Joan Didion

First published in 1979, The White Album records indelibly the upheavals and aftermaths of the 1960s. Examining key events, figures, and trends of the era—including Charles Manson, the Black Panthers, and the shopping mall—through the lens of her own spiritual confusion, Joan Didion helped to define mass culture as we now understand it. Written with a commanding sureness of tone and linguistic precision, The White Album is a central text of American reportage and a classic of American autobiography.

Essays

The White Album

This comprehensive edition brings together three seminal collections by legendary essayist and journalist Joan Didion: Slouching toward Bethlehem, White Album and Sentimental Journeys. WE TELL OURSELVES STORIES IN ORDER TO LIVE Looking for plausible stories as the Sixties are about to implode, Joan Didion sets out, notebook in hand, on a now-legendary journey into the hinterland of the American psyche: she kills time waiting for Jim Morrison to show up, parties with Janis Joplin, visits the Black Panthers in prison, watches a campus combust, dines with Tate and Polanski, buys dresses with Charlie Manson's girls, and gravitates towards biker movies 'because there on screen was some news I was not getting from the New York Times'. She and her reader emerge, cauterized, from this devastating tour of the myths and realities of that age of self-discovery into the harsh light of the morning after...

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. 

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. 

Some women fight and others do not. Like so many successful guerrillas in the war between the sexes, Georgia O'Keeffe seems to have been equipped early with an immutable sense of who she was and a fairly clear understanding that she would be required to prove it. 

That Mrs. Lessing does not suggests her particular dilemma. What we are witnessing here is a writer undergoing a profound and continuing cultural trauma, a woman of determinedly utopian and distinctly teleological bent assaulted at every turn by fresh evidence that the world is not exactly improving as promised. And, because such is the particular quality of her mind, she is compelled in the face of this evidence to look even nore frenetically for the final cause, the unambiguous answer.

That many women are victims of condescension and exploitation and sex-role stereotyping was scarcely news, but neither was it news that other women are not: nobody forces women to buy the package. But of course something other than an objection to being “discriminated against” was at work here, something other than an aversion to being “stereotyped” in one’s sex role. Increasingly it seemed that the aversion was to adult sexual life itself: how much cleaner to stay forever children. 

As I drove home that day through the somnolent back streets of Hollywood I had the distinct sense that everyone I knew had some fever which had not yet infected the invisible city. 

Yet for several years bike movies have constituted a kind of underground folk literature for adolescents, have located an audience and fabricated a myth to exactly express that audience’s every inchoate resentment, every yearning for the extreme exhilaration of death. To die violently is “righteous,” a flash. To keep on living, as Peter Fonda points out in ‘The Wild Angels’, is just to keep on paying rent. 

Things did change, but in the end it was not they who made things change, and their enthusiasms and debates sometimes seem very close to me in this house. In a way the house suggests the particular vanity of perceiving social life as a problem to be solved by the good will of individuals, but I do not mention that to many of the people who visit me here. 

The West begins where the average annual rainfall drops below twenty inches. Water is important to people who do not have it, and the same is true of control. 

It was hard to surprise me in those years. It was hard to even get my attention. I was absorbed in my intellectualization, my obsessive-compulsive devices, my projection, my reaction-formation, my somatization, and in the transcript of the Ferguson trial.

louv

“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.”

darby

We tell ourselves stories in order to live. 

aisha

"You don't look like a migraine personality," a doctor once said to me. "Your hair's messy. But I suppose you're a compulsive housekeeper." Actually my house is kept even more negligently than my hair, but the doctor was right nonetheless: perfectionism can also take the form of spending most of a week writing and rewriting and not writing a single paragraph.

Helen 

We were standing in a sea of orchids, an extravagance of orchids, and he had given me an armful of blossoms from his own cattleyas to take to my child, more blossoms maybe than in all of Madrid. It seemed to me that day that I had never talked to anyone so direct and unembarrassed about the things he loved.

New York Times Bestseller: An “elegant” mosaic of trenchant observations on the late sixties and seventies from the author of Slouching Towards Bethlehem (The New Yorker). In this landmark essay collection, Joan Didion brilliantly interweaves her own “bad dreams” with those of a nation confronting the dark underside of 1960s counterculture. From a jailhouse visit to Black Panther Party cofounder Huey Newton to witnessing First Lady of California Nancy Reagan pretend to pick flowers for the benefit of news cameras, Didion captures the paranoia and absurdity of the era with her signature blend of irony and insight. She takes readers to the “giddily splendid” Getty Museum in Los Angeles, the cool mountains of Bogotá, and the Jordanian Desert, where Bishop James Pike went to walk in Jesus’s footsteps—and died not far from his rented Ford Cortina. She anatomizes the culture of shopping malls—“toy garden cities in which no one lives but everyone consumes”—and exposes the contradictions and compromises of the women’s movement. In the iconic title essay, she documents her uneasy state of mind during the years leading up to and following the Manson murders—a terrifying crime that, in her memory, surprised no one. Written in “a voice like no other in contemporary journalism,” The White Album is a masterpiece of literary reportage and a fearless work of autobiography by the National Book Award–winning author of The Year of Magical Thinking (The New York Times Book Review). Its power to electrify and inform remains undiminished nearly forty years after it was first published.

Lindy

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! 

annalyse! 

kayley

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 💔💔

Laura Mauler

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.

Lila R E

woahluv

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

enya

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 

Elizabeth Denny

she’s so brill. also she uses desultory soooo much. due a reread honestly

lauren amitirigala

Andrew Louis

(Three stars because of the political essays and her hatred of carpool lanes)

Midori Kobayashi

Nick Gracilla

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.

Amy Thibodeau

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.

Irem

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.

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.

Lia 

I don’t think I am smart enough for this book.

Grace M

Chiyeung lau

“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.

Arden Kowalski

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.

Jade Flynn

I / THE WHITE ALBUM - Overall 3/5.
II / CALIFORNIA REPUBLIC - Overall 3/5. Honourable mentions, Holy Water and Many Mansions.
III / WOMEN - Overall 4/5. Honourable mentions, The Women's Movement and Georgia O'Keeffe.
IV / SOJOURNS - Overall 4/5. Honourable mentions, In the Islands, In Bed and On the Road.
V / ON THE MORNING AFTER THE SIXTIES - Overall 2/5. Honourable mentions, Quiet Days in Malibu.

Will either be reading After Henry or A Year of Magical Thinking next.

Sheryl Levitt

The first collection of essay's I've read by choice (school requirements don't count). I wasn't sure if I'd be into it or not, but I was pleasantly surprised. Didion writes with thoughtfulness and depth.

The White Album Essays

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