only 1 more joan book to go :,(

This is not one of Joan's most popular collections, but I found it alarmingly relevant, even 35 years after the essays were written. The Washington DC sections cover presidential election campaigns in ways that lay all the visible groundwork for the last ten years, and the Los Angeles section includes a run on the 1987 writers strike that is VERBATIM some of the related bullshit being spewed during the 2023 strike (like so verbatim it should've been handed out at WGA meetings so we could all roll around in the inevitable repetition of cycles and talking points). The New York section focuses on the cultural and socioeconomic and media factors regarding the Central Park Jogger case, and we can see even then the beginnings of what would ultimately lead to the summer of 2020. I think I found these essays almost more urgent than the more popular cultural writing in pieces like Slouching Towards Bethlehem...they may not have the "evergreen" nature of the personal or human interest essay, but these bits of assignment reporting done roughly between 1985 and 1990 contain all the seeds of many major issues we're grappling with today.

Plus, it contains one of my favorite paragraphs about Los Angeles:

"In a city not only largely conceived as a series of real estate promotions but largely supported by a series of confidence games, a city even then afloat on motion pictures and junk bonds and the B-2 Stealth Bomber, the conviction that something can be made of nothing may be one of the few narratives in which everyone participates. A belief in extreme possibilities colors daily life."

READING VLOG

A fine collection of stories. What is there to do after the death of your husband but to look at where you come from? Spanning across Los Angeles and New York, Didion could write about the most mundane subject and I'd eat it up as if I was starved. She discussed currency exchange and I was floored by the music she incorporated into her language around numbers and symbols.

You really get a sense of where LA came from. You really get a sense of what New York was like. All in the late eighties. Money moved. People rioted. Over jobs. Over skin color. These essays show us that not much has changed from the America we know now. The spirit is still there. That trying and true longing that feeds the soil with the running blood of work ethic and politics that run cities dry of a light that beckons and beams in that hope that heaven projects.

In the cosmology of 1980s Joan Didion, LA is deluded, NYC is worse, and don't even mention DC. (Honest question: Who is the Joan Didion of Chicago?) This collection doesn't have the golden reputation of JD stalwarts like Slouching Toward Bethlehem and The White Album, and that's mostly fair. It's totally solid, if not always dazzling, work - which for Didion means it's head and shoulders above most writing ever, with some absolutely vertiginous and unhinged use of subordinate clauses. It does, also, contain "Insider Baseball," one of the all-time bangers of the American nonfiction canon, an essay I've read 3x time now and that still knocks me out and makes me embarrassed that I pay attention to legacy media political journalism.

voto: un tre scarso

Joan Didion mi era entrata nel cuore con "L'anno del pensiero magico" e mi ero, perciò, ripromessa di leggermi tutte le sue opere. Così ho preso in mano "Nel paese del Re pescatore" ed è stata una grande delusione (anche se probabilmente è da unicamente imputare al mio mancato interesse per i temi trattati).

La scrittura della Didion non è da mettere in discussione - rimane sempre sublime. Sono piuttosto gli argomenti che mi hanno suscitato solo una noia terribile.
L'opera è divisa in tre sezioni: "Washington" sui temi politici/presidenziali (molto scorrevole il primo scritto su Nancy Reagan), "California" su l'ononimo stato e LA, e "New York" su un caso di violenza avvenuto a Central Park come spunto per una riflessione più ampia (forse la sezione più interessante).
Consiglio, dunque, il libro solamente a chi vuole scoprire nei minimi dettagli il paese americano.

I grabbed this book as I headed out the door to the airport -- I never travel to California without a Didion in tow. Good thing I own many of her books that I have yet to read; for occasions such as this.

Some of the essays in this collection seem dated in 2014, but others timeless. I particularly liked the great mini-history on the LA Times written in 1989, and her essay about Patty Hearst's personal life trajectory. Also interesting was the book-closer, written about the Central Park jogger case at the time it was happening in the headlines and long before the five boys charged with the crime were exonerated in 2002. Because this case came back into the headlines a couple of years ago with the Burns documentary, was fascinating to read Didion's cautious insights at the time -- which also called out the lack of actual evidence against these boys and the case in juxtaposition to New York City's social culture at the time.

“History is context.”--Joan Didion.
AFTER HENRY: ESSAYS


In this collection of her work that appeared first in publications like THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS, Joan Didion gives us an insightful look at a myriad of public issues like high-profile crime, print journalism, real estate dealings, et al. The essays dissect the power players and gamesmanship in American centers of power (Los Angeles, Honolulu, and New York City) with precision and craftsmanship that makes reading her on ANY subject such fun.

Subjects here cover a review of a "tell-all" book by kidnap victim turn machine-gun-toting revolutionary Patricia Hearst; a detailed full-scope take on all the players in and around the Central Park Five jogger rape case that rocked New York and the country in the early 90s; a thorough and compelling examination of the competing power brokers in Los Angeles, and a humorous viewing of former First Lady Nancy Reagan's acute sense of entitlement that went from everything from designer dresses to new China for the White House to a house in Bel-Air for her and Ronnie after their Presidency was done. Didion never gets into one political lane or the other with any of this, a choice that makes her observations all the more powered.


If you lived through this era--called 'The Reagan Era', or 'The Greed-is-Good Era"or "The NewCoke Era"--just kidding--AFTER HENRY gives us reminders of the context of those times and how far (or how little) we have come since then.

Not a bad book. She does a good job of covering the cases, but I’m not terribly interested in the politics of that time period. The Patricia Campbell Hearst case was so interesting. I remember being on the band bus and telling Malachi about how I couldn’t believe it happened to begin with. And the New York jogger was so so morbid. I could see how these topics wouldn’t fit into her other books. I wanted there to be more of her poetic prose in this book, but instead I got a 20 page explanation of California fires. That was another topic I could not believe was real. If you really think about it, fires ravaging for months on end are not normal. The fact that this rape story and these crimes and these drug issues happened in New York in the 90s is absolutely terrifying. How could that happen? is what I thought for a great deal of the book. This book was also terrible for my reading slump, though. Every time it went into politics (which it frequently did), I got so bored I put the book down for a week. I made it through. Some of the sections were too drawn out or went too off topic that I could not be interested in it. Some quotes left me thinking, but it was similar to looking for a needle in hay. So glad I could finally finish this book. Much love to Joan Didion.

"i believed that days would be too full forever, too crowded with friends there was no time to see. i believed, by way of contemplating the future, that we would all be around for one another's funerals. i was wrong. i had failed to imagine, i had not understood. here was the way it was going to be: i would be around for henry's funeral, but he was not going to be around for mine"

Joan Didion's After Henry is a set of essays, the best of which are "in the Realm of the Fisher King" about the Reagan White House and "Sentimental Journeys" about crime in New York City, centering on the 1989 rape of a jogger in Central Park. I also enjoyed all the essays in the section entitled "California": I feel that the author understanding of the California scene is superior to that of any other writer, except perhaps Eve Babitz.

I find it interesting that most essay collections contain published book reviews, whereas Joan's do not. It is obvious that she is well read, but she doesn't appear to like writing about books.

it took me a very long time to read this collection of essays from joan didion so any review will be necessarily scattershot, but here goes: after henry is divided by region, with didion tackling new york and los angeles politics and culture in her well researched blank slate emotionless style. it's interesting to look back on these takes on race, real estate, los angeles wildfires from the perch of 2024 because all of it is still partially relevant: los angeles is still burning, al sharpton is still around. each of these pieces feel current, even as they reflect on, what, like, kenny loggins spent on his house. this is all a testament to Didion's ability to remove herself from the situation and approach it with detachment, incisively showing us the guts of the thing rather than the pretty presentist view it was propped up as at the time. I don't think anyone is better at this than Didion, a true force.

I came across Joan Didion the person by way of a YouTube video served up by the algorithm because I’d been watching a series of #writinginspiration videos. I don’t remember what she was speaking to in the video itself, but it had intrigued me enough to look up her Wikipedia page. There I discovered the existence of a documentary on her. I watched it and again I remember little of import other than it motivated me to read one of her books. I reserved After Henry though the university interlibrary loan system and read it in a determined push to finish it before 2023.

(Reading the paragraph above, I think I need to do a better job of documenting how I arrive at consuming certain books. The initial spark and resulting illumination that leads to an eventual reading seems important.)

Assuming After Henry is a prime example of Didion’s form over a period of many years the dry truthy voice in her writing was instructive. It is such a plaintive, matter-of-fact tone that I felt like I was reading the words of a true, no-nonsense authority. Like those long form articles from the golden age of newsprint that bordered on and sometimes outright invaded the territory of the essay: columns you’d skim and maybe your eyes would glaze over to the point where you wouldn’t continue to page 4 where it went after it exhausted its initial allotment of space. Presented in book form, however, I found the words eminently readable, if a little dense and challenging at times. Didion didn’t write sentences that were meant to be read out loud; the average reader simply wouldn’t have the capacity of breath to finish them. But she wrote supremely crafted sentences, which led to paragraphs of the same quality. As informative writing goes it’s beautiful, and there’s a lot there that anyone with a journalist bent can benefit from.