I’m less inclined to be interested in politics, but I will always love the way Joan has with words.

Favorite Quotes:

“Childhood is the kingdom where nobody dies.”

“Death was constructed as either a ‘blessing’ or an exceptional case, the dramatic instance on which someone else’s (never our own) story turned.”

In the Realm of the Fisher King

“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. She collected slights.”

“‘A people free to choose will always choose peace.’ Ronald Reagan”

Insider Baseball

“They tend to speak a language common in Washington but not specifically shared by the rest of us.”

“When we talk about the process, then, we are talking, increasingly, not about the democratic process’, or the general mechanism affording the citizens of a state a voice in its affairs, but the reverse: a mechanism seen as so specialized that access to it is correctly limited to its own professionals, to those who manage policy and those who report on it, to those who run the polls and those who quote them, to those who ask and those who answer the questions on the Sunday shows, to the media consultants, to the columnists, to the issue advisors, to those who give off-the-record breakfasts and to those who attend them; to that handful of insiders who invent, year in and year out, the narrative of the public life.”

Shooters Inc.

“History is context.”

Girl of the Golden West

“On a psychiatric test administered while she was in custody she completed the sentence ‘Most men…’ with the words ‘ … are assholes.’”

“Here you can reach all that is within you.”

“The extent to which certain places dominate the California imagination is apprehended, even by Californians, only dimly. Deriving not only from the landscape, but from the claiming of it, from the romance of emigration, the radical abandonment of established attachments, this imagination remains obdurately symbolic, tending to locate lessons in what the rest of the country perceives only as scenery. Yosemite, for example, remains what Kevin Starr has called ‘one of the primary California symbols, a fixed factor of identity for all those who sought a primarily Californian aesthetic.’ Both the community of and the coastline at Carmel have a symbolic meaning lost to the contemporary visitor, a lingering allusion to art as freedom, freedom as craft, the ‘bohemian’ pantheism of the early 20th century. The Golden Gate Bridge, referring as it does to both the infinite and technology, suggests, to the Californian, a quite complex representation of land’s end, and also of its beginning.”

“Concerns over love and marriage, family life, friends, human relationships, my whole previous life, ahd become, in SLA terms, bourgeois luxuries.”

“‘Don’t worry about it,’ the author of Every Secret Thing reported having told herself in the closet after her first sexual encounter with a member of the SLA. ‘Don’t examine your feelings. Never examine your feelings - they’re no help at all.’”

Pacific Distances

“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 exhilarates some people, and floods others with an amorphous unease. There is about these hours spent in transit a seductive unconnectedness. Conventional information is missing. Context clues are missing.”

“Our children remind us of how random our lives have been.”

“I suppose that what I really wanted to say that day at my daughter’s school is that 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 years ahead, never do close those circles that seem, at 13 and 14 and 19, so urgently in need of closing.”

“I fell not only into the habits but into the moods of the student day. Every morning I was hopeful, determined, energized, by the campanile bells and by the smell of eucalyptus and by the day’s projected accomplishments.”

Los Angeles Days

“People brought up to believe that the phrase ‘terra firma’ has real meaning often find it hard to understand the apparent equanimity with which earthquakes are accommodated in California, and tend to write it off as regional spaciness.”

“... The scenario in which this wrench will be needed is a catastrophe, and something in the human spirit rejects planning on a daily basis for a catastrophe.”

“‘Is it going,’ they would say, or ‘I think it’s moving.’ They almost always said ‘it’, and what they meant by ‘it’ was not just the ground but the world as they knew it.”

L.A. Noir

“A belief in extreme possibilities colors daily life.”

Giving this three stars because when it's great, it's really great, but there are certain essays here that were kind of a drag for me. I decided to read this book because I was interested in hearing Joan Didion's thoughts on the Reagans after her writings on Nancy Reagan were referenced in SHOTIME's "The Reagans" documentary.

I'm originally from New York City but have lived in DC for a while and am interested in 20th century American history, so I came into this book expecting that I would be most interested in the DC essays. While they contained some interesting commentary and good anecdotes (a personal favorite: the story of the Reagans' visit to the church in Virginia), I struggled to stay interested in them, in part because some of the observations are dated through no fault of the author's. Example: there's a long-ish analysis here of the changing dynamics of presidential primaries and the RNC / DNC conventions because of the rise of cable news. These observations are interesting in that they show how much our country's relationship to the news has changed over the past few decades, but because they don't ring true anymore — so much has changed since then! — I personally struggled to connect to them.

Considering all this, I found that the book picked up a lot more in the Los Angeles section (interesting to me: Didion's thoughts on real estate prices in the area and her essay on Hawaii, her essay on Patty Hearst). The best essay by far is the New York one, IMO, which is one long essay while the other two sections are broken up into smaller ones.

Didion clearly has her thumb on the cultural pulse of the US and is, of course, a super talented writer. I'm really looking forward to reading some of her more renowned works after this!

Contains some of the authors longer and denser works. prolly why it took 3 weeks to read. emphasized (or exacerbated depending on readers taste) some of her writerly tendencies. Also hit on many of her familiar themes (geographic psychologies of California, New York). My fav bits were her observations on news media, in the form of covering both specific events like pres election cycles and specific institutions like the LA times or NY papers.

My other favorite part about reading Didion besides the substance is imagining her face as she writes this or reads it aloud because she has such a distinct authorial personality. Her actual dominating presence in her text seems to contradict her reputation of unsentimental observational detachment but there she is looking through dark sunglasses with her California cool nerdy glamour lecturing me about sentimentality and lamenting (unsentimentally, coolly) the devolution of all things concrete into abstract narrative filler

Joan Didion challenges you with her writing, but she never disappoints. As a former Californian who is now living in New York City, Didion and I have something in common: our love for the state that we both left. And here is her quote, which I now claim for my own: A place belongs forever to whoever claims it hardest…remembers it most obsessively, loves it so radically that it remakes his image…
I will always feel that way about the years that I spent in California, the joy of its beauty, its trees and plantings, and yet the fear of the fires. Didion writes about them in this collection, naming streets and areas where our home stood--and still stands, though I fear more drought and crazy wind could one day put an end to it. Didion also writes about the Central Park Five in a biting way that makes you want to scream at people. Now I need to do more research, find other ways to look at this event. But it's only a part of her writings as I so admire her smarts. And will always. Read The Year if Magical Thinking, if you want to learn more about this gifted writer.

I love a good book of essays. I enjoyed this one, as I have others by Joan Didion. She has a way with the word that is enviable. The only reason I gave this a 3 is that I found myself skipping through several of the essays. They are long, but sometimes I started losing my way, or my interest, part way through them. There are pieces that were very enjoyable and made me think. I'd recommend this book, but if you haven't read Didion in the past, perhaps start with a previous effort and then move to this one. Thank you to Net Galley and Open Road Integrated Media for an e-ARC of this title, in exchange for my honest opinion.

Mostly disappointing and somewhat a slog to read due to an overabundance of parenthetical information and sentences that don’t seem to know when to stop. I am glad though that I finished the book. The final part, written about New York and focusing on the case of the Central Park Five, presents the information in a different light with a unique point of view. That alone made the book worth the read.

a few slow points aside (and a penchant for way too many statistics), the book's high points make it a solid read. I am a little biased, as Joan has changed my life for the better with The Year Of Magical Thinking, but that doesn't change the fact that she is almost never off of her game.

Despite not knowing some of the events and people to which Didion refers in multiple essays, I still greatly enjoyed this book. Didion's writing never fails to draw me in. The final essay, on the rape of a jogger in Central Park, New York, was particularly superb.

Awesome writing, somewhat boring topics. This collection of essays spanned a wide range of issues. Some of them I found to be pretty interesting (Didion’s relationship with her editor, the series of rapes in NYC in the 80s, the Patty Hearst drama). However, some of the essays I found boring (the writing on Reagan, the earthquakes in Los Angeles). This was a good read for any Didion fan, but I wouldn’t recommend it to the average reader. Decent read

Joan's writing is excellent in every essay in this book; however, the subject matters of the essays "Down at City Hall" and "L.A. Noir" did not pique my interest. "Down at City Hall" focuses on the local Los Angeles politics of the late 1980s while "L.A. Noir" focuses on what was once a high-profile court case in the 1980s that has now been forgotten about; while it's true that many of the essays in this book serve as a form of time capsule to the late 1980s, the other essays still hold a parallelism to contemporary issues that "L.A. Noir" and "Down at City Hall" do not.

Not all the essays fully engaged me, but the stand-out closing essay about the Central Park Five and NYC was outstanding that it's worth picking up for that alone. Thought the stories about the Regan administration were horrifying --- Reagan and his cronies gave us Trump, and the similarities between the two are scary.

I'm slowly making my way through Joan Didion's oeuvre, but randomly. In this volume, a collection of essays written after her long-time editor, Henry Robbins, died, Didion takes us through the 1980s - the Reagan presidency, the 1988 presidential election, the Patty Hearst trial, California wildfires - and ends with the early 1990s and the Central Park jogger case. Despite the idea that these might be dated references now, many of these essays are still very relevant - the molding of a political "brand," racial injustice in the courtroom. A few of them don't hang together as well, the edges not lining up quite right, but Didion's distinctive style is ever-present.