I imagined that my own life was simple and sweet, and sometimes it was, but there were odd things going around town. There were rumors. There were stories.” In the essay, Didion uses the story of Tate’s murder to demonstrate how, in the aftermath of the event, it felt as if everything in the world had stopped making sense. She writes about strange coincidences and links: She bought a dress to be married in on the morning JFK was killed; later, she wore it to a party that was also attended by Tate and Polanski, and Polanski spilled wine on it. These and other coincidences don’t mean anything, she admits, but “in the jingle-jangle morning of that summer it made as much sense as anything else.” However much she would resist the idea, Miss Didion’s talent is primarily discursive in tendency. As is the case with Gore Vidal, the essays are far more interesting than the fiction. The novels get taken up, with the enthusiasm, the unanimity, the relief which American critics and readers often show when they discover a new and distinctly OK writer. Miss Didion is already being called ‘major’, a judgment that some might think premature, to say the least: but she is far more rewarding than many writers similarly saluted. In particular, the candour of her femaleness is highly arresting and original. She doesn’t try for the virile virtues of robustness and infallibility; she tries to find a female way of being serious. Nevertheless, there are hollow places in even her best writing, a thinness, a sense of things missing. The White Album è una raccolta di saggi e reportage giornalistici, del tipo che hanno reso famoso nel mondo il cosiddetto new journalism (Capote docet). The fragmented scenes take a form like chapters and cover Didion’s perspective on key moments during the late 60s. Photograph: Lars Jan/Sydney festival

When five people were murdered at Sharon Tate’s house on the night of August 8-9, 1969, the reverberations went far beyond the elite Hollywood community of which she was part. They were felt far beyond Los Angeles, too. By that fall, when police connected the murders (and those of Leno and Rosemary LaBianca the following night) to Charles Manson and his cult-like “family,” Manson was well on his way to infamy, becoming a murderous icon and a symbol of an age. There is a reputation of arrogance and ostentatious name-dropping following her, and yes, she may have done that at times, but a writer who NEVER fails to end her paragraphs/ chapters/ pieces with one magnificent sentence after another affords to do that, if she so wishes. There is a section entitled Women that includes thoughtful essays on the Women's Movement. It includes the writings of feminist Doris Lessing, highlighting her writing featuring thoughts on The Grass is Singing and her iconic The Golden Notebook. There is also an essay on the beautiful art of Georgia O'Keeffe including her beautiful and vast "Sky Above the Clouds" painting that Didion took her daughter to see in 1973 at the Chicago Art Institute. Joan Didion describes the resolve of Georgia O'Keeffe being an artist open to what she sees and her sensitivity to bright colors and her sense of self. I've always thought that I was somehow naïve to some sort of greater truth about reality, or at least the United States, or at least California, because I had never read anything by Joan Didion. Friends and acquaintances and strangers spoke of her with a sort of ineloquent awe as if their own descriptions could never match her lucid prose or mental acuity. I didn’t love these essays until about the midpoint, “The Women’s Movement”, a devastatingly good piece about the watering-down of feminism in mid-century America, about the heartbreaking shift of a vitally important revolutionary movement as it lost touch with its ideological base and became ever more a vehicle appropriated by a leisure class, its goals moving away from seeking the possibility for an individual to create their own unique destiny unfettered by traditional obstacles and bias, and moving toward something like a seeking of the possibility for the mere prolongation of adolescence, a fear of growing up- more a form of escapism than a new form of liberation. This seems to me, even today, a very important and accurate assessment of not only what happened within various egalitarian movements in the last half of the 20th century, but a shift that occurred on whole societal, generational levels in America.Didion had more than a mild interest in the case. After the passage quoted above, she writes about visiting Linda Kasabian in prison, and later buying a dress for her to wear to testify in court during Manson’s trial. (Kasabian was among the four members of the Manson family who went to Tate’s house, but she was standing lookout and did not actually kill anyone, which meant she was a prime witness in the case later on.) The White Album by Joan Didion is a collection of pieces about America in the 1960s. As a result, writing about the White Album is definitely going to force you to make choices about exactly which stories in the collection you focus on.

E mi pare che il suo essere al centro della scena e del racconto apra prospettive nuove e conceda spazio, trasformi gli oggetti in soggetti, moltiplichi le angolazioni da cui guardare alla stessa cosa. She felt that the US political process had become self-contained, exclusive of the electorate and, from the presidency of R onald Reagan onwards, of reality itself – as depicted in the essays anthologised in After Henry (1992) and Political Fictions (2001) and her occasional 21st century pieces. This perception also fed into her best and most successful novel, Democracy (1984), which could be read as a romance, or – as was also true of her 1996 novel The Last Thing He Wanted – as an exploration of private connections to public power. The political could not have been made more personal.I like her excitability, her habit of sudden absorption. Of late ‘60s biker grindhouse she writes, “I saw nine of them recently, saw the first one almost by accident and the rest of them with a notebook.” The book’s keynote, right there. Didion takes the stuff of recondite hobbies and autistic fixation—irrigation infrastructure, the Governors’ mansions of California—and finds the grandeur, the lyric, the idea. This was an adequate enough performance, as improvisations go. The only problem was that my entire education, everything I had ever been told or had told myself, insisted that the production was never meant to be improvised: I was supposed to have a script, and had mislaid it. I was supposed to hear cues, and no longer did. I was meant to know the plot, but all I knew was what I saw: flash pictures in variable sequence, images with no “meaning” beyond their temporary arrangement, not a movie but a cutting-room 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. I've read more contemporary books of Didion's, and it's interesting that she has the same voice in the 21st century as she did in the late 60s. But no matter the decade, I don't like the style at all and won't read more of her books. I did not always think he was right nor did he always think I was right but we were each the person the other trusted. – The Year of Magical Thinking (2005) On loss

In 1973 the five pillboxes on Makapuu Head had seemed to James Jones exactly as he had left them in 1942. In 1973 the Royal Hawaiian Hotel had seemed to James Jones less formidably rich than he had left it in 1942 …She was born in Sacramento, the daughter of Eduene (nee Jerrett) and Frank Didion, a finance officer with the US army, poker player, and, after the second world war, a real estate dealer. Joan was an army brat on her father’s stations, and her juvenile fantasies set out in that notebook were doomy – death in the desert, suicide in the surf.

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. Joan Didion is the author of several novels and works of nonfiction, among them "Slouching Towards Bethlehem, The White Album, Miami, Salvador, After Henry, "and "Political Fictions." She lives in New York City.This book is sort of an extended tribute to a time and place I know almost nothing about first hand. 1960's. California. She is such an amazing writer that I found myself captivated by almost every essay in this book, even if I wasn't really interested in the subject matter. This is a magical skill great writers have. It's easy to find an essay interesting if you are already interested in a topic, but it takes great skill to make a topic the reader is not interested in to come alive by the writing. Didion] stands revealed, in The White Album, as a human being who has managed to gouge another book out of herself, rather than as a writer who gets her living done on the side, or between the lines. The result is a volatile, occasionally brilliant, distinctly female contribution to the new New Journalism, diffident and imperious by turns, intimate yet categorical, self-effacingly listless and at the same time often subtly self-serving. She can still find her own perfect pitch for long stretches, and she has an almost embarrassingly sharp ear and unblinking eye for the Californian inanity. Seemingly obedient, though, to the verdicts of her psychiatric report, Miss Didion writes about everything with the same doom-conscious yet faintly abstract intensity of interest, whether remarking on the dress sense of one of Manson’s henchwomen, or indulging her curious obsession with Californian waterworks in these pieces, Miss Didion’s writing does not "reflect" her moods so much as dramatise them. "How she feels" has become, for the time being, how it is. [4] II. California Republic [ edit ]