Johan Didion

Slouching towards Bethlehem

Sarah Christine Gill

They set out to find it in accountants' ledgers and double-indemnity clauses and motel registers, set out to determine what might move a woman who believed in all the promises of the middle class-a woman who had been chairman of the Heart Fund and and who always knew a reasonable little dressmaker and who had come out of the bleak wild of prairie fundamentalism to find what she imagined to be the good life - what should drive such a woman to sit on a street called Bella Vista and look out her new picture window into the empty California sun and calculate how to burn her husband alive in a Volkswagen. 

Outside the Monterey county court house in Salinas, California, the Downtown Merchants' Christmas decorations glittered in the thin sunlight that makes the winter lettuce grow. Inside, the crowd blinked uneasily in the blinding television lights. 

Every weekday morning at eleven oʻclock, just about the time the sun burns the last haze off the Santa Barbara hills, fifteen or twenty men gather in what was once the dining room of a shirt manufacturer's mansion overlooking the Pacific Ocean and begin another session of what they like to call "clarifying the basic issues." 

I have long been interested in the Center's rhetoric, which has about it the kind of ectoplasmic generality that always makes me senseI am on the track of the real soufflé, the genuine American kitsch, and so not long ago I arranged to attend a few sessions in Santa Barbara. It was in no sense time wasted. 

Driving in across the Mojave from Los Angeles, one sees the signs way out on the desert, looming up from that moonscape of rattlesnakes and mesquite, even before the Las Vegas lights appear like a mirage on the horizon: "GETTING MARRIED? Free License Information First Strip Exit." 

Almost everyone notes that there is no "time" in Las Vegas, no night and no day and no past and no future (no Las Vegas casino, however, has taken the obliteration of the ordinary time sense quite so far as Harold's Club in Reno, which for a while issued, at odd intervals in the day and night, mimeographed "bulletins" carrying news from the world outside); neither is there any logical sense of where one is. One is standing on a highway in the middle of a vast hostile desert looking at an eighty-foot sign which blinks "STARDUST" or "CAESAR'S PALACE." Yes, but what does that explain? This geographical implausibility reinforces the sense that what happens there has no connection with "real" life; Nevada cities like Reno and Carson are ranch towns, Western towns, places behind which there is some historical imperative. But Las Vegas seems to exist only in the eye of the beholder. 

taha

It all comes back. Perhaps it is difficult to see the value in having one’s self back in that kind of mood, but I do see it; I think we are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not. Otherwise they turn up unannounced and surprise us, come hammering on the mind’s door at 4 a. m. of a bad night and demand to know who deserted them, who betrayed them, who is going to make amends. We forget all too soon the things we thought we could never forget. We forget the loves and the betrayals alike, forget what we whispered and what we screamed, forget who we were.

But the change is not what I remember first. First I remember running a boxer dog of my brother's over the same flat fields that our great-great-grandfather had found virgin and had planted; I remember swimming (albeit nervously, for I was a nervous child, afraid of sinkholes and afraid of snakes, and perhaps that was the beginning of my error) the same rivers we had swum for a century: the Sacramento, so rich with silt that we could barely see our hands a few inches beneath the surface; the American, running clean and fast with melted Sierra snow until July, when it would slow down, and rattlesnakes would sun themselves on its newly exposed rocks. 

I have said that the trip back is difficult, and it is difficult in a way that magnifies the ordinary ambiguities of sentimental journeys. Going back to California is not like going back to Vermont, or Chicago; Vermont and Chicago are relative constants, against which one measures one's own change. All that is constant about the California of my childhood is the rate at which it disappears. 

… in any case the legislature has largely deserted the Senator for the flashy motels north of town, where the tiki torches flame and the steam rises off the heated swimming pools in the cold Valley night. 

It is hard to find California now, unsettling to wonder how much of it was merely imagined or improvised; melancholy to realize how much of anyone's memory is no true memory at all but only the traces of someone else's memory, stories handed down on the family network. 

It had rained in Los Angeles until the cliff was crumbling into the surf and I did not feel like getting dressed in the morning, so we decided to go to Mexico, to Guaymas, where it was hot. We did not go for marlin. We did not go to skin-dive. We went to get away from ourselves, and the way to do that is to drive, down through Nogales some day when the pretty green places pall and all that will move the imagination is some place difficult, some desert. The desert, any desert, is indeed the valley of the shadow of death; come back from the desert and you feel like Alcestis, reborn. After Nogales on Route 15 there is nothing but the Sonoran desert, nothing but mesquite and rattlesnakes and the Sierra Madre floating to the east, no trace of human endeavor but an occasional Pemex truck hurtling north and once in a while in the distance the dusty Pullman cars of the Ferrocarril del Pacífico. Magdalena is on Route 15, and then Hermosillo, where the American ore and cattle buyers gather in the bar at the Hotel San Alberto. There is an airport in Hermosillo, and Hermosillo is only eighty-five miles above Guaymas, but to fly is to miss the point. The point is to become disoriented, shriven, by the heat and the deceptive perspectives and the oppressive sense of carrion. The road shimmers. The eyes want to close.

Kat Albanese

My only advantage as a reporter is that I am so physically small, so temperamentally unobtrusive, and so neurotically inarticulate that people tend to forget that my presence runs counter to their best interests. And it always does. That is one last thing to remember: writers are always selling somebody out.

As it happens I am still committed to the idea that the ability to think for one's self depends upon one's mastery of the language, and I am not optimistic about children who will settle for saying, to indicate that their mother and father do not live together, that they come from "a broken home." They are sixteen, fifteen, fourteen years old, younger all the time, an army of children waiting to be given the words.

The dismal fact is that self-respect has nothing to do with the approval of others—who are, after all, deceived easily enough; has nothing to do with reputation, which, as Rhett Butler told Scarlett OHara, is something people with courage can do without.

There has always been that divergence between our official and our unofficial heroes. It is impossible to think of Howard Hughes without seeing the apparently bottomless gulf between what we say we want and what we do want, between what we officially admire and secretly desire, between, in the largest sense, the people we marry and the people we love. In a nation which increasingly appears to prize social virtues, Howard Hughes remains not merely antisocial but grandly, brilliantly, surpassingly, asocial. He is the last private man, the dream we no longer admit.

Even as the sun dapples the great lawns and the fountains plash all around, there is something in the air that has nothing do with pleasure and nothing to do with graceful tradition, a sense not of how prettily money can be spent but of how harshly money is made.

It is hard for me to believe that Cornelius Vanderbilt did not sense, at some point in time, in some dim billiard room of his unconscious, that when he built "The Breakers" he damned himself.

There is an airport in Hermosillo, and Hermosillo is only eighty-five miles above Guaymas, but to fly is to miss the point. The point is to become disoriented, shriven, by the heat and the deceptive perspectives and the oppressive sense of carrion. The road shimmers. The eyes want to close.

I could make promises to myself and to other people and there would be all the time in the world to keep them. I could stay up all night and make mistakes, and none of it would count. 

You see I was in a curious position in New York: it never occurred to me that I was living a real life there. 

You wil have perceived by now that I was not one to profit by the experience of others, that it was a very long time indeed before I stopped believing in new faces and began to understand the lesson in that story, which was that it is distinctly possible to stay too long at the Fair.

Joan Didion

The “dazzling” and essential portrayal of 1960s America from the author of South and West and The Year of Magical Thinking (The New York Times). Capturing the tumultuous landscape of the United States, and in particular California, during a pivotal era of social change, the first work of nonfiction from one of American literature’s most distinctive prose stylists is a modern classic. In twenty razor-sharp essays that redefined the art of journalism, National Book Award–winning author Joan Didion reports on a society gripped by a deep generational divide, from the “misplaced children” dropping acid in San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury district to Hollywood legend John Wayne filming his first picture after a bout with cancer. She paints indelible portraits of reclusive billionaire Howard Hughes and folk singer Joan Baez, “a personality before she was entirely a person,” and takes readers on eye-opening journeys to Death Valley, Hawaii, and Las Vegas, “the most extreme and allegorical of American settlements.” First published in 1968, Slouching Towards Bethlehem has been heralded by the New York Times Book Review as “a rare display of some of the best prose written today in this country” and named to Time magazine’s list of the one hundred best and most influential nonfiction books. It is the definitive account of a terrifying and transformative decade in American history whose discordant reverberations continue to sound a half-century later.

Essays

Slouching Towards Bethlehem

Israel is mentioned too much for my liking!

william wukkuan

tepid, drab, utterly pointless. at least now i know never to pick up anything by didion ever again

eris

Life changing truly. This was my first experience with Joan Didion and I am now itching to read more. This was so beautiful. She paints a gorgeous picture of Cali and the 60s it felt hazy and heavy and perfect in every way. She’s inspired me to write and write and write. Cannot recommend this enough. 

jaya kohol

formative. took me years to read cover to cover –– reading one essay at a time w a sharp inhale then shoving away for months –– only because it pierced too keenly, spoke too well to how I felt and feel as a person in her twenties. joan forever

nicola

Louis Norton

She knows how to write. And in her writing hug the audience. 

andrea valentina 

Colton Ray

Didion is able to take a critical but fair eye to the 60s movement and the part of it she illustrates is shown to be a sham of angry, confused children play-acting at revolution and sneering at adulthood while contributing nothing to society but platitudes and pot smoke. This is not a standard "California in the 60s" book, as Didion is intent on diving into the underbelly of society, showcasing the murder, the dissatisfaction, the crippling ennui, the regret, and the sense of turbulence as entire institutions were wiped from the map and new conventions were arising every day. A new world of missing children, commonplace drugs, rebellious women, and rejection of religion. 

But this is no nostalgic trip. She is firmly capable of tearing away the facade and revealing the moral hideousness of the hippie movement: parents hooking their children on acid, ignorant teenagers hyped up about issues they know nothing about, people coasting through life caring little for themselves and nothing for others. The cringiest part was the hippie kids in blackface confronting some African-Americans about how white people were stealing "black music" in a parody of what plays out now in viral videos. 

Despite the rhetoric of change, there's no coherent ideology here beyond reactionary rebellion against the admittedly severe social strictures of the previous decades. There is no plan for the revolution except to "drop out." We've seen the result of apathy; ignore politics at your own peril. While the hippies were wasting around doing meth, the capitalists were laughing all the way to the bank, and they continue to do so.

While the hippie moment was an incredible force for social change, they were hypocrites in youth who grew up to be hypocrites in old age. It's a well-documented fact that many 60s hippies grew up to be 80s Reagan voters and now the butt of "baby-boomer" jokes on Twitter. 

My generation needs to conceive of a greater vision for change, and I think there is a wider consensus on what the first steps should be: taxing billionaires, universal healthcare, decreased military spending, cleaner elections, those are just the start. We can take the good parts of the 60s (their rage at the system and willingness to cut ties with outmoded institutions) and leave the bad.

Aside from chronicling California and New York decadence, she also delves within in a few personal essays. While I did skip through a few of the entries in this book, the good parts are very good, and stirred a lot of thought about my own life and place in the world.

Classic literary journalism which defined, for many, the state of America during the upheaval of the Sixties Revolution "It was not a country in open revolution. It was not a country under enemy siege. It was the United States of America in the cold late spring of 1967, and the market was steady and the GNP high and a great many articulate people seemed to have a sense of high social purpose and it might have been a spring of brave hopes and national promise, but it was not..." "So physically small, so temperamentally unobtrusive, and so neurotically inarticulate" that people tended to forget that her presence ran counter to their best interests, Joan Didion slipped herself into the heart of the Sixties Revolution, only to slip out again with this savage masterpiece, which, since first publication in 1968, has been acknowledged as an unparalleled report on the state of America during those curious days. Now that some of the posturing and pronouncements of those times are being recycled, Didion's sobering reflections are timely once again: 'the future always looks good in the golden land, because no one remembers the past."

Neeeeeed to read more of her works. She’s such a fantastic writer. 

Oscar Kömpel

slouching towards bethlehem by joan didion: um! suffice to say i might be a didion freak now after reading two of her books! i think her prose is the coolest thing ever, and her insights on counterculture, sharply perceptive but very distanced narrator, and disaffected observations make me grin or tear up; it's really your pick! the essay "on self-respect" is brilliant and everyone should read it. i also liked the love i could see for sacramento in her essay on it. i wonder if she watched lady bird and if she liked it.

lauren

my review from may 2022:

slouching towards bethlehem by joan didion: um! suffice to say i might be a didion freak now after reading two of her books! i think her prose is the coolest thing ever, and her insights on counterculture, sharply perceptive but very distanced narrator, and disaffected observations make me grin or tear up; it's really your pick! the essay "on self-respect" is brilliant and everyone should read it. i also liked the love i could see for sacramento in her essay on it. i wonder if she watched lady bird and if she liked it.

annalyse! 

“That was the year, my twenty-eighth, when I was discovering that not all of the promises would be kept, that some things are in fact irrevocable and that it had counted after all, every evasion and every procrastination, every mistake, every word, all of it.”

“To assign unanswered letters their proper weight, to free us from the expectations of others, to give us back to ourselves—there lies the great, the singular power of self-respect”

“Above all, she is the girl who "feels" things, who has hung on to the freshness and pain of adolescence, the girl ever wounded, ever young.”

💌

jack

old review:
the first two sections are incredibly strong, while the last is relatively weak. my favorite essays were Some Dreamers of the Golden Dream, Where the Kissing Never Stops, Slouching Towards Bethlehem, On Self Respect, On Keeping a Notebook, On Morality, and Goodbye to All That. though her lens here is a reactionary one that eulogizes a lot of conservative sentiments/ways of life, i think her essay on morality makes it clear that her view is not a diagnosis of what is "wrong" but rather a description of what she sees. things are not categorically good or bad, but they are happening and any action we take is a reaction. the picture she paints of california in the first section reminds me of pynchon's crying of lot 49 if it weren't as zany. loved most of this collection a lot, want to get deeper into didion asap

new review:
reading this again just over two years from my last read. got a lot more out of it. don't really have words for the way this made me feel, coming to it this time now with more benjamin, baudrillard, etc. under my belt. her diagnosis of culture and fracturing is such a vision. really just blown away by her power of sight and her style. feeling "understood" by this text in such a fundamental way. which is perhaps the power she holds for everyone. i've written didion off as a bit of a cliche but... will not anymore. it is all real and there. Goodbye To All That and On Self-Respect drive a lot deeper for me personally when couched in these other, more perceptive cultural analyses. love.

désirée

one of my favorite books of all time, a reason i carry myself the way i do

grace ott

jennifer 

3.7 high and lows in enjoyment but it’s anthological so i got to pick favorites that i’ll revisit (on self respect, on keeping a notebook, marrying absurd, some dreamers of the golden dream). with didion overall, i think the prose and writing is top notch but sometimes her narratives don’t connect with me. and sometimes i just REALLY don’t agree with how she perceives things. 

but what i got from this book was nice. how she’s knows to describe falling apart or “atomization” in sm different ways is interesting.

woahluv

I'm convinced that some of us are born with this mystical eerie allure to southern california or at least its image: the good, bad, ugly and mysterious. Joan Didion captures this allure in its rawness and bluntness that had my heart filling with the SoCal magic and reaffirming my belief of born allure. 

the california magnet

luca

“It all comes back. Perhaps it is difficult to see the value in having one's self back in that kind of mood, but I do see it; I think we are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not." ❤️

Dustin Tinch

Slouching Towards Bethlehem by Joan Didion







"I'm not telling you to make the world better, because I don't think that progress is necessarily part of the package. I'm just telling you to live in it. Not just endure it, not just to suffer it, not just to pass through it, but to live in it. To look at it. To try to get the picture. To live recklessly. To take chances to make your own work and take pride in it. To seize the moment."


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Throughout my reading experience I often found myself pondering how in the world was I going to be able to review this book. I feel like there's nothing I can say about Joan Didion or Slouching Towards Bethlehem that hasn’t already been said in a much more articulate manner than I ever could. Alas, here we are and here is my pitiful attempt at an analysis. 


Non-fiction is a somewhat new reading venture for me and I could not have picked a better jumping off point. A few passages into the first essay titled, "Some Dreamers of the Golden Dream", Didion had already lassoed my soul and only gripped tighter the further into her masterpiece I wandered. It felt like Joan took me on a time travel trip to the 1960’s and it was as if she gifted me a state of the art VR headset in which to view her world through. Adorned in my headband, long, puffed sleeves, thrown up peace signs, frayed bell-bottomed jeans, sandals and all. As I devoured each masterfully crafted sentence it gave me a deep sense of nostalgia even though I wasn’t born until many decades after this book’s time setting. Didion’s pragmatic writing style invokes all of your senses which makes you feel like you've somehow lived through the events of the book. It was as though I was her writer's apprentice. She recounts people and experiences with laser focus, clear, intriguing detail and description all with her richly unclassifiable voice. She evokes strong emotions from her readers weaving a beautifully shattered/non-linear narrative that is honest and independently brilliant. It appears to me that she lives in a state of peaked awareness due to the way she was able to fully encapsulate the ethos of the 1960’s. Her essays are like small standalone rocks that with wind, rain and time, that her writing embodies, turn into beautiful mountains. This collection moved me infinitely. It is filled with glistening nuggets of knowledge that I will carry with me for the rest of my life.


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Slouching Towards Bethlehem, like life, is hard to completely illustrate. This body of work is undefinable and it can't just simply be labeled and put it in a box. I was reminded that life is so utterly beautiful, complex and at the same time can be very pessimistically dark. This book is a deep dive into 60’s subculture, covering everything from John Wayne, Howard Hughes, growing up in California, morality, fate, dignity, the human condition, the seedy underbelly of the drug epidemic, racism/racial violence, homophobia, social crises, moral/social disintegration and other issues that we try to overlook but is always creeping like the boogeyman in the back of our minds. Didion brings the good along with the bubbling stench to the surface and challenges us to learn from history no matter how depressing so that we may not be doomed to repeat the mistakes of our past. It is a cautionary tale and touches on so many interesting and principal things. It enlightens and drives home the importance of self-respect, the significance of appreciating where you came from, finding a home in whoever and wherever that may be for you and the impossibility of utopia and so much more. Didion’s writing captivated me beyond reprieve and I relished every page in absolute reverie. Yeah I gagged too asdfghjkl..







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Joan Didion strikes me as an author who could just let her hand write forever like stories flow so freely from her soul that it is second nature. She has obviously put in tireless time and hard work into sharpening her craft and is so incredibly talented. To be honest I’m scared of her *laughs nervously*. She's THAT good and THAT staggeringly intelligent. Reading Joan Didion is an EXPERIENCE in every sense of the word. Her voice and style is so impeccably honed and molded that it’s hard to even fully grasp after the first read through, at least for me and my pea brain hehe. It took time to marinate and entirely sink in. She is a perfectionist which she has admitted herself in interviews and it comes through in her writing but not annoyingly or pretentiously so. She is a verifiable visionary and has ultimately become one of my favorite authors of all time.

Rowan Hitchcock

This book changed my life. What else is there to say? It is perfect.

Joan Didion always gives you what you need.

Katherine Yang

I read this over a fairly long period of time so the stories and sentiments relayed within seem to have been blurred by the various contexts in which I read them, an additional filter to that of the hazy nostalgia already present. Honoured to have been gifted this, but I'm not sure I really get what Didion is about. The essays that stuck with me more than the others were On Keeping a Notebook and Goodbye to All That; otherwise, I'm left feeling somewhat distant from the author. "Remember what it is to be me: that is always the point," she writes. Perhaps it will take some time for me to be acquainted with Ms. Didion.

Twenty essays on such diverse topics as John Wayne, the Haight-Ashbury culture, and the Newport mansions

Nick Gracilla

Bookstore plug: while working a few weeks this summer in San Francisco, I stumble across Joan Didion. What luck! And regret—how could I not have known about her earlier? Her tight, concise writing illuminates, confronts, and invigorates. These short stories encapsulate the spirit of the times, a moment when everything seemed possible, even while the seams were fraying. Highly recommended.

Silvia Morgantini

Che voglia di andare a coltivare ortaggi, non scriverò mai bene quanto la Didion. Also: appena sarà possibile viaggiare nel tempo mi fiondo nella California degli anni '60. Also also: ho pianto leggendo il suo articolo su Joh Wayne anche se a) non ho mai visto un suo film e b) i western manco mi piacciono.

Arden Kowalski

These essays are really immersive and very good. This was my introduction to Didion as a writer, and I found that I enjoyed her writing style and the thorough way that she reports on subjects and events. I love this essay collection and almost feel cheated that I read it on my phone instead of in a physical version. My favourite essay might have been the one about Joan Baez; partially because she's one of my favourite musicians and partially because I had to Google 'Joan Baez? Like Joan Baez the musician?' because I was so surprised by the content of the essay and the school. I would highly recommend this to people who don't usually read nonfiction as it is an engrossing and clever entry point.

Clara Jo

There is magic in Joan Didion's writing, in its substance and intentionality, and I am wondering how it is possible that anybody could write prose that exquisite. She begins each journalistic essay with such precise and powerful imagery that I cannot help but feel transported to the very places she so effortlessly captures, and I am left with a sense of unexplained nostalgia for a time and story that is not my own. I especially connected with each of her personals — memories and feelings, snippets and ideas —my goodness is she brilliant and real.

Slouching towards Bethlehem

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