a relative of hers, she writes a mashed-up lesson learned from these distinct yet somehow linked events: Suffice it to say. Don’t examine your feelings, they’re no help at all. Never take no cutoffs and hurry along as fast as you can. We need a goddamn South American revolutionary mixed up in this thing like a hole in the head. This was a California girl, and she was raised on a history that placed not much emphasis on why. She was never an idealist, and this pleased no one. She was tainted by survival. She came back from the other side with a story no one wanted to hear.

She gives me chills.

A drawback of this often-overlooked collection is that some subjects feel dated, like observations on the 1988 presidential campaign of Michael Dukakis versus George Bush the first, or other pieces taking the political temperature of the country. Yet in “Sentimental Journeys”, she writes a piece so fresh and utterly relevant that it could be written today, that is being written by other authors about other incidents, where the names and locations and principle players have changed but the gist remain more or less the same, more than two decades on.

Didion has that knack for teasing out a tellable story from disturbing headlines, and After Henry shows what often powerful lasting effects those stories have.

Didion continues to write essays with a strength and level of connection few can match in this collection. With much of the collection being centered around California this book might not have the same cross cultural appeal as some of her earlier writings. That point may be silly however, cross cultural appeal is not a phrase that comes easily to mind when speaking of Joan Didion.

In " The Realm of the Fisher " Didion focuses primarily on Nancy Reagan both in and out of The White House. No matter your political bent it is a fascinating picture of a woman who really was as sheltered, and thus benign, as any twentieth century First Lady. The section of the Reagan's visit, while on the campaign trail, to an Episcopalian church in Virginia is priceless, not as a knock on the Reagan's themselves, but as an example of the foolish dog and pony shows modern candidates must subject themselves to.

" Los Angeles Days " meanders from the subject of earthquakes, real estate prices, and the building of Aaron Spelling's dream mansion. It is valuable even today due to the major focus of the piece centers on the late eighties writers strike in Hollywood. Didion pulls no punches as she writes about where writers, like her in fact, are in the Hollywood echelon. Her telling of the strike is strong and explains as much as anything why labor peace in Hollywood will always be short lived.

A short piece titled " Fire Season " is Didion's chance to revisit the constant Southern California understandable obsession with the yearly risk and destruction wrought by fire. " Down at City Hall " is an essay where the author wonders out loud how Tom Bradley kept getting elected Mayor of Los Angeles and " Times Square Mirror " tells the story of the Chandler family and their Los Angeles Times empire, an empire they used to build the city of Los Angeles. This essay is strong and well done but anyone who has read David Halberstam's The Powers That Be will find the Chandler story well trod ground.

The final essay in the book, titled " Sentimental Journeys ", written in the wake of The Central Park jogger trial proves to be remarkably prescient. While never claiming that the young African-American men convicted were actually innocent Didion did bemoan the lack of physical evidence tying the men to the crime. While not claiming the confessions, later recanted, were gained in an improper way she does point out that only the confessions served to make the men guilty and that, while the video of the men signing the confessions was there for all to see, somehow the interrogations themselves did not seem to have been recorded. Reading with the benefit of history we know now Didion was onto something, the young men were not guilty. Maybe we should all learn that there is no such thing as a sure thing in our criminal cases. A desire to have the guilty person caught is not the same as catching the guilty person. In this remarkable essay the author also bemoans another victim, dead and dumped beside the road with the trash. This young woman, however, was an having an affair with a married man, an official in city government. No exciting narrative for the press. The man was convicted of wrongful disposal of a dead body so she guesses justice was served. She also looks into the beginning of the Al Sharpton phenomenon and again her prescience is strong. Understanding that Sharpton knew that the literal truth of his statements was less important than the fact that the conditions existed in which they could be she had a keen understanding of his import.

What can one say. Didion is a writer always worth reading.

Though a few of the subjects are dated (in particular the clueless entitlement of the Reagans, the venality of GHW Bush, all their staff and hangers-on), the incisiveness, the insight, the craft, the writing are so strong that made little difference to me. The "Pacific Distances" and much of the "Los Angeles" sections are timeless. Didion's press criticism (in the first section, she zeroes in on the way that media's limited capacity for complexity dilutes the electoral process, how coverage becomes one big insiders' feedback loop of self-satisfied banalities) are at this point largely acknowledged as a given, an accepted evil made by agreement largely invisible, passively accepted,--nonetheless these observations remain riveting in her telling, and she does bore down further on the press and body politic's pernicious elevation of pablum and mediocrity than I have seen done elsewhere. Her analysis of the "race politics" (she doesn't use the term but I use it here as a lazy compression) around the coverage and public consumption of the 1989-90 "Central Park Jogger" rape and assault case is way ahead of what was then the curve. She does accept the idea of the five convicted teenagers as guilty, given their statements, but she does not freight the case with the racist and classist baggage endemic to the white middle and upper classes' response. I do get irritated by her broad-brush dismissal of criticism among Black observers at the trials as wacky, self-indulgent "conspiracy" theories. She does not like the notion of conspiracies, she! I abhor the use of the term conspiracy (still, today) to effectively obscure entrenched structural racism and upper-class protections--it doesn't have to be "conspiracy" to merit great alarm and response. These structures are far worse than conspiracy; they're not the work of a few or even a few hundred schemers: this is us, our government, ourselves. It's baked in; the game is in fact quite fixed. Didion does acknowledge these structural blocks, if she doesn't call them by the names we more commonly use now, or give them as much attention as she reserves for lambasting the City of New York for widespread petty and not-so-petty corruption.

Ultimately, much of her social and media criticism comes down to the yen for and manipulation of narrative, specific boilerplate, fall-back narratives, the character types and caricatures, the story, the myth, elaborating on what she was getting at when, long before, she wrote, "We tell ourselves stories in order to live."

I'm curious if she ever revisited the "Jogger" case and her dismissals of facile "conspiracy" when it was revealed the the five convicted boys were in fact not guilty, their confessions coerced.

A note on accessibility: The early essays about the Reagans et al., and to a certain extent the 1988 presidential election, would be hard to fully appreciate if you haven't lived through and remember the 1980s. Even I did not recall some of the Reaganites and reporters mentioned. The"Jogger" essay, ("Sentimental Journeys") is, I think still quite accessible with a bit of Googling to grasp the outline of events.

Other random notes: Nobody uses the passive to withering effect as well as Didion. Nobody writes the kind of slowly unspooling, syntactically idiosyncratic, jolting sentences she peppers throughout. Nobody--thankfully--(it seems) uses parentheses to set off long, complicated interjections when em dashes would make her thoughts ever so much easier to follow. But I suspect she doesn't care about ease.

Didion is as demanding of her readers as she likely was of herself as a writer.

I did not read "Down at City Hall" or "Insider Baseball," as their subjects disinterest me. But Didion's writing is such that I may visit them later to enter her sentences again. They are often long and rhythmic. One must pay attention, always. One must keep up.