The White Album

"The beaches at Malibu are neither white nor as wide as the beach at Carmel. The hills are scrubby and barren, infested with bikers and rattlesnakes, scarred with cuts and old burns and new R.V. parks. For these and other reasons Malibu tends to astonish and disappoint those who have never seen it, and yet its very name remains, in the imagination of people all over the world, a kind of shorthand for the easy life. I had not before 1971 and will probably not again live in a place with a Chevrolet named after it."

I think that paragraph sums up, this collection of essays. A mosaic of snaphots, from the 60s and 70s, captured in Didion's deft, slightly aloof style, with razor-sharp insight and vivid imagery. Not every essay here sings, but show more there are plenty that do and she covers a lot of territory too, although the bulk, are centered around California. The collection opens with the title essay and it is a stunner. If you only want to read one, make it that one. show less

Joan escreve maravilhosamente bem tornando interessante qualquer assunto por mais insólito. Sua prosa gostosa de ler é fluída e segura, que nos convida a olhar para seus temas de interesse com cumplicidade, sensibilidade e surpresa. Uma mistura de Camus com Rubem Braga. Seus ensaios são sobre temas surpreendentemente diversos. Sobre estufas de orquídeas, sistemas de distribuição de águas, salva-vidas de Malibu, a casa vazia do governador, o funcionamento de uma represa hidroelétrica ou acompanhar no estúdio uma gravação do The Doors. Nesse livro está o polêmico artigo sobre o feminismo, e em todos eles Joan é a personagem principal com sua visão do mundo da vida, valores, e comentários. Sua ironia fina é melancólica e show more conformada com um mundo sem sentido. Por vezes transparece um certo elitismo não esnobe porém incorporado como um fato da vida. Por ter lido o "Ano do Pensamento Mágico" antes desse me criou um sentimento estranho de conhecer o futuro da autora. De saber os desdobramentos de algumas histórias, e de futuras tragédias que não estavam nem no horizonte desses anos 60 e 70 cobertos nesse livro. Recomendo. show less

I think what Joan Didion is very good at is setting the stage and making you feel present in the moment, even when that moment happened decades ago. She is cagey. She is writing for herself first, capturing those images and those facts in prose that will reflect the minutia back to you like a mirror. She is in every word, you can feel her presence, her careful crafting of each sentence, but she is elusive. So what is she saying? How did that make her feel? What is she getting at? Some of her essays beg to be read more than once, to be delved into time and time again. And this is what makes her brilliant - what she has to say isn't the point - it is how she says it. She has preserved the moment, the day, the decade in all of its glory or show more shame. She has laid the trivial beside the momentous and in doing so has made it timeless. It is not flat - it has dimension.

This collection, like most collections of anything has an unevenness. The brilliant shares space with the adequate and the puzzling. I wonder at why some of the entries were included. BUT the title essay is a gorgeous example of how to present a decade for consumption - she delivers to us the 60s by giving us a glimpse of her own life in that decade. Small vignettes that form a collage representing the whole. And the opening dialogue has become iconic:

“We tell ourselves stories in order to live...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 live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images, by the "ideas" with which we have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience.”

Divided into five sections, each with a theme, the collection contains a total of twenty essays. I liked most of them, and I loved several - the collection is worth having just for the title essay, in my opinion. Highly recommended if you like essays with the caveat that the title essay is by far the best of the bunch. show less

I adored this book. Didion writes beautifully, with a quickness and wit that is the equal of anything I've read. An essay can be heading on one direction, instantly turn on its head for a sentence or paragraph and then resume its original course, or change direction yet again. Everything is full of meaning, but as she explains in one of the later essays, it's not some meaning about the world, but only ever a personal one. Orchids, the Hoover Dam and serial killers are worth writing about because they're interesting, not because they're significant. It's a follow your nose attitude to intellectual life that makes Didion very fun company.

So is there anything deeper here, or is it just an exercise in aesthetics? Well first of all, what show more does "just aesthetics" mean? But second, yes I think there is. These essays are a celebration of curiosity and a warning against seriousness. Didion is modelling a spirit of enquiry and lightness which would make the world a much better place. She's not apolitical, in fact the timelessness of her political commentary is testament to the power of her approach. By looking at personality, style and rhetoric, she more accurately characterises the political temper of the time than the serious pundits and experts whose commentary long ago grew stale.

And that style! Everything is so clearly described and laden with meaning. It's a pleasure to read and wonderfully entertaining, which is exactly what a book should be. show less

Blending journalism and memoir into snapshots of a narrative landscape during American 1960-70s, Didion expresses themes of separation, confusion and the search for meaning in a stylized format that is a signature of her writing. The titular essay “The White Album” is the strongest, followed by “Many Mansions,” “The Getty”, “In the Islands” and “On the Morning After the Sixties” — the writing feels most secure when she is in California. First published in 1979, many of the brief, more memoir essays may no longer have the impact they did upon publication, but her style left an indelible mark on the format.

A significant problem with Joan Didion’s writing is that it is often of such high standard, achieves such show more excellence in clarity through omission, that the bar is raised incredibly high for anything she writes, resulting in many of her works being subsequently considered to be not as good as expected. Opening with “We tell ourselves stories to live,” which became one of the most quoted sentences by Didion, the reader is set up immediately for expecting the very best. show less

A wonderful style, a cool voice, but one you trust to tell it how it is, whatever it is.
Over thirty years ago I read George Orwell’s non-fiction, his journalism, his books, his essays and even his letters. He would write about saucy seaside postcards or roses from Woolworths, and it didn’t matter that you had had no interest in the subject matter, but Orwell made the subject real in his writing.
Didion does that, although the voice is entirely different.
Well worth the time.



We tell ourselves stories in order to live.

We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images, by the “ideas” with which we have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual show more experience.

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. show less

These essays- published mostly in magazines such as The Saturday Evening Post, Esquire, Life- were written from 1968 to 1977. They serve nicely as vintage time capsules, snapshots from an era. Didion as a writer encompasses both the objectivity of the journalist and the subjectivity of a memoirist.

Personal favorites:

The Women's Movement
In the Islands
In Bed
On the Road
At the Dam
Quiet Days in Malibu

With her reporter's eye, she never misses a detail. Whether sitting in on a Doors studio recording or at Nancy Reagan's house and yet there is no celebrity worship. Actually, it's her portrayal of ordinary people that stands out the most. Amado Vasquez, the greenhouse grower is listened to with the utmost respect. The piece on Nancy Reagan show more feels comical but it's in such a subtle way that you never feel that Didion is mocking her.

Most journalists keep sealed the goings on behind the scenes; Didion rips away the facade and shows you. This, she says, is the reality. The driest essay here is what you may expect to be the juiciest, "In Hollywood." Here she is overtly explaining how things are not how they are often perceived. And it puzzles her why no one else ever says the truth in front of everyone's faces. So much of this sentiment is true still.

Didion is a Stoic in many ways and at the same time she presents herself authentically. Which is rare to see. She even shares word for word her diagnosis and medical notes from her stay in a psychiatric hospital. She comments how this seems to her "an appropriate response to the summer of 1968." A pretty ballsy response and I wouldn't say she's wrong. show less