The White Album Essays
Reviews
I read the opening essay from the white album when I was 18 and in college. It was part of the best American essays of the 20th century, edited by Joyce Caroll Oates. The essay stuck with me, with its quotiden doom and an air of confidence that makes Didion feel like someone that everyone wants to talk to as the bar, despite her being completely unmoved. It was like something I'd never read before. This is a different Didion than the year of magical thinking, and just as relevant.
Parts of this book I really like, and it felt relevant to read after Chaos. So much of the past year kind of had a sense of foreboding that Didion described in her first essay, in which her close brushes with the Manson family illustrate a greater cynicism that built behind the hippy ideal, but where I lost her was how some of the cynicism bent back to a more conservative underpinning, which seems like a tendency of post war folks (boomers and silent generation). Her essay making fun of second wave feminism felt odd, but maybe I'm missing something. Essentially it felt like she just wanted to make fun of folks for fighting for their rights from the perspective of a conventionally attractive and well off white woman, which is why I couldn't get into later Didion, it feels like hearing a rich aunt gossip about the country club while at check out at whole foods. Additionally she displays some latent racism towards what she perceives as a naivety of the natives in her essay about Colombia, when really it seems like she doesn't know how to see outside of herself.
Some of the things I love about this book are her moments of idiosyncratic hyper-focus, which lends her a particular charm. Her obsession with the Hoover Dam, the Water Systems of California, and her last essay about orchids, greenhouses and wildfires is where she really shines. There is something really endearing about a bourbon soaked blunt bob cut cold attitude writer not being impressed by anything except the hoover dam, and being kicked out of greenhouses for vibing too hard.
Her perspectives as well as her mastery of sentence, and her first person and diaristic take on journalism lends these essays an almost parasocial appeal that makes Didion relevant now inspite of some of her cruel attitudes, and the book is a classic for reason.
wow!!! im joan didion-pilled. i hate most of the creative nonfiction genre because these people just keep talking about themselves but didion was so adept in placing herself in the zeitgeist, and she knows the zeitgeist very well. that last essay knocked my socks off.
personal library, bought from the strand
Didion's writing paves out a discourse of thought between the reader and her curious perspective of the world. To read this interpretation of life, culture and politics during the 60s and 70s, I gathered a disjointed belonging to that past as she did, and experienced her history, vivid, through her poetic narrative. Both sophisticated and honest, this vulnerable insight to Didion's mind is a true gift to the thoughtful readers. May this novel teach you to never take things for their surface level, like the dams of the world, there is always a story.
the ”women’s movement” essay where she claims that feminists are victimizing themselves was my least favourite.
i very much liked this book
I am, unfortunately, a contrarian by nature who is prone to disorienting illnesses. I'm beginning to see that is might be the main reason I enjoy Didion's work. The cover copy says that The White Album is about the aftermath of The Sixties (what does one do after the narrative of the American Dream has been rewritten in a foreign language?), and the title essay is, but there's an equal number of pieces about infrastructure and infrastructure as metaphor. Volume highlights: - "The White Album" - "Good Citizens" -"Notes Towards a Dreampolitik" -"In Hollywood" -"On the Morning after The Sixties" Volume lowlight: "The Women's Movement," to which I cannot even grant points for originality or contrariness, as the idea that feminists are fragile snowflakes stuck in a state of arrested adolescent development while Real Adult Women get married to men and have babies is one that I hear/see approximately three times a week.
the first half of the book was really great. unfortunately the last half was a bit strenuous to get through. i did really love ‘in bed’! migraine sufferers unite!
started with paperback, ended with audible…..i wanted to love this book so bad but i just could not get into it like her other work 💔💔
Joan Didion books should only be read when one is in Los Angeles, preferably when it is very hot and you have just finished driving around town. The one exception to this rule is "The Year of Magical Thinking", which must be read at night in a Manhattan apartment when you are alone, so that people do not see you cry, or do not see you not cry.
⭐️⭐️⭐️½ maybe
the way joan didion speaks about the california mind during natural disasters and freak weather, lights passion in me as if I lived in california and knew these simultaneous feelings of paradise and hell
some of the essays were kinda boring but maybe thats bc im not american and/or old however Didion’s writing is <333333 and the way she observes the world is just super interesting
Joan Didion’s narrative is erratic, weird and loveable. I fell in love with this book from chapter one and it makes for such an amazing audiobook for car rides
she’s so brill. also she uses desultory soooo much. due a reread honestly
(Three stars because of the political essays and her hatred of carpool lanes)
the og cool girl monologue!!
Didion died in December, aged 87. In my mind, she'll forever represent the voice of a generation, the kind of voice we don't foster anymore. No one can capture the spirit of a time — the ending of the 60s and its free-loving spirit, California in all its hope, its freeways, its unexpected communities rallying around fires, citizenship, and the fight for water — than Didion. She can take the oddest topics, like waterwork systems, and unwrap something so essential it is invisible, like the air we breathe. She led a complicated life: surrounded by the wildly successful of her generation; suffered from paralyzing migraines; suffered the loss of her husband and her child. She has left us a time capsule in her writing, in which the roots of today's culture draws. A must read.
Didion's concise, insightful prose rings clear in this collection of short stories centered around American life, especially in California, during the late 1960s. Her essays on women are particularly clearheaded, spearing second-wave feminist myths. No one can evoke the image and absurdities of an age, a mood, a movement, and a place like Didion. Highly recommended.
I really like Joan Didion and I enjoyed this book but didn't *love* it the way I did The Year of Magical Thinking. I think this is due in part to not relating much with the context in which she was writing, the 60s and 70s in California. Didion assumes a certain base knowledge level of her era and I was missing that a bit. Still there were a few stand out essays in this collection that I really enjoyed. Didion makes me want to be a better non-fiction writer.
Joan Didion ile tanışmam The Year of Magical Thinking ile olmuştu. Bir yası ve bir acıyı bu kadar salt ve yalın bir dil ile anlatması, kendisiyle yüzleşmesi beni büyülemişti. The White Album ise bambaşka bir konuda. 60’ların sonu ve 70lerin başını kapsayan Kaliforniya’nın tarihi ve siyaseti üzerine odaklanan denemelerden oluşuyor. Okurken çok tuhaf bir şekilde Kaliforniya’yı Joan Didion ile bütünleştiriyor insan. Çünkü kendisinin yazım tarzı, cümleleri çok farklı. Normalde hiç ilginizi çekmeyecek detayları lirik bir atmosferin içinde anlatıyor size. Şimdiye kadar hiç ilginizi çekmeyen su kemerleri bir anda öncelik sıralamanıza giriyor. Bazen de çok basit bir detayda, gözünüzün önünde duran noktalarını nasıl birleştiremediğinizi sorgulamanıza sebep oluyor. Bazı yazarlar vardır, hiç ilginiz olmayan konularda dahi sizi kitaba kilitleyip okuturlar. Joan Didion o yazarlardan birisi. Kaliforniya hiçbir şekilde bağ kurmadığım, ilgimi çekmeyen bölgelerden birisiyken, onunla keşfetmeye/öğrenmeye doyamadım. O yüzden bu ikiliyi artık zihnimde ayırmamın imkanı yok, ikisi de birbiriyle güzel.
it is hardly a relevatory observation that didion's writing tone is cool and chic, both somewhat sentimental and somewhat detached. it is - perhaps - the perfect journalistic (essayist) voice, certainly the perfect observationist voice.
there is a certain rhythm to her writing that draws you in and carries you away easily, smoothly. her strong intellect comes through incessantly while her prose remains sharp and accessible.
it is not difficult to understand why so many girls want to be joan didions and why so few in fact are.
4.5
I don’t think I am smart enough for this book.
“We tell ourselves stories in order to live.” Reading Joan Didion felt like reading for the first time. Every sentence was electric. Every page was a surprise. Didion writes with great clarity and compassion no matter the subject matter. Many times I found myself in shock and asking myself — how did she do that? How did she make that connection? How did she capture this moment with such tender dispassion? It was something I’ve never seen in non-fiction/autobiographical works. “Quiet days in Malibu” was my favorite piece in the collection and it was the piece that prompted me to rush to the bookstore to buy The White Album. Highly recommended.
Joan Didion is an absolutely fantastic writer. This collection of essays (I think it's my third of hers) is extremely compelling and kept me interested from front to back. The essays in the 'Women' section were my favourite, but several managed to make me feel a deep nostalgia for an era I did not actually live through. Some topics I could care less about (i.e. orchids, Reagan, Hawaii) but the clever prose and nice flow of the writing kept me reading. I swear, I could read Joan Didion's grocery lists. She's just that good of a writer, perhaps specifically because she's very self aware of it. There is a passage about location that particularly stood out to me: "Certain places seem to exist mainly because someone has written about them. [...] A place belongs forever to whoever claims it hardest, remembers it most obsessively, wrenches it from itself, shapes it, renders it, loves it so radically that he remakes it in his image..." If this quote isn't enough to convince you that you absolutely must immerse yourself in The White Album—even or especially if you're not a fan of nonfiction—I'm not sure what will. It is a genius collection of essays that I thoroughly enjoyed. I'm beyond excited to read Play As It Lays when it comes in the mail, whenever that may be. P.S. I would be remiss if I did not include my favourite quote from the collection in this review. It is 'writers are always selling somebody out,' which perhaps puts the opening phrase of the book into its intended context.
Highlights
I remember “Do You Wanna Dance” on the record player, “Do You Wanna Dance” and “Visions of Johanna” and a song called “Midnight Confessions.” I remember a babysitter telling me that she saw death in my aura. I remember chatting with her about reasons why this might be so, paying her, opening all the French windows and going to sleep in the living room.
on self respect
If I could believe that going to a barricade would affect man's fate in the slightest I would go to that barricade, and quite often I wish that I could, but it would be less than honest to say that I expect to happen upon such a happy ending.
We were that generation called “silent" but we were silent neither, as some thought, because we shared the period's official optimism nor, as others thought, because we feared its official repression. We were silent because the exhilaration of social action seemed to many of us just one more way of escaping the personal, of masking for a while the dread of the meaningless which was man’s fate.
At Berkeley in the Fifties no one was surprised by anything at all,
I suppose I am talking about just that: the ambiguity of belonging to a generation distrustful of political highs, the historical irrelevancy of growing up convinced that the heart of darkness lay not in some error of social organization but in man's own blood. If man was bound to err, then any social organization was bound to be in error. It was a premise which still seems to me accurate enough but one which robbed us early of a certain capacity for surprise.
The star map was, he had said, for when we were all gone and the dam was left. I had not thought much of it when he said it, but I thought of it then, with the wind whining and the sun dropping behind a mesa with the finality of a sunset in space. Of course that was the image I had seen always, seen it without quite realizing what I saw, a dynamo finally free of man, splendid at last in its absolute isolation, transmitting power and releasing water to a world where no one is.
One thing you will note about shopping-center theory is that you could have thought of it yourself, and a course in it will go a long way toward dispelling the notion that business proceeds from mysteries too recondite for you and me.
In New York the air was charged and crackling and shorting out with opinions, and we pretended we had some. Everyone in New York had opinions. Opinions were demanded in return. The absence of opinion was construed as opinion.
I have trouble maintaining the basic notion that keeping promises matters in a world where everything I was taught seems beside the point. The point itself seens increasingly obscure.
Why don't I keep a diary? Obviously, my changing everything into fiction is simply a means of concealing something from myself.... I shall keep a diary:
The astral discontent with actual lives, actual men, the denial of the real generative possibilities of adult sexual life, somehow touches beyond words.
All one's actual apprehension of what it is like to be a woman, the ireconcilable difference of it--that sense of living one's deepest life underwater, that dark involvement with blood and birth and death
women who had perhaps been conditioned to obscure their resentments even from themselves.
And then, at that exact dispirited moment when there seemed no one at all willing to play the proletariat, along came the women's movement, and the invention of women as a "class." One could not help admiring the radical simplicity of this instant transfiguration. The notion that, in the absence of a cooperative proletariat, a revolutionary class might simply be invented, made up, “named” and so brought into existence, seemed at once so pragmatic and so visionary, so precisely Emersonian that it took the breath away, exactly confirmed one’s idea of where nineteenth-century transcendental instincts, crossed with a late reading of Engels and Marx, might lead.
But its curious vanity and irrelevance stay with me, if only because those qualities characterize so many of Hollywood's best intentions.
the public life of liberal Hollywood comprises a kind of dictatorship of good intentions, a social contract in which actual and irreconcilable disagreement is as taboo as failure or bad teeth, a climate devoid of irony.
Politics are not widely considered a legitimate source of amusement in Hollywood,
To understand what was going on it is perhaps necessary to have participated in the freeway experience, which is the only secular communion Los Angeles has.
we were never any better than we are and will never be any better than we were,
Here was a man who moved through life believing that he was entitled to forget it and start over, to shed women when they became difficult and allegiances when they became tedious and simply move on, dismissing those who quibbled as petty and "judgmental' and generally threatened by his superior and more dynamic view of human possibility.
We look for the sermon in the suicide, for the social or moral lesson in the murder of five. We interpret what we see, select the most workable of the multiple choices.
We tell ourselves stories in order to live
“In what would probably be the middle of my life I wanted still to believe in the narrative and in the narrative’s intelligibility, but to know that one could change the sense with every cut was to begin to perceive the experience as rather more electrical than ethical.”