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Read 12 Masterful Essays by Joan Didion for Free Online, Spanning Her Career From 1965 to 2013

in Literature , Writing | January 14th, 2014 3 Comments

Image by David Shankbone, via Wikimedia Commons

In a classic essay of Joan Didion’s, “Goodbye to All That,” the novelist and writer breaks into her narrative—not for the first or last time—to prod her reader. She rhetorically asks and answers: “…was anyone ever so young? I am here to tell you that someone was.” The wry little moment is perfectly indicative of Didion’s unsparingly ironic critical voice. Didion is a consummate critic, from Greek kritēs , “a judge.” But she is always foremost a judge of herself. An account of Didion’s eight years in New York City, where she wrote her first novel while working for Vogue , “Goodbye to All That” frequently shifts point of view as Didion examines the truth of each statement, her prose moving seamlessly from deliberation to commentary, annotation, aside, and aphorism, like the below:

I want to explain to you, and in the process perhaps to myself, why I no longer live in New York. It is often said that New York is a city for only the very rich and the very poor. It is less often said that New York is also, at least for those of us who came there from somewhere else, a city only for the very young.

Anyone who has ever loved and left New York—or any life-altering city—will know the pangs of resignation Didion captures. These economic times and every other produce many such stories. But Didion made something entirely new of familiar sentiments. Although her essay has inspired a sub-genre , and a collection of breakup letters to New York with the same title, the unsentimental precision and compactness of Didion’s prose is all her own.

The essay appears in 1967’s Slouching Towards Bethlehem , a representative text of the literary nonfiction of the sixties alongside the work of John McPhee, Terry Southern, Tom Wolfe, and Hunter S. Thompson. In Didion’s case, the emphasis must be decidedly on the literary —her essays are as skillfully and imaginatively written as her fiction and in close conversation with their authorial forebears. “Goodbye to All That” takes its title from an earlier memoir, poet and critic Robert Graves’ 1929 account of leaving his hometown in England to fight in World War I. Didion’s appropriation of the title shows in part an ironic undercutting of the memoir as a serious piece of writing.

And yet she is perhaps best known for her work in the genre. Published almost fifty years after Slouching Towards Bethlehem , her 2005 memoir The Year of Magical Thinking is, in poet Robert Pinsky’s words , a “traveler’s faithful account” of the stunningly sudden and crushing personal calamities that claimed the lives of her husband and daughter separately. “Though the material is literally terrible,” Pinsky writes, “the writing is exhilarating and what unfolds resembles an adventure narrative: a forced expedition into those ‘cliffs of fall’ identified by Hopkins.” He refers to lines by the gifted Jesuit poet Gerard Manley Hopkins that Didion quotes in the book: “O the mind, mind has mountains; cliffs of fall / Frightful, sheer, no-man-fathomed. Hold them cheap / May who ne’er hung there.”

The nearly unimpeachably authoritative ethos of Didion’s voice convinces us that she can fearlessly traverse a wild inner landscape most of us trivialize, “hold cheap,” or cannot fathom. And yet, in a 1978 Paris Review interview , Didion—with that technical sleight of hand that is her casual mastery—called herself “a kind of apprentice plumber of fiction, a Cluny Brown at the writer’s trade.” Here she invokes a kind of archetype of literary modesty (John Locke, for example, called himself an “underlabourer” of knowledge) while also figuring herself as the winsome heroine of a 1946 Ernst Lubitsch comedy about a social climber plumber’s niece played by Jennifer Jones, a character who learns to thumb her nose at power and privilege.

A twist of fate—interviewer Linda Kuehl’s death—meant that Didion wrote her own introduction to the Paris Review interview, a very unusual occurrence that allows her to assume the role of her own interpreter, offering ironic prefatory remarks on her self-understanding. After the introduction, it’s difficult not to read the interview as a self-interrogation. Asked about her characterization of writing as a “hostile act” against readers, Didion says, “Obviously I listen to a reader, but the only reader I hear is me. I am always writing to myself. So very possibly I’m committing an aggressive and hostile act toward myself.”

It’s a curious statement. Didion’s cutting wit and fearless vulnerability take in seemingly all—the expanses of her inner world and political scandals and geopolitical intrigues of the outer, which she has dissected for the better part of half a century. Below, we have assembled a selection of Didion’s best essays online. We begin with one from Vogue :

“On Self Respect” (1961)

Didion’s 1979 essay collection The White Album brought together some of her most trenchant and searching essays about her immersion in the counterculture, and the ideological fault lines of the late sixties and seventies. The title essay begins with a gemlike sentence that became the title of a collection of her first seven volumes of nonfiction : “We tell ourselves stories in order to live.” Read two essays from that collection below:

“ The Women’s Movement ” (1972)

“ Holy Water ” (1977)

Didion has maintained a vigorous presence at the New York Review of Books since the late seventies, writing primarily on politics. Below are a few of her best known pieces for them:

“ Insider Baseball ” (1988)

“ Eye on the Prize ” (1992)

“ The Teachings of Speaker Gingrich ” (1995)

“ Fixed Opinions, or the Hinge of History ” (2003)

“ Politics in the New Normal America ” (2004)

“ The Case of Theresa Schiavo ” (2005)

“ The Deferential Spirit ” (2013)

“ California Notes ” (2016)

Didion continues to write with as much style and sensitivity as she did in her first collection, her voice refined by a lifetime of experience in self-examination and piercing critical appraisal. She got her start at Vogue in the late fifties, and in 2011, she published an autobiographical essay there that returns to the theme of “yearning for a glamorous, grown up life” that she explored in “Goodbye to All That.” In “ Sable and Dark Glasses ,” Didion’s gaze is steadier, her focus this time not on the naïve young woman tempered and hardened by New York, but on herself as a child “determined to bypass childhood” and emerge as a poised, self-confident 24-year old sophisticate—the perfect New Yorker she never became.

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June 14, 2017

American Life , The 1960s

Slouching Towards Bethlehem

In her transformative essay from 1967, Joan Didion takes a closer look at the dark side of the Haight-Ashbury counterculture during the Summer of Love.

Joan Didion

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[ Editor’s note: Joan Didion’s “Slouching Towards Bethlehem” was first published in the September 23, 1967, edition of the Post . We republish it here as part of our 50th anniversary commemoration of the Summer of Love . Scroll to the bottom to see this story as it appeared in the magazine.]

Things fall apart; the center cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world . . . Surely some revelation is at hand; Surely the Second Coming is at hand . . . And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born? —W.B. Yeats

The center was not holding. It was a country of bankruptcy notices and public-auction announcements and commonplace reports of casual killings and misplaced children and abandoned homes and vandals who misspelled even the four-letter words they scrawled. It was a country in which families routinely disappeared, trailing bad checks and repossession papers. Adolescents drifted from city to torn city, sloughing off both the past and the future as snakes shed their skins, children who were never taught and would never now learn the games that had held the society together. People were missing. Children were missing. Parents were missing. Those who were left behind filed desultory missing-persons reports, then moved on themselves.

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 year 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 year of brave hopes and national promise, but it was not, and more and more people had the uneasy apprehension that it was not. All that seemed clear was that at some point we had aborted ourselves and butchered the job, and because nothing else seemed so relevant I decided to go to San Francisco. San Francisco was where the social hemorrhaging was showing up. San Francisco was where the missing children were gathering and calling themselves “hippies.” When I first went to San Francisco, I did not even know what I wanted to find out, and so I just stayed around awhile and made a few friends.

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A sign on Haight Street, San Francisco: Last Easter Day My Christopher Robin wandered away. He called April 10th But he hasn’t called since He said he was coming home But he hasn’t shown.

If you see him on Haight Please tell him not to wait I need him now I don’t care how If he needs the bread I’ll send it ahead.

If there’s hope Please write me a note If he’s still there Tell him how much I care Where he’s at I need to know For I really love him so!

Deeply, Marla

I am looking for somebody called Deadeye (all single names in this story are fictitious; full names are real), and I hear he is on the Street this afternoon doing a little business, so I keep an eye out for him and pretend to read the signs in the Psychedelic Shop on Haight Street when a kid, 16, 17, comes in and sits on the floor beside me.

“What are you looking for?” he says.

I say nothing much.

“I been out of my mind for three days,” he says. He tells me he’s been shooting crystal, which I pretty much know because he does not bother to keep his sleeves rolled down over the needle tracks. He came up from Los Angeles some number of weeks ago, he doesn’t remember what number, and now he’ll take off for New York, if he can find a ride. I show him a sign on the wall offering a ride to Chicago. He wonders where Chicago is. I ask where he comes from. “Here,” he says. I mean before here. “San Jose. Chula Vista, I dunno,” he says. “My mother’s in Chula Vista.”

A few days later I see him in Golden Gate Park. I ask if he has found a ride to New York. “I hear New York’s a bummer,” he says.

Deadeye never showed up that day, and somebody says maybe I can find him at his place. It is three o’clock and Deadeye is in bed. Somebody else is asleep on the living-room couch, and a girl is sleeping on the floor beneath a poster of Allen Ginsberg, and there are a couple of girls in pajamas making instant coffee. One of the girls introduces me to the friend on the couch, who extends one arm but does not get up because he is naked. Deadeye and I have a mutual acquaintance, but he does not mention his name in front of the others. “The man you talked to,” he says, or “that man I was referring to earlier.” The man is a cop.

The room is overheated and the girl on the floor is sick. Deadeye says she has been sleeping for 24 hours. “Lemme ask you something,” he says. “You want some grass?” I say I have to be moving on. “You want it,” Deadeye says, “it’s yours.” Deadeye used to be a Hell’s Angel around Los Angeles, but that was a few years ago. “Right now,” he says, “I’m trying to set up this groovy religious group — ‘Teen-age Evangelism.’”

Don and Max want to go out to dinner, but Don is on a macrobiotic diet so we end up in Japantown. Max is telling me how he lives free of all the old middle-class Freudian hang-ups. “I’ve had this old lady for a couple of months now, maybe she makes something special for my dinner, and I come in three days late and tell her I’ve been with some other chick, well, maybe she shouts a little but then I say, ‘That’s me, baby,’ and she laughs and says, ‘That’s you, Max. ‘“ Max says it works both ways. “I mean, if she comes in and tells me she wants to have Don, maybe, I say, ‘OK, baby, it’s your trip.’”

Max sees his life as a triumph over “don’ts.” The don’ts he had done before he was 21 were peyote, alcohol, mescaline, and Methedrine. He was on a Meth trip for three years in New York and Tangier before he found acid. He first tried peyote when he was in an Arkansas boys’ school and got down to the Gulf and met “an Indian kid who was doing a don’t. Then every weekend I could get loose I’d hitchhike 700 miles to Brownsville, Texas, so I could pop peyote. Peyote went for thirty cents a button down in Brownsville on the street.” Max dropped in and out of most of the schools and fashionable clinics in the eastern half of America, his standard technique for dealing with boredom being to leave. Example: Max was in a hospital in New York, and “the night nurse was a groovy spade, and in the afternoon for therapy there was a chick from Israel who was interesting, but there was nothing much to do in the morning, so I left.”

We drink some more green tea and talk about going up to Malakoff Diggins, a park in Nevada County, because some people are starting a commune there and Max thinks it would be a groove to take acid there. He says maybe we could go next week, or the week after, or anyway sometime before his case comes up. Almost everybody I meet in San Francisco has to go to court at some point in the middle future. I never ask why.

I am still interested in how Max got rid of his middle-class Freudian hang-ups, and I ask if he is now completely free.

“Nah,” he says. “I got acid.”

Max drops a 250- or 350-microgram tab every six or seven days.

Max and Don share a joint in the car, and we go over to North Beach to find out if Otto, who has a temporary job there, wants to go to Malakoff Diggins. Otto is trying to sell something to some electronics engineers. The engineers view our arrival with some interest, maybe, I think, because Max is wearing bells and an Indian headband. Max has a low tolerance for straight engineers and their Freudian hang-ups. “Look at ’em,” he says. “They’re always yelling ‘queer,’ and then they come prowling into the Haight-Ashbury trying to get a hippie chick.”

We do not get around to asking Otto about Malakoff Diggins because he wants to tell me about a 14-year-old he knows who got busted in the Park the other day. She was just walking through the Park, he says, minding her own, carrying her schoolbooks, when the cops took her in and booked her and gave her a pelvic. “ Fourteen years old ,” Otto says. “ A pelvic .”

“Coming down from acid,” he adds, “that could be a real bad trip.”

I call Otto the next afternoon to see if he can reach the 14-year-old. It turns out she is tied up with rehearsals for her junior-high-school play, The Wizard of Oz . “Yellow-brick-road time,” Otto says. Otto was sick all day. He thinks it was some cocaine somebody gave him.

There are always little girls around rock groups — the same little girls who used to hang around saxophone players, girls who live on the celebrity and power and sex a band projects when it plays — and there are three of them out here this afternoon in Sausalito where a rock group, the Grateful Dead, rehearses. They are all pretty and two of them still have baby fat and one of them dances by herself with her eyes closed.

I ask a couple of the girls what they do.

“I just kind of come out here a lot,” one of the girls says.

“I just sort of know the Dead,” the other says.

The one who just sort of knows the Dead starts cutting up a loaf of French bread on the piano bench. The boys take a break, and one of them talks about playing at the Los Angeles Cheetah, which is in the old Aragon Ballroom. “We were up there drinking beer where Lawrence Welk used to sit,” he says.

The little girl who was dancing by herself giggles. “Too much,” she says softly. Her eyes are still closed.

Somebody said that if I was going to meet some runaways I better pick up a few hamburgers, cola, and French fries on the way, so I did, and we are eating them in the Park together, me, Debbie, who is 15, and Jeff, who is 16. Debbie and Jeff ran away 12 days ago, walked out of school one morning with $100 between them. Because a missing-juvenile is out on Debbie — she was already on probation because her mother had once taken her to the police station and declared her incorrigible — this is only the second time they have been out of a friend’s apartment since they got to San Francisco. The first time they went over to the Fairmont Hotel and rode the outside elevator, three times up and three times down. “Wow,” Jeff says, and that is all he can think of to say about that.

I ask why they ran away.

“My parents said I had to go to church,” Debbie says. “And they wouldn’t let me dress the way I wanted. In the seventh grade my skirts were longer than anybody’s — it got better in the eighth grade, but still.”

“Your mother was kind of a bummer,” Jeff says to her.

“They didn’t like Jeff. They didn’t like my girl friends. I had a C average and my father told me I couldn’t date until I raised it, and that bugged me a lot too.”

“My mother was just a genuine all-American bitch.” Jeff says. “She was really troublesome about hair. Also, she didn’t like boots. It was really weird.”

“Tell about the chores,” Debbie says.

“For example, I had chores. If I didn’t finish ironing my shirts for the week, I couldn’t go out for the weekend. It was weird. Wow.”

Debbie giggles and shakes her head. “This year’s gonna be wild.”

“We’re just gonna let it all happen,” Jeff says. “Everything’s in the future, you can’t pre-plan it, you know. First we get jobs, then a place to live. Then, I dunno.”

Jeff finishes off the French fries and gives some thought to what kind of job he could get. “I always kinda dug metal shop, welding, stuff like that.” Maybe he could work on cars, I say. “But I’m not too mechanically minded,” he says. “Anyway, you can’t pre-plan.”

“I could get a job baby-sitting,” Debbie says. “Or in a dime store.”

“You’re always talking about getting a job in a dime store,” Jeff says.

“That’s because I worked in a dime store already,” Debbie says.

Debbie is buffing her fingernails with the belt to her suede jacket. She is annoyed because she chipped a nail and because I do not have any polish remover in the car. I promise to get her to a friend’s apartment so that she can redo her manicure, but something has been bothering me, and as I fiddle with the ignition, I finally ask it. I ask them to think back to when they were children, to tell me what they had wanted to be when they were grown up, how they had seen the future then.

Jeff throws a cola bottle out the car window. “I can’t remember I ever thought about it,” he says. “I remember I wanted to be a veterinarian once,” Debbie says. “But now I’m more or less working in the vein of being an artist or a model or a cosmetologist. Or something.”

I hear quite a bit about one cop, Officer Arthur Gerrans, whose name has become a synonym for zealotry on the Street. Max is not personally wild about Officer Gerrans because Officer Gerrans took Max in after the Human Be-In last winter, that’s the big Human Be-In in Golden Gate Park where 20,000 people got turned on free, or 10,000 did, or some number did, but then Officer Gerrans has busted almost everyone in the District at one time or another. Presumably to forestall a cult of personality, Gerrans was transferred out of the District not long ago, and when I see him it is not at the Park Station but at the Central Station.

We are in an interrogation room, and I am interrogating Gerrans. He is young, blond, and wary and I go in slow. I wonder what he thinks the major problems in the Haight area are.

Officer Gerrans thinks it over. “I would say the major problems there,” he says finally, “the major problems are narcotics and juveniles. Juveniles and narcotics, those are your major problems.”

I write that down.

“Just one moment,” Officer Gerrans says, and leaves the room. When he comes back he tells me that I cannot talk to him without permission from Chief Thomas Cahill.

“In the meantime,” Officer Gerrans adds, pointing at the notebook in which I have written major problems, juveniles, narcotics , “I’ll take those notes.”

The next day I apply for permission to talk to Officer Gerrans and also to Chief Cahill. A few days later a sergeant returns my call.

“We have finally received clearance from the chief per your request,” the sergeant says, “and that is taboo.”

I wonder why it is taboo to talk to Officer Gerrans.

Officer Gerrans is involved in court cases coming to trial.

I wonder why it is taboo to talk to Chief Cahill.

The chief has pressing police business.

I wonder if I can talk to anyone at all in the police department.

“No,” the sergeant says, “not at the particular moment.”

Which was my last official contact with the San Francisco Police Department.

Norris and I are standing around the Panhandle, and Norris is telling me how it is all set up for a friend to take me to Big Sur. I say what I really want to do is spend a few days with Norris and his wife and the rest of the people in their house. Norris says it would be a lot easier if I’d take some acid. I say I’m unstable. Norris says, all right, anyway, grass , and he squeezes my hand.

One day Norris asks how old I am. I tell him I am 32. It takes a few minutes, but he rises to it. “Don’t worry,” he says at last. “There’s old hippies too.”

It is a pretty nice evening, nothing much is happening and Max brings his old lady, Sharon, over to the Warehouse. The Warehouse, which is where Don and a floating number of other people live, is not actually a warehouse but the garage of a condemned hotel. The Warehouse was conceived as total theater, a continual happening, and I always feel good there. Somebody is usually doing something interesting, like working on a light show, and there are a lot of interesting things around, like an old touring car which is used as a bed and a vast American flag fluttering up in the shadows and an overstuffed chair suspended like a swing from the rafters.

One reason I particularly like the Warehouse is that a child named Michael is staying there now. Michael’s mother, Sue Ann, is a sweet, wan girl who is always in the kitchen cooking seaweed or baking macrobiotic bread while Michael amuses himself with joss sticks or an old tambourine or an old rocking horse. The first time I ever saw Michael was on that rocking horse, a very blond and pale and dirty child on a rocking horse with no paint. A blue theatrical spotlight was the only light in the Warehouse that afternoon, and there was Michael in it, crooning softly to the wooden horse. Michael is three years old. He is a bright child but does not yet talk.

On this night Michael is trying to light his joss sticks and there are the usual number of people floating through and they all drift in and sit on the bed and pass joints. Sharon is very excited when she arrives. “Don,” she cries breathlessly, “we got some STP today.” At this time STP, a hallucinogenic drug, is a pretty big deal; remember, nobody yet knew what it was and it was relatively, although just relatively, hard to come by. Sharon is blonde and scrubbed and probably 17, but Max is a little vague about that since his court case comes up in a month or so, and he doesn’t need statutory rape on top of it. Sharon’s parents were living apart when she last saw them. She does not miss school or anything much about her past, except her younger brother. “I want to turn him on,” she confided one day. “He’s 14 now, that’s the perfect age. I know where he goes to high school and someday I’ll just go get him.”

Time passes and I lose the thread and when I pick it up again Max seems to be talking about what a beautiful thing it is the way that Sharon washes dishes.

“It is beautiful,” she says. “ Every thing is. You watch that blue detergent blob run on the plate, watch the grease cut — well, it can be a real trip.”

Pretty soon now, maybe next month, maybe later, Max and Sharon plan to leave for Africa and India, where they can live off the land. “I got this little trust fund, see,” Max says, “which is useful in that it tells cops and border patrols I’m OK, but living off the land is the thing. You can get your high and get your dope in the city, OK, but we gotta get out somewhere and live organically.”

“Roots and things,” Sharon says, lighting a joss stick for Michael. Michael’s mother is still in the kitchen cooking seaweed. “You can eat them.”

Maybe eleven o’clock, we move from the Warehouse to the place where Max and Sharon live with a couple named Tom and Barbara. Sharon is pleased to get home (“I hope you got some hash joints fixed in the kitchen,” she says to Barbara by way of greeting), and everybody is pleased to show off the apartment, which has a lot of flowers and candles and paisleys. Max and Sharon and Tom and Barbara get pretty high on hash, and everyone dances a little and we do some liquid projections and set up a strobe and take turns getting a high on that. Quite late, somebody called Steve comes in with a pretty, dark girl. They have been to a meeting of people who practice a western yoga, but they do not seem to want to talk about that. They lie on the floor awhile, and then Steve stands up.

“Max,” he says, “I want to say one thing.”

“It’s your trip.” Max is edgy.

“I found love on acid. But I lost it. And now I’m finding it again. With nothing but grass.”

Max mutters that heaven and hell are both in one’s karma.

“That’s what bugs me about psychedelic art,” Steve says.

“What about psychedelic art?” Max says. “I haven’t seen much psychedelic art.”

Max is lying on a bed with Sharon, and Steve leans down. “Groove, baby,” he says. “You’re a groove.”

Steve sits down then and tells me about one summer when he was at a school of design in Rhode Island and took 30 trips, the last ones all bad. I ask why they were bad. “I could tell you it was my neuroses,” he says, “but forget it.”

A few days later I drop by to see Steve in his apartment. He paces nervously around the room he uses as a studio and shows me some paintings. We do not seem to be getting to the point.

“Maybe you noticed something going on at Max’s,” he says abruptly.

It seems that the girl he brought, the dark, pretty one, had once been Max’s girl. She had followed him to Tangier and now to San Francisco. But Max has Sharon. “So the girl is kind of staying around here,” Steve says.

Steve is troubled by a lot of things. He is 23, was raised in Virginia and has the idea that California is the beginning of the end. “I feel it’s insane,” he says, and his voice drops. “This chick tells me there’s no meaning to life, but it doesn’t matter, we’ll just flow right out. There’ve been times I felt like packing up and taking off for the East Coast again. At least there I had a target. At least there you expect that it’s going to happen.” He lights a cigarette for me and his hands shake. “Here you know it’s not going to.”

“What is supposed to happen?” I ask.

“I don’t know. Something. Anything.”

Arthur Lisch is on the telephone in his kitchen, trying to sell VISTA a program for the District. “We’ve already got an emergency,” he is saying into the telephone, meanwhile trying to disentangle his daughter, age one and a half, from the cord. “We don’t get help here, nobody can guarantee what’s going to happen. We’ve got people sleeping in the streets here. We’ve got people starving to death.” He pauses. “All right,” he says then, and his voice rises. “So they’re doing it by choice. So what?”

By the time he hangs up he has limned what strikes me as a pretty Dickensian picture of life on the edge of Golden Gate Park, but then this is my first exposure to Arthur Lisch’s “riot-on-the-Street-unless” pitch. Arthur Lisch is a kind of leader of the Diggers, who, in the official District mythology, are supposed to be a group of anonymous good guys with no thought in their collective head but to lend a helping hand. The official District mythology also has it that the Diggers have no “leaders,” but nonetheless Arthur Lisch is one. Arthur Lisch is also a paid worker for the American Friends’ Service Committee, and he lives with his wife, Jane, and their two small children in a railroad flat, which on this particular day lacks organization. For one thing, the telephone keeps ringing. Arthur promises to attend a hearing at city hall. Arthur promises to “send Edward, he’s OK.” Arthur promises to get a good group, maybe the Loading Zone, to play free for a Jewish benefit. For a second thing, the baby is crying, and she does not stop until Jane appears with a jar of Gerber’s Chicken Noodle Dinner. Another confusing element is somebody named Bob, who just sits in the living room and looks at his toes. First he looks at the toes on one foot, then at the toes on the other. I make several attempts to include Bob before I realize he is on a bad trip. Moreover, there are two people hacking up what looks like a side of beef on the kitchen floor, the idea being that when it gets hacked up, Jane Lisch can cook it for the daily Digger feed in the park.

Arthur Lisch does not seem to notice any of this. He just keeps talking about cybernated societies and the guaranteed annual wage and riot on the Street, unless.

I call the Lisches a day or so later and ask for Arthur. Jane Lisch says he’s next door taking a shower because somebody is coming down from a bad trip in their bathroom. Besides the freak-out in the bathroom, they are expecting a psychiatrist in to look at Bob. Also a doctor for Edward, who is not OK at all but has the flu. Jane says maybe I should talk to Chester Anderson. She will not give me his number.

Chester Anderson is a legacy of the Beat Generation, a man in his middle 30s whose peculiar hold on the District derives from his possession of a mimeograph machine, on which he prints communiqués signed “the communication company.” It is another tenet of the official District mythology that the communication company will print anything anybody has to say, but in fact Chester Anderson prints only what he writes himself, agrees with, or considers harmless or dead matter. His statements, which are left in piles and pasted on windows around Haight Street, are regarded with some apprehension in the District and with considerable interest by outsiders, who study them, like China watchers, for subtle shifts in obscure ideologies. An Anderson communiqué might be as specific as fingering someone who is said to have set up a marijuana bust, or it might be in a more general vein:

Pretty little 16-year-old middle-class chick comes to the Haight to see what it’s all about and gets picked up by a 17-year-old street dealer who spends all day shooting her full of speed again and again, then feeds her 3,000 mikes & raffles off her temporarily unemployed body for the biggest Haight Street . . . . since the night before last. The politics and ethics of ecstasy. Rape is as common as . . . . on Haight Street. Kids are starving on the Street. Minds and bodies are being maimed as we watch, a scale model of Vietnam.

Somebody other than Jane Lisch gave me an address for Chester Anderson, 443 Arguello, but 443 Arguello does not exist. I telephone the wife of the man who gave me 443 Arguello and she says it’s 742 Arguello.

“But don’t go up there,” she says.

I say I’ll telephone.

“There’s no number,” she says. “I can’t give it to you.”

“742 Arguello,” I say.

“No,” she says. “I don’t know. And don’t go there. And don’t use either my name or my husband’s name if you do.”

She is the wife of a full professor of English at San Francisco State College. I decide to lie low on the question of Chester Anderson for a while.

Paranoia strikes deep — Into your life it will creep — is a song the Buffalo Springfield sings.

The appeal of Malakoff Diggins has kind of faded out, but Max says why don’t I come to his place, just be there, the next time he takes acid. Tom will take it too, probably Sharon, maybe Barbara. We can’t do it for six or seven days because Max and Tom are in STP space now. They are not crazy about STP, but it has advantages. “You’ve still got your forebrain.” Tom says. “I could write behind STP, but not behind acid.” This is the first time I have heard that Tom writes.

Otto is feeling better because he discovered it wasn’t the cocaine that made him sick. It was the chicken pox, which he caught while baby-sitting for Big Brother and the Holding Company one night when they were playing. I go over to see him and meet Vicki, who sings now and then with a group called the Jook Savages and lives at Otto’s place. Vicki dropped out of Laguna High “because I had mono,” followed the Grateful Dead up to San Francisco one time, and has been here “for a while.” Her mother and father are divorced, and she does not see her father, who works for a network in New York. A few months ago he came out to do a documentary on the District and tried to find her, but couldn’t. Later he wrote her a letter in care of her mother urging her to go back to school. Vicki guesses maybe she will go back sometime, but she doesn’t see much point in it right now.

We are eating a little tempura in Japantown, Chet Helms and I, and he is sharing some of his insights with me. Until a couple of years ago Chet Helms never did much besides hitchhiking, but now he runs the Avalon Ballroom and flies over the Pole to check out the London scene and says things like, “Just for the sake of clarity I’d like to categorize the aspects of primitive religion as I see it.” Right now he is talking about Marshall McLuhan and how the printed word is finished, out, over. But then he considers the East Village Other , an “underground” biweekly published in New York. “The EVO is one of the few papers in America whose books are in the black,” he says. “I know that from reading Barron ’ s .”

A new group is supposed to play today in the Panhandle, a section of Golden Gate Park, but they are having trouble with the amplifier and I sit in the sun listening to a couple of little girls, maybe 17 years old. One of them has a lot of makeup and the other wears Levi’s and cowboy boots. The boots do not look like an affectation, they look like she came up off a ranch about two weeks ago. I wonder what she is doing here in the Panhandle, trying to make friends with a city girl who is snubbing her, but I do not wonder long, because she is homely and awkward, and I think of her going all the way through the consolidated union high school out there where she comes from, and nobody ever asking her to go into Reno on Saturday night for a drive-in movie and a beer on the riverbank, so she runs. “I know a thing about dollar bills,” she is saying now. “You get one that says ‘1111’ in one corner and ‘1111’ in another, you take it down to Dallas, Texas, and they’ll give you $15 for it.”

“Who will?” the city girl asks.

“I don’t know.”

“There are only three significant pieces of data in the world today,” is another thing Chet Helms told me one night. We were at the Avalon and the big strobe was going and so were the colored lights and the Day-Glo painting, and the place was full of high-school kids trying to look turned on. The Avalon sound system projects 126 decibels at 100 feet but to Chet Helms the sound is just there, like the air, and he talks through it. “The first is,” he said, “God died last year and was obited by the press. The second is, 50 percent of the population is or will be under 25.” A boy shook a tambourine toward us and Chet smiled benevolently at him. “The third,” he said, “is that they got 20 billion irresponsible dollars to spend.”

Thursday comes, some Thursday, and Max and Tom and Sharon and maybe Barbara are going to take some acid. They want to drop it about three o’clock. Barbara has baked fresh bread, Max has gone to the Park for fresh flowers, and Sharon is busy making a sign for the door which reads, DO NOT DISTURB, RING, KNOCK, OR IN ANY OTHER WAY DISTURB. LOVE. This is not how I would put it to either the health inspector, who is due this week, or any of the several score of narcotics agents in the neighborhood, but I figure the sign is Sharon’s trip.

Once the sign is finished Sharon gets restless. “Can I at least play the new record?” she asks Max.

“Tom and Barbara want to save it for when we’re high.”

“I’m getting bored, just sitting around here.”

Max watches her jump up and walk out. “That’s what you call pre-acid uptight jitters,” he says.

Barbara is not in evidence. Tom keeps walking in and out. “All these innumerable last-minute things you have to do,” he mutters.

“It’s a tricky thing, acid,” Max says after a while. He is turning the stereo on and off. “When a chick takes acid, it’s all right if she’s alone, but when she’s living with somebody this edginess comes out. And if the hour-and-a-half process before you take the acid doesn’t go smooth. . . .” He picks up a marijuana butt and studies it, then adds, “They’re having a little thing back there with Barbara.”

Sharon and Tom walk in.

“You bugged too?” Max asks Sharon.

Sharon does not answer.

Max turns to Tom. “Is she all right?”

“Can we take acid?” Max is on edge.

“I just don’t know what she’s going to do.”

“What do you want to do?”

“What I want to do depends on what she wants to do.” Tom is rolling some joints, first rubbing the papers with a marijuana resin he makes himself. He takes the joints back to the bedroom, and Sharon goes with him.

“Something like this happens every time people take acid,” Max says. After a while he brightens and develops a theory around it. “Some people don’t like to go out of themselves, that’s the trouble. You probably wouldn’t. You’d probably like only a quarter of a tab. There’s still an ego on a quarter tab, and it wants things. Now if that thing is sex— and your old lady or your old man is off somewhere flashing and doesn’t want to be touched — well, you get put down on acid, you can be on a bummer for months.”

Sharon drifts in, smiling. “Barbara might take some acid, we’re all feeling better, we smoked a joint.”

At 3:30 that afternoon Max, Tom, and Sharon placed tabs under their tongues and sat down together in the living room to wait for the flash. Barbara stayed in the bedroom, smoking hash. During the next four hours a window banged once in Barbara’s room, and about 5:30 some children had a fight on the street. A curtain billowed in the afternoon wind. A cat scratched a beagle in Sharon’s lap. Except for the sitar music on the stereo there was no other sound or movement until 7:30, when Max said, “Wow.”

I spot Deadeye on Haight Street, and he gets in the car. Until we get off the Street he sits very low and inconspicuous. Deadeye wants me to meet his old lady, but first he wants to talk to me about how he got hip to helping people.

“Here I was, just a tough kid on a motorcycle,” he says, “and suddenly I see that young people don’t have to walk alone.” Deadeye has a clear evangelistic gaze and the reasonable rhetoric of a car salesman. He is society’s model product. I try to meet his gaze directly because he once told me he could read character in people’s eyes, particularly if he has just dropped acid, which he did about nine o’clock that morning. “They just have to remember one thing,” he says. “The Lord’s Prayer. And that can help them in more ways than one.”

He takes a much-folded letter from his wallet. The letter is from a little girl he helped. “My loving brother,” it begins. “I thought I’d write you a letter since I’m a part of you. Remember that: When you feel happiness, I do, when you feel . . .”

“What I want to do now,” Deadeye says, “is set up a house where a person of any age can come, spend a few days, talk over his problems. Any age. People your age, they’ve got problems too.”

I say a house will take money.

“I’ve found a way to make money,” Deadeye says. He hesitates only a few seconds. “I could’ve made $85 on the Street just then. See, in my pocket I had a hundred tabs of acid. I had to come up with $20 by tonight or we’re out of the house we’re in, so I knew somebody who had acid, and I knew somebody who wanted it, so I made the connection.

“Since the Mafia moved into the LSD racket, the quantity is up and the quality is down. . . . “Historian Arnold Toynbee celebrated his 78th birthday Friday night by snapping his fingers and tapping his toes to the Quicksilver Messenger Service . . .”

are a couple of items from Herb Caen’s column one morning as the West declined in the year 1967.

When I was in San Francisco a tab, or a cap, of LSD-25 sold for three to five dollars, depending upon the seller and the district. LSD was slightly cheaper in the Haight-Ashbury than in the Fillmore, where it was used rarely, mainly as a sexual ploy, and sold by pushers of hard drugs, e.g., heroin, or “smack.” A great deal of acid was being cut with Methedrine, which is the trade name for an amphetamine, because Methedrine can simulate the flash that low-quality acid lacks. Nobody knows how much LSD is actually in a tab, but the standard trip is supposed to be 250 micrograms. Grass was running $10 a lid, $5 a matchbox. Hash was considered “a luxury item.” All the amphetamines, or “speed” — Benzedrine, Dexedrine, and particularly Methedrine (“crystal”) — were in common use. There was not only more tolerance of speed but there was a general agreement that heroin was now on the scene. Some attributed this to the presence of the Syndicate; others to a general deterioration of the scene, to the incursions of gangs and younger part-time, or “plastic,” hippies, who like the amphetamines and the illusions of action and power they give. Where Methedrine is in wide use, heroin tends to be available, because, I was told, “You can get awful damn high shooting crystal, and smack can be used to bring you down.”

Deadeye’s old lady, Gerry, meets us at the door of their place. She is a big, hearty girl who has always counseled at Girl Scout camps during summer vacations and was “in social welfare” at the University of Washington when she decided that she “just hadn’t done enough living” and came to San Francisco. “Actually, the heat was bad in Seattle,” she adds.

“The first night I got down here,” she says, “I stayed with a gal I met over at the Blue Unicorn. I looked like I’d just arrived, had a knapsack and stuff.” After that Gerry stayed at a house the Diggers were running, where she met Deadeye. “Then it took time to get my bearings, so I haven’t done much work yet.”

I ask Gerry what work she does. “Basically I’m a poet, but I had my guitar stolen right after I arrived, and that kind of hung up my thing.”

“Get your books,” Deadeye orders. “Show her your books.”

Gerry demurs, then goes into the bedroom and comes back with several theme books full of verse. I leaf through them but Deadeye is still talking about helping people. “Any kid that’s on speed,” he says, “I’ll try to get him off it. The only advantage to it from the kids’ point of view is that you don’t have to worry about sleeping or eating.”

“Or sex,” Gerry adds.

“That’s right. When you’re strung out on crystal you don’t need nothing .”

“It can lead to the hard stuff,” Gerry says. “Take your average Meth freak, once he’s started putting the needle in his arm, it’s not too hard to say, well, let’s shoot a little smack.”

All the while I am looking at Gerry’s poems. They are a very young girl’s poems, each written out in a neat hand and finished off with a curlicue. Dawns are roseate, skies silver-tinted. When she writes “crystal” in her books, she does not mean Meth.

“You gotta get back to your writing,” Deadeye says fondly, but Gerry ignores this. She is telling about somebody who propositioned her yesterday. “He just walked up to me on the Street, offered me $600 to go to Reno and do the thing.”

“You’re not the only one he approached,” Deadeye says.

“If some chick wants to go with him, fine,” Gerry says. “Just don’t bum my trip.” She empties the tuna-fish can we are using for an ashtray and goes over to look at a girl who is asleep on the floor. It is the same girl who was asleep on the floor the first day I came to Deadeye’s place. She has been sick a week now, 10 days. “Usually when somebody comes up to me on the Street like that,” Gerry adds, “I hit him for some change.”

When I saw Gerry in the Park the next day I asked her about the sick girl, and Gerry said cheerfully that she was in the hospital with pneumonia.

Max tells me about how he and Sharon got together. “When I saw her the first time on Haight Street, I flashed. I mean flashed. So I started some conversation with her about her beads, see, but I didn’t care about her beads.” Sharon lived in a house where a friend of Max’s lived, and the next time he saw her was when he took the friend some bananas. “Sharon and I were like kids — we smoked bananas and looked at each other and smoked more bananas and looked at each other.”

But Max hesitated. For one thing, he thought Sharon was his friend’s girl. “For another I didn’t know if I wanted to get hung up with an old lady.” But the next time he visited the house, Sharon was on acid.

“So everybody yelled, ‘Here comes the banana man,’” Sharon interrupts, “and I got all excited.”

“She was living in this crazy house,” Max continues. “There was this one kid, all he did was scream. His whole trip was to practice screams. It was too much.” Max still hung back from Sharon. “But then Sharon offered me a tab, and I knew.”

Max walked to the kitchen and back with the tab, wondering whether to take it. “And then I decided to flow with it, and that was that. Because once you drop acid with somebody, you flash on, you see the whole world melt in her eyes.”

“It’s stronger than anything in the world,” Sharon says.

“Nothing can break it up,” Max says. “As long as it lasts.”

No milk today — My love has gone away . . . The end of my hopes — The end of all my dreams —

is a song I heard on many mornings in 1967 on KFRC, the Flower Power Station, San Francisco.

Deadeye and Gerry tell me that they plan to be married. An Episcopal priest in the District has promised to perform the wedding in Golden Gate Park, and they will have a few rock groups there, “a real community thing.” Gerry’s brother is also getting married, in Seattle. “Kind of interesting,” Gerry muses, “because, you know, his is the traditional straight wedding, and then you have the contrast with ours.”

“I’ll have to wear a tie to his,” Deadeye says.

“Right,” Gerry says.

“Her parents came down to meet me, but they weren’t ready for me,” Deadeye notes philosophically.

“They finally gave it their blessing,” Gerry says. “In a way.”

“They came to me and her father said, ‘Take care of her,’ “Deadeye reminisces. “And her mother said, ‘Don’t let her go to jail.’”

Barbara has baked a macrobiotic apple pie — one made without sweets and with whole-wheat flour — and she and Tom and Max and Sharon and I are eating it. Barbara tells me how she learned to find happiness in “the woman’s thing.” She and Tom had gone somewhere to live with the Indians, and although she first found it hard to be shunted off with the women and never to enter into any of the men’s talk, she soon got the point. “That was where the trip was,” she says.

Barbara is on what is called the woman’s trip to the exclusion of almost everything else. When she and Tom and Max and Sharon need money, Barbara will take a part-time job, modeling or teaching kindergarten, but she dislikes earning more than $10 or $20 a week. Most of the time she keeps house and bakes. “Doing something that shows your love that way,” she says, “is just about the most beautiful thing I know.” Whenever I hear about the woman’s trip, which is often, I think a lot about nothin’-says-lovin’-like-something-from-the-oven and the Feminine Mystique and how it is possible for people to be the unconscious instruments of values they would strenuously reject on a conscious level, but I do not mention this to Barbara.

It is a pretty nice day and I am just driving down the Street and I see Barbara at a light.

What am I doing, she wants to know.

I am just driving around.

“Groovy,” she says.

This is quite a beautiful day, I say.

“Groovy,” she agrees.

She wants to know if I will come over. Sometime soon, I say.

I ask if she wants to drive in the Park but she is too busy. She is out to buy wool for her loom.

Arthur Lisch gets pretty nervous whenever he sees me now because the Digger line this week is that they aren’t talking to “media poisoners,” which is me. So I still don’t have a tap on Chester Anderson, but one day in the Panhandle I run into a kid who says he is Chester’s “associate.” He has on a black cape, black slouch hat, mauve Job’s Daughters’ sweatshirt and dark glasses, and he says his name is Claude Hayward, but never mind that because I think of him just as The Connection. The Connection offers to “check me out.”

I take off my dark glasses so he can see my eyes. He leaves his on.

“How much you get paid for doing this kind of media poisoning?” he says for openers.

I put my dark glasses back on.

“There’s only one way to find out where it’s at,” The Connection says, and jerks his thumb at the photographer I’m with. “Dump him and get out on the Street. Don’t take money. You won’t need money.” He reaches into his cape and pulls out a mimeographed sheet announcing a series of classes at the Digger Free Store on How to Avoid Getting Busted, VD, Rape, Pregnancy, Beatings and Starvation. “You oughta come,” The Connection says. “You’ll need it.”

I say maybe, but meanwhile I would like to talk to Chester Anderson.

“If we decide to get in touch with you at all,” The Connection says, “we’ll get in touch with you real quick.” He kept an eye on me in the Park after that, but he never did call the number I gave him.

It is twilight and cold and too early to find Deadeye at the Blue Unicorn so I ring Max’s bell. Barbara comes to the door.

“Max and Tom are seeing somebody on a kind of business thing,” she says. “Can you come back a little later?” I am hard put to think what Max and Tom might be seeing somebody about in the way of business, but a few days later in the Park I find out.

“Hey,” Tom calls. “Sorry you couldn’t come up the other day, but business was being done.” This time I get the point. “We got some great stuff,” he adds, and begins to elaborate. Every third person in the Park this afternoon looks like a narcotics agent and I try to change the subject. Later I suggest to Max that he be more wary in public. “Listen, I’m very cautious,” he says. “You can’t be too careful.”

By now I have an unofficial taboo contact with the San Francisco Police Department. What happens is that this cop and I meet in various late-movie ways, like I happen to be sitting in the bleachers at a baseball game and he happens to sit down next to me, and we exchange guarded generalities. No information actually passes between us, but after a while we get to kind of like each other.

“The kids aren’t too bright,” he is telling me on this particular day. “They’ll tell you they can always spot an undercover, they’ll tell you about ‘the kind of car he drives.’ They aren’t talking about undercovers, they’re talking about plainclothesmen who just happen to drive unmarked cars, like I do. They can’t tell an undercover. An undercover doesn’t drive some black Ford with a two-way radio.”

He tells me about an undercover who was taken out of the District because he was believed to be over-exposed, too familiar. He was transferred to the narcotics squad, and by error was immediately sent back into the District as a narcotics undercover.

The cop plays with his keys. “You want to know how smart these kids are?” he says finally. “The first week, this guy makes 43 cases.”

Some kid with braces on his teeth is playing his guitar and boasting that he got the last of the STP from Mr. X himself, and someone else is talking about some acid that will be available within the next month, and you can see that nothing much is happening around the San Francisco Oracle office this afternoon. A boy sits at a drawing board drawing the infinitesimal figures that people do on speed, and the kid with the braces watches him. “ I ’ m gonna shoot my wo – man ,” he sings softly. “ She been with a– noth – er man .” Someone works out the numerology of my name and the name of the photographer I’m with. The photographer’s is all white and the sea (“If I were to make you some beads, see, I’d do it mainly in white,” he is told), but mine has a double death symbol. The afternoon does not seem to be getting anywhere, so it’s suggested we get in touch with a man named Sandy. We are told he will take us to the Zen temple.

Four boys and one middle-aged man are sitting on a grass mat at Sandy’s place, sipping anise tea and listening to Sandy read Laura Huxley’s You Are Not the Target .

We sit down and have some anise tea. “Meditation turns us on,” Sandy says. He has a shaved head and the kind of cherubic face usually seen in newspaper photographs of mass murderers. The middle-aged man, whose name is George, is making me uneasy because he is in a trance next to me and he stares at me without seeing me.

I feel that my mind is going — George is dead , or we all are — when the telephone suddenly rings.

“It’s for George,” Sandy says.

“George, tele phone.”

“ George .”

Somebody waves his hand in front of George and George finally gets up, bows, and moves toward the door on the balls of his feet.

“I think I’ll take George’s tea,” somebody says. “George — are you coming back?”

George stops at the door and stares at each of us in turn. “In a mo ment,” he snaps.

Do you know who is the first eternal spaceman of this universe? The first to send his wild wild vibrations To all those cosmic superstations? For the song he always shouts Sends the planets flipping out . . . But I’ll tell you before you think me loony That I’m talking about Narada Muni . . . Singing HARE KRISHNA HARE KRISHNA KRISHNA KRISHNA HARE HARE HARE RAMA HARE RAMA RAMA RAMA HARE HARE

is a Krishna song. Words by Howard Wheeler and music by Michael Grant.

Maybe the trip is not in Zen but in Krishna, so I visit Michael Grant, the Swami A. C. Bhaktivedanta’s leading disciple in San Francisco. Grant is at home with his brother-in-law and his wife, a pretty girl wearing a cashmere pullover, a jumper and a red caste mark on her forehead.

“I’ve been associated with the Swami since about last July,” Michael says. “See, the Swami came here from India, and he was at this ashram (hermitage) in upstate New York and he just kept to himself and chanted a lot. For a couple of months, pretty soon I helped him get his storefront in New York. Now it’s an international movement, which we spread by teaching this chant.” Michael is fingering his red wooden beads, and I notice that I am the only person in the room who is wearing shoes. “It’s catching on like wildfire.”

“If everybody chanted,” the brother-in-law says, “there wouldn’t be any problem with the police or anybody.”

“Ginsberg calls the chant ecstasy, but the Swami says that’s not exactly it.” Michael walks across the room and straightens a picture of Krishna as a baby. “Too bad you can’t meet the Swami,” he adds. “The Swami’s in New York now.”

“Ecstasy’s not the right word at all,” says the brother-in-law, who has been thinking about it. “It makes you think of some mun dane ecstasy.”

The next day I drop by Max and Sharon’s, and find them in bed smoking a little morning hash. Sharon once advised me that even half a joint of grass would make getting up in the morning a beautiful thing. I ask Max how Krishna strikes him.

“You can get a high on a mantra,” he says. “But I’m holy on acid.”

Max passes the joint to Sharon and leans back. “Too bad you couldn’t meet the Swami,” he says. “The Swami was the turn-on.”

“Anybody who thinks this is all about drugs has his head in a bag. It’s a social movement, quintessentially romantic, the kind that recurs in times of real social crisis. The themes are always the same. A return to innocence. The invocation of an earlier authority and control. The mysteries of the blood. An itch for the transcendental, for purification. Right there you’ve got the ways that romanticism historically ends up in trouble, lends itself to authoritarianism. When the direction appears. How long do you think it’ll take for that to happen?” is a question a San Francisco psychiatrist asked me.

At the time, I was in San Francisco, the political potential of the movement was just becoming clear. It had always been clear to the revolutionary core of the Diggers, whose guerrilla talent was now bent on open confrontations and the creation of a summer emergency, and it was clear to many of the doctors and priests and sociologists who had occasion to work in the District, and it could rapidly become clear to any outsider who bothered to decode Chester Anderson’s call-to-action communiqués or to watch who was there first at the street skirmishes which now set the tone for life in the District. One did not have to be a political analyst to see it: The boys in the rock groups saw it, because they were often where it was happening. “In the Park there are always twenty or thirty people below the stand,” one of the Grateful Dead complained to me, “ready to take the crowd on some militant trip.”

But the peculiar beauty of this political potential, as far as the activists were concerned, was that it remained not clear at all to most of the inhabitants of the District. Nor was it clear to the press, which at varying levels of competence continued to report “the hippie phenomenon” as an extended panty raid; an artistic avant-garde led by such comfortable YMHA regulars as Allen Ginsberg; or a thoughtful protest, not unlike joining the Peace Corps.

This last, or they’re-trying-to-tell-us-something approach, reached its apogee in July in a Time cover story which revealed that hippies “scorn money — they call it ‘bread,’” and remains the most remarkable, if unwitting, extant evidence that the signals between the generations are irrevocably jammed.

Because the signals the press was getting were immaculate of political possibilities, the tensions of the District went unremarked upon, even during the period when there were so many observers on Haight Street from Life and Look and CBS that they were largely observing one another. The observers believed roughly what the children told them: That they were a generation dropped out of political action, beyond power games, that the New Left was on an ego trip. Ergo , there really were no activists in the Haight-Ashbury, and those things which happened every Sunday were spontaneous demonstrations because, just as the Diggers say, the police are brutal and juveniles have no rights and runaways are deprived of their right to self-determination, and people are starving to death on Haight Street.

Of course the activists — not those whose thinking had become rigid, but those whose approach to revolution was imaginatively anarchic — had long ago grasped the reality which still eluded the press: We were seeing something important. We were seeing the desperate attempt of a handful of pathetically unequipped children to create a community in a social vacuum. Once we had seen these children, we could no longer overlook the vacuum, no longer pretend that the society’s atomization could be reversed. At some point between 1945 and 1967, we had somehow neglected to tell these children the rules of the game we happened to be playing. Maybe we had stopped believing in the rules ourselves, maybe we were having a failure of nerve about the game. Or maybe there were just too few people around to do the telling. These were children who grew up cut loose from the web of cousins and great-aunts and family doctors and lifelong neighbors who had traditionally suggested and enforced the society’s values. They are children who have moved around a lot, San Jose, Chula Vista, here . They are less in rebellion against the society than ignorant of it, able only to feed back certain of its most publicized self-doubts, Vietnam, diet pills, the Bomb .

They feed back exactly what is given them. Because they do not believe in words — words are for “typeheads,” Chester Anderson tells them, and a thought which needs words is just another ego trip — their only proficient vocabulary is in the society’s platitudes. As it happens, I am still committed to the idea that the ability to think for oneself 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 14, 15, 16 years old, younger all the time, an army of children waiting to be given the words.

Peter Berg knows a lot of words.

“Is Peter Berg around?” I ask.

“Are you Peter Berg?”

The reason Peter Berg does not bother to share too many words with me is because two of the words he knows are “media poisoning.” Peter Berg wears a gold earring and is perhaps the only person in the District upon whom a gold earring looks obscurely ominous. He belongs to the San Francisco Mime Troupe, some of whose members started the Artist’s Liberation Front for “those who seek to combine their creative urge with socio-political involvement.” It was out of the Mime Troupe that the Diggers grew, during the 1966 Hunter’s Point riots when it seemed a good idea to give away food and do puppet shows in the streets, making fun of the National Guard. Along with Arthur Lisch, Peter Berg is part of the shadow leadership of the Diggers, and it was he who more or less invented and first introduced to the press the notion that there would be an influx into San Francisco this summer of 200,000 indigent adolescents. The only conversation I ever have with Peter Berg is about how he holds me personally responsible for the way Life captioned Henri Cartier-Bresson’s pictures out of Cuba, but I like to watch him at work in the Park.

Big Brother is playing in the Panhandle, and almost everybody is high, and it is a pretty nice Sunday afternoon between three and six o’clock, which the activists say are the three hours of the week when something is most likely to happen in the Haight-Ashbury, and who turns up but Peter Berg. He is with his wife and six or seven other people, along with Chester Anderson’s associate The Connection, and the first peculiar thing is, they’re in blackface. I mention to Max and Sharon that some members of the Mime Troupe seem to be in blackface.

“It’s street theater,” Sharon assures me. “It’s supposed to be really groovy.”

The Mime Troupers get a little closer, and there are some other peculiar things about them. For one thing they are tapping people on the head with dimestore plastic nightsticks, and for another they are wearing signs on their backs: HOW MANY TIMES YOU BEEN RAPED, YOU LOVE FREAKS? and things like that. Then they are distributing communication-company fliers which say:

& this summer thousands of unwhite un–suburban boppers are going to want to know why you’ve given up what they can’t get & how you get away with it & how come you not a faggot with hair so long & they want haight street one way or the other. IF YOU DON’T KNOW, BY AUGUST HAIGHT STREET WILL BE A CEMETERY.

Max reads the flier and stands up. “I’m getting bad vibes,” he says, and he and Sharon leave.

I have to stay around because I’m looking for Otto so I walk over to where the Mime Troupers have formed a circle around a Negro. Peter Berg is saying, if anybody asks, that this is street theater, and I figure the curtain is up because what they are doing right now is jabbing the Negro with the nightsticks. They jab, and they bare their teeth, and they rock on the balls of their feet, and they wait.

“I’m beginning to get annoyed here,” the Negro says. “I’m gonna get mad.” By now there are several Negroes around, reading the signs and watching.

“Just beginning to get annoyed, are you?” one of the Mime Troupers says. “Don’t you think it’s about time?”

“Listen, here,” another Negro says. “There’s room for everybody in the Park.”

“Yeah?” a girl in blackface says. “Everybody who ?”

“Why,” he says, confused. “Everybody. In America.”

“In America ,”the blackface girl shrieks. “Listen to him talk about America.”

“Listen,” he says. “Listen here.”

“What’d America ever do for you?” the girl in blackface jeers. “White kids here, they can sit in the Park all summer long, listening to music, because their big-shot parents keep sending them money. Who ever sends you money?”

“Listen,” the Negro says helplessly. “You’re gonna start something here, this isn’t right —”

“You tell us what’s right, black boy,” the girl says.

The youngest member of the blackface group, an earnest tall kid about 19, 20, is hanging back at the edge of the scene. I offer him an apple and ask what is going on. “Well,” he says, “I’m new at this, I’m just beginning to study it, but you see the capitalists are taking over the District, and that’s what Peter — well, ask Peter.”

I did not ask Peter. It went on for a while. But on that particular Sunday between three and six o’clock everyone was too high, and the weather was too good, and the Hunter’s Point gangs who usually come in between three and six on Sunday afternoon had come in on Saturday instead, and nothing started. While I waited for Otto I asked a little girl I had met a couple of times before what she had thought of it. “It’s something groovy they call street theater,” she said. I said I had wondered if it might not have political overtones. She is 17 years old, and she worked it around in her mind for a while and finally she remembered a couple of words from somewhere. “Maybe it’s some John Birch thing,” she said.

When I finally find Otto he says, “I got something at my place that’ll blow your mind,” and when we get there I see a child on the living-room floor, wearing a reefer coat, reading a comic book. She keeps licking her lips in concentration and the only off thing about her is that she’s wearing white lipstick.

“Five years old,” he says. “On acid.”

The five-year-old’s name is Susan, and she tells me she is in High Kindergarten. She lives with her mother and some other people, just got over the measles, wants a bicycle for Christmas, and particularly likes soda, ice cream, Marty in the Jefferson Airplane, Bob in the Grateful Dead, and the beach. She remembers going to the beach once a long time ago, and wishes she had taken a bucket. For a year, her mother has given her acid and peyote. Susan describes it as getting stoned.

I start to ask if any of the other children in High Kindergarten get stoned, but I falter at the key words.

“She means do the other kids in your class turn on, get stoned ,” says the friend of her mothers who brought her to Otto’s.

“Only Sally and Anne,” Susan says.

“What about Lia?” her mother’s friend prompts.

“Lia,” Susan says, “is not in High Kindergarten.”

Sue Ann’s three-year-old Michael started a fire this morning before anyone was up, but Don got it out before much damage was done. Michael burned his arm, though, which is probably why his mother was so jumpy when she happened to see him chewing on an electric cord. “You’ll fry like rice,” she screamed. The only people around were Don and one of Sue Ann’s macrobiotic friends and somebody who was on his way to a commune in the Santa Lucias, and they didn’t notice Sue Ann screaming at Michael because they were in the kitchen trying to retrieve some very good Moroccan hash which had dropped down through a floorboard that had been damaged in the fire.

This article is featured in the July/August 2017 issue of The Saturday Evening Post . Subscribe to the magazine for more art, inspiring stories, fiction, humor, and features from our archives.

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I first came across “Slouching Towards Bethlehem” as a song recorded by Eliza Gilkyson, which was on a CD I bought (in fact, I bought three CD’s by this singer) and I wondered what it was all about. I liked the melody and did not reference the lyrics; shameful of me, but time constrains. Anyway I have now read the essay by Joan Didion and being born in 1942 and just being slightly too old and off time, could never fulfil my destiny as part of an inclusive group. Reading this essay is like a tendril to the past and thoroughly nostalgic. Evocatively put together from experienced time, I loved it.

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"Slouching Towards Bethlehem": Joan Didion's Iconic Essay on 1960s Subculture

The 1967 piece on San Francisco hippies is included in the critically-acclaimed collection of the same name.

Photo Credit: Alchetron

“The center was not holding,” Didion wrote in 1967, opening what is now the iconic essay “Slouching Towards Bethlehem.” In the spring and summer of that year, Didion paid frequent visits to the Haights-Ashbury neighborhood of San Francisco—a microcosm of the “social hemorrhaging” that was then sweeping the nation. Hippiedom had changed; Americans were experiencing a strange sort of turmoil, most of all Didion herself. Believing that writing had become an “irrelevant act”—how could she possibly explain what was happening in words?—Didion went to the center of the chaos. There, she might be able to understand it, and to come to terms with it.

Related: On Joan Didion: Her Books, Life, and Legacy

The 1968 first edition cover of Slouching Towards Bethlehem (left), and the updated 2017 cover (right).

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On assignment for The Saturday Evening Post , a 32-year-old Didion got up close and personal with the Haight's psychedelic hippies. These were primarily runaways and drug-users (and often both), who had fled overbearing parents or simply wanted to "stick it to the Man" by marching to the beat of their own drum. But their behavior and the “hemorrhaging” Didion describes in her piece can be unsettling: In one passage, she recounts meeting Susan, a tripping 5-year-old girl whose mother frequently dosed her with LSD. In another, she talks about a neglected young boy who nearly sets his house on fire. While shocking, Didion observed these incidents with her signature coolness.

What makes “Slouching Towards Bethlehem” even more fascinating is Didion’s technique—a kind of “new journalism” that creates a sense of menace and immediacy. Didion is never concerned with objectivity, but only with telling the story of the hippie movement as she sees it. She, herself, becomes so wholly immersed in the counterculture that it seems as though she might become a part of it.

Related: Joan Didion's The Last Thing He Wanted Is Coming to Netflix

“Slouching” was featured in a 1967 edition of The Saturday Evening Post and became the titular essay of her 1968 collection. Despite a steady journalism career and one lackluster novel, Slouching was the work that truly put Didion on the map.

The collection includes some of her other famous nonfiction pieces, many previously published in magazines. There's her famous Vogue essay “On Self-Respect” and “Goodbye to All That,” a farewell letter to youth and innocence that has become a touchpoint for any New York writer. Many of the other pieces solidified her as a figure of California. Altogether, Slouching Towards Bethlehem , the collection, turned the author into the Joan Didion we know and love today.

Related: The Best Essay Collections to Add to Your TBR List

Click here to read an excerpt of the titular essay from Slouching Towards Bethlehem , then download the book.

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The Hero of Jonestown

The Adult Amid the Hippies: Why You Should Read Joan Didion’s Early Essays

by Mark Stricherz | Jan 1, 2022 | Journalism , Middlebrow Art , Reporting | 2 comments

Revised January 4, 2022

Early last fall, I read Slouching Towards Bethlehem and The White Album , the first two collections of essays of writer Joan Didion. As my emails to my friend Dan and jottings inside the books attest, I was impressed by not only their literary style but also their content. Here was an American original.

Alas, on December 23, Ms. Didion died, at age 87. To anyone curious which of these justly celebrated writer’s books you should start reading, I recommend those two.

Ms. Didion explored a theme she returned to again in her long career. Adults should act like adults. When they don’t, bad consequences follow.

“Get off my lawn” wasn’t her message. It was something bigger: adults should be engaged with kids and set boundaries for them and if they don’t, whole neighborhoods and cities will crumble.

Ms. Didion said this in the late 1960s. That was a decade before books like Christopher Lasch’s The Culture of Narcissism was published and religious and cultural conservatives emerged on the scene. Something was going on, to paraphrase Bob Dylan’s “ Ballad of a Thin Man,” a famous song from the era, and Ms. Didion knew what it was.

Despite the country’s material prosperity, America was becoming poorer culturally and civically.

In particular, the emerging 1960s counterculture, the one with its flower children and hippies, wasn’t the unqualified good its advocated claimed. It had a dark side. Drug abuse was rife. Many kids grew up without parents effectively.

Ms. Didion was more than a Cassandra. She was a cultural and social diagnostician. She laid out reasons for the country’s emerging social atomization. Which, it seems fair to say, are relevant today as then.

Here’s what you should know about Joan Didion

Ms. Didion’s background is key to understanding her. For one thing, she was a fifth-generation Californian, which this brief, smooth jazz-inflected video below shows:

To an old-line Californian, this background suggests wealth and social respectability. The East Coast equivalent would be a person claiming old New England stock. He or she wants it known, as a member of Congress volunteered his old California roots to me while we were waiting in line at a Capitol Hill hardware store recently.

This background was important to Ms. Didion, too. In her essay “Many Mansions,” she mentioned that growing up she was acquaintances with the daughter of then California Governor Earl Warren, future Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. (She told Ms. Didion, incidentally, she was “full of herself.”)

In addition, Ms. Didion, born in 1934, was a member of the Silent Generation. Again, this reference might be lost on most Americans, who are familiar with Baby Boomers and subsequent generations, but not those born between the mid-1920s and 1945.

Many Silent Generation members saw the world through the prism of original sin, the Judeo-Christian doctrine that humans are born selfish rather than perfectible. In a testament to the hold idea had on the American imagination, The Vital Center by Arthur Schlesinger , a well-known liberal historian, endorsed original sin as a guiding social principle.

Ms. Didion, too, said she had believed in Original Sin. In her essay “On the Morning After the Sixties, ” she said she “belonged to a generation distrustful of political highs, the historical irrelevancy of growing up convinced that the heart of darkness lay not in some error in social organization but in man’s own blood.”

Also, by the late 1960s, Ms. Didion was not only an emerging woman of American letters but also a young mother.

She and her husband, John Gregory Dunne, adopted a daughter, Quintana Roo, in 1965. Can there be doubt that being a mom shaped Ms. Didion’s thinking? Consider the final horrifying scene in the essay “Slouching” about a young hippie family:

Sue Ann’s three-year-old Michael started a fire this morning before anyone was up, but Don got it out before much damage was done. Michael burned his arm, though, which is probably why Sue Ann was so jumpy when she happened to see him chewing on an electrical cord. ‘You’ll fry like rice,” she screamed. The only people around were Don and one of Sue Ann’s macrobiotic friends and somebody who was on his way to a commune in the Santa Lucias, and they didn’t notice Sue Ann screaming because they were in the kitchen trying to retrieve some very good Moroccan hash which had dropped down through a floorboard damaged in the fire.

Finally, Ms. Didion adopted the techniques of the New Journalism , the school that developed in the 1960s that sought to use the bag of tricks of fiction writers, in particular scenes and dialogue.

Ms. Didion’s New Journalism credentials can be overstated. In Slouching and The White Album , only a few essays rely on its techniques. She was an essayist and memoirist as much as a New Journalist. Even so, she wasn’t chained to her desk. She left the house, interviewed people, and witnessed scenes in person.

Put those four factors together—Ms. Didion’s regional, social, and intellectual roots, she was a recent mother, and her use of New Journalist techniques—and you have a writer and reporter who can portray the objective and subjective reality at the same time. She was no ideologue, but she was nobody’s fool, either.

What Joan Didion saw at the Revolution

As the counterculture emerged, Ms. Didion saw solid American values being inverted. Adolescence and egotism were prized, while adulthood was downgraded.

“I think now we were the last generation to identify with adults,” she wrote of her Berkeley education in “On the Morning After the Sixties.” “That most of us have found adulthood to be just as morally ambiguous as we expected falls perhaps in the categories of prophecies self-fulfilled.’

Ms. Didion said she found the women’s movement of the 1970s misguided and its most ardent voices juvenile. “To those of us who remain committed mainly to the exploration of moral distinctions and ambiguities, the feminist analysis may have seemed a particularly narrow and cracked determinism,” she wrote.

In a better-known essay in 1979, Ms. Didion excoriated Woody Allen’s films in the late 1970s for their jejune themes. “Self-absorption is general, as is self-doubt,” she wrote memorably.

This is not to suggest Ms. Didion was a proto-cultural warrior, a writer who sided with older Americans against the kids in the sixties. She could be as critical of her peers. In her diagnosis of the hippie movement, she blamed older Americans in part:

At some point between 1945 and 1967 we had somehow neglected to tell these children the rules of the game we happened to be playing. Maybe we had stopped believing in the rules ourselves, maybe we were having a failure of nerve about the game. Maybe there were just too few people around to do the telling. These were children who grew up cut loose from the web of cousins and great-aunts and family doctors and lifelong neighbors who had traditionally suggested and enforced the society’s values.

Ms. Didion’s Tocquevillian and moralistic explanation for America’ s growing fragmentation may be simplistic.

As sociologist Robert Putnam showed , the fact that 90 percent of American households had a TV set in the late 1950s compared to 10 percent a decade earlier contributed to the decline of civil society.

The increase in recreational drug use and its availability in the 1960s may have been a cause as well as a symptom of social decay.

Nevertheless, Ms. Didion had grasped an important social insight. American culture and society were becoming juvenile and self-absorbed. Adults had power but did not use it responsibly. They retreated into their own worlds instead. Americans should feel grateful Ms. Didion, with uncommon charm and grace, warned us about this less-decried form of injustice.

What does everybody else think?

– 30 –

Nice essay, Mark! I feel like I can place her in the bigger picture much better than I could before reading it.

I’m more sympathetic than you to her worry that the blaming the counterculture might be too easy. (I certainly wish I didn’t know that instinct as well as I do, considering I managed to make my personal version of it both self-righteous and hypocritical). But I might spin it a different way than she does, though. Lately, I’ve been wondering if we all indeed make our individual moral choices, but history is not actually carried along by the aggregate of them? There seems to be some way that the river of history is carrying us along to some destination of its own choosing, and people’s individual choices are dictated by that flow? Often people’s choices that backfire seems to be coming from something acting upon them, where they are caught up in the “spirit of their times” rather than making a true free choice of their own. I have met people who knew they were choosing wrong, but only very rarely. More often, people somehow get tangled up in situations more akin to being caught up in a spider’s web of good intentions, bad luck, and an all-too-human failure to not remember how fast time and other people change. Maybe neither the “great man” theory of history, where a Jefferson or Churchill moves the fates, nor the moral blame game where Jeremiah’s castigate everyone for their laxity actually have much explanatory power. As with remembering the beam in our own eye instead of the mote in our neighbors, perhaps the adult Christian doesn’t get to see why history moves as it does, as much as just getting to take care of the casualties history sends out broken, reeling around us everywhere we look.

I agree history shapes us, but does it determine us? I don’t think so.

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Joan Didion’s radical curiosity

She sought to understand the lives of ordinary americans, and to explain the world to herself.

FILE - Author Joan Didion sits in front of a photo of herself holding her daughter, Quintana Roo, and another picture of her daughter's wedding, in her New York apartment Sept. 26, 2005. Didion, the revered author and essayist whose provocative social commentary and detached, methodical literary voice made her a uniquely clear-eyed critic of a uniquely turbulent time, has died. She was 87. (AP Photo/Kathy Willens, File)

I n the spring of 1967 Joan Didion was gathering material for an essay on the hippie movement. In Haight-Ashbury, a neighbourhood in San Francisco, a man named Otto promised to show her something that would “blow your mind”. He took her inside a house and pointed to a young child crouched on the floor; she was concentrating on comic books and licking her lips, which were slicked with white lipstick. “Five years old,” Otto said, “on acid.” Ms Didion described the jarring experience in “Slouching Towards Bethlehem”, the title article in her first collection of journalism, published in 1968. “Let me tell you, it was gold,” she later said of the girl. “You live for moments like that, if you’re doing a piece. Good or bad.”

Ms Didion, who died on December 23rd, was not much interested in the grandiose narratives of politicians and celebrities that were often reported in the media. She found the peripheral stories, the tales of middle-class women, of travellers or runaway children, to be more indicative of the state of America. Her guiding force as a journalist was her curiosity; she sought to explain the world to herself as much as anyone else. In an essay of 1976, “Why I Write”, she declared: “I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear.”

Born in Sacramento—a place she scathingly described as the “Midwest of California”—Ms Didion studied English at the University of California, Berkeley. In her senior year of college she won an essay contest for Vogue and moved to New York to be a copywriter and, later, editor at the magazine. While working there, she wrote her first novel, “Run River” (1963); it told a harrowing story of murder, marriage and misery and explored the history of her home state.

Two more books about women in crisis followed, “Play It as It Lays” (1970) and “A Book of Common Prayer” (1977). By then Ms Didion had honed her distinct style across mediums: limpid (Ernest Hemingway was her greatest literary influence) and pacey yet also melodic. She combined troubling subject matter with sentences that were pleasurable to read without compromising the potency of her observations on class and gender.

In the 1970s she began writing for the New York Review of Books . The editor at the time, Robert Silvers, encouraged her to write about American politics. Politics was always present in the background of her work, but she hadn’t been interested in covering it for its own sake. Of domestic government at the time, she said: “It seemed to exist only to maintain itself…it didn’t seem to have any relationship with the people who hung around gas stations.” Ms Didion forged those links herself. Along with colleagues in the school of New Journalism, she championed an essay form that used the quotidian to illuminate vast subjects of politics and history. It remains popular today.

She was also a pioneer in injecting a distinctly personal voice into her journalism. In the early 2000s, after the deaths of her husband and daughter in quick succession, her writing became more introspective. Ms Didion wrote “The Year of Magical Thinking” (2005) and “Blue Nights” (2011), books that originated the modern grief memoir. She wrote candidly about the pain many knew intimately but few spoke about.

Her work chronicled, instructed and comforted, but she saw it as having a simple message. In 1975 Ms Didion gave the commencement address at the University of California, Riverside. She told the students: “I’m not telling you to make the world better…I’m just telling you to live in it. Not just to 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 make your own work and take pride in it.” ■

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Joan Didion: A guide to five of her most influential books

An overview of the Didion books you'll revisit for the rest of your days

Joan Didion inspired countless writers and readers to put pen to paper and write about the world as they see it. Her unique style, restrained yet honest, affecting yet never sentimental, is peerless. Famed for her incisive depictions of American life and personal journalism, she never wasted a word, nor a character. Her seminal essay for Vogue , On Self-Respect first published in 1961, was written not to a word count or a line count, but to an exact character count.

Didion's work chronicled the mood of the '60s, the highs and the lows, as well as the human experience in general - few writers have explored the subject of death and loss with as much insight, control or candour. Her skill lay not only in her style of prose, but her ability to astutely observe the behaviour of others. She saw what others missed.

"I’m not telling you to make the world better, because I don’t think that progress is necessarily part of the package," she said at UC Riverside commencement address in 1975. "I’m just telling you to live in it. Not just to 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. And if you ask me why you should bother to do that, I could tell you that the grave’s a fine and private place, but none I think do there embrace. Nor do they sing there, or write, or argue, or see the tidal bore on the Amazon, or touch their children. And that’s what there is to do and get it while you can and good luck at it.”

Here, we celebrate five of her most influential books.

Slouching Towards Bethlehem, 1968

Although Slouching Towards Bethlehem wasn't Didion's first book ( Run, River of 1963 was), it was the one that cemented her as a prominent writer. A collection of essays about California in the '60s, her work explores the beauty and the ugliness of the decade, from the hippy community of San Francisco's Haight Ashbury to a woman accused of murdering her husband. Considered an essential portrait of American life in the '60s, Slouching Towards Bethlehem received positive attention as soon as it was published and its fandom has only grown over the decades since.

The White Album, 1979

Another collection of essays, The White Album deals with the late '60s to late '70s and the aftermath of the former. She studies the Women's Movement, shares her psychiatric report, parties with Janis Joplin and visits Linda Kasabian, who served as a lookout while members of the Manson family murdered Sharon Tate, in prison. These diverse essays see Didion capture the anxiety of the era and try to make sense of the Manson murders, the event many believe caused the '60s to end abruptly.

Where I Was From, 2003

Didion revisits the California she grew up in, specifically Sacramento County where she lived with her family, but also the state more generally. She questions the history she was taught, debunks Californian mythology and traces her ancestors and their journey moving west. She writes candidly about her upbringing, while exploring class issues with nuance. Where I Was From is one of Didion's lesser-known books, but shouldn't be.

The Year of Magical Thinking, 2005

Written in the aftermath of her husband's sudden death, The Year of Magical Thinking is an account of loss and grief - and the ways in which it can drive us to insanity. Hers was one of the first books to talk about bereavement beyond funerals, tracking the days and months that follow with her signature detachment. She writes about her own 'magical thinking' - how she can't bring herself to get rid of her husband's shoes because she thought he might need them when he returns. It sounds like pure misery, but Didion's deadpan tone impressively stops it from being so.

Blue Nights, 2011

Just a month before The Year of Magical Thinking was published, Didion's daughter, Quintana died of acute pancreatitis, aged 39. Blue Nights - a devastating account of her daughter's life and death - challenges how much tragedy one person can take. She laments over the passage of time and worries about growing older, lonelier. This is a heartbreaking tome, but solace for anyone who has ever faced the incomparable loss of losing a child.

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Beyond the Books: Joan Didion’s Essays, Profiles and Criticism

The author of “Slouching Towards Bethlehem,” “The White Album” and “Play It as It Lays” was a prolific writer for The Times.

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By Tina Jordan

Joan Didion, who died on Thursday at 87, is best known for her essay collections — “ Slouching Towards Bethlehem ,” “ The White Album ” and “ After Henry ,” to name a few — though she also wrote blazingly original narrative nonfiction (“ Miami ,” “ The Year of Magical Thinking ,” “ Salvador ”) and novels (“ Play It as It Lays ,” “ A Book of Common Prayer ”). Her work for The New York Times is as eclectic and insightful as you might imagine, ranging from a profile of Joan Baez to a review of John Cheever’s “Falconer.”

‘“Scum,” hissed an old man with a snap-on bow tie.’

Didion’s 1966 profile of Joan Baez and the community opposition to the Institute for the Study of Nonviolence — the folk singer’s school in California’s Carmel Valley — is a classic. “‘Scum,’ hissed an old man with a snap-on bow tie who had identified himself as ‘a veteran of two wars’ and who is a regular at such meetings. ‘ Spaniel .’ He seemed to be referring to the length of Miss Baez’s hair, and was trying to get her attention by tapping with his walking stick, but her eyes did not flicker from the rostrum.”

‘She holds the mind’s other guests in ardent contempt.’

In a 1971 review of Doris Lessing’s novel, “ Briefing for a Descent Into Hell ,” Didion wrote, “To read a great deal of Doris Lessing over a short span of time is to feel that the original hound of heaven has commandeered the attic. She holds the mind’s other guests in ardent contempt. She appears for meals only to dismiss the household’s own preoccupations with writing well as decadent.”

‘Thin raincoats on bitter nights’

Didion’s fiery words lit up this 1972 essay on the women’s movement : “To read the theorists of the women’s movement was to think not of Mary Wollstonecraft but of Margaret Fuller at her most high‐minded, of rushing position papers off to mimeo and drinking tea from paper cups in lieu of eating lunch; of thin raincoats on bitter nights. If the family was the last fortress of capitalism, then let us abolish the family. If the necessity for conventional reproduction of the species seemed unfair to women, then let us transcend, via technology, ‘the very organization of nature,’ the oppression, as Shulamith Firestone saw it, ‘that goes back through recorded history to the animal kingdom itself.’”

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The essential Joan Didion: An L.A. Times reading list for newcomers and fans alike

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Joan Didion, who died Thursday at 87 , produced decades’ worth of memorable work across genres and subjects: personal essays, reporting and criticism on pop culture, political dispatches from at home and abroad and, near the end of her career, a bestselling memoir and a follow-up. Whether you’re a newcomer looking for a place to start or a reader looking to dive deeper, here’s a guide to Didion’s writing, start to finish:

The ‘personals’

If any subset of her work made Didion’s reputation for “inevitable” sentences, it is the personal essays collected in “Slouching Towards Bethlehem” (1968) and “The White Album” (1979). These pieces, starting with “On Self-Respect” in 1961, and originally published in magazines such as Vogue, the American Scholar and the Saturday Evening Post, have come to be appreciated as models of the form, elliptical, poetic, punctuated with the author’s eye for telling detail and lacerating self-awareness. Didion’s essays carefully revealed, and concealed, the correspondent’s inner life: As she once wrote of husband John Gregory Dunne — in a piece he edited — “We are here on this island in the middle of the Pacific in lieu of filing for divorce.”

Didion later described these essays as having been written under “crash circumstances” — “On Self-Respect” was improvised in “two sittings,” she reflected in 2007 , and written “not just to a word count or a line count but a character count” — yet they produced an astonishing number of unforgettable phrases: “I’ve already lost touch with a couple people I used to be” ( “On Keeping a Notebook,” a personal favorite); “That was the year, my twenty-eighth, when I was discovering that not all of the promises would be kept” ( “Goodbye to All That,” which invented the modern “leaving New York” essay); “We tell ourselves stories in order to live” (“The White Album,” possibly the definitive rendering of the end of the ‘60s).

Joan Didion, masterful essayist, novelist and screenwriter, dies at 87

Didion bridged the world of Hollywood, journalism and literature in a career that arced most brilliantly in the realms of social criticism and memoir.

Dec. 23, 2021

A number of additional magazine pieces from her early career are collected in her final published work , “Let Me Tell You What I Mean ” (2021), and her observations of self and culture from the 1970s are central to her travelogue “South and West” (2017).

"Slouching Towards Bethlehem," by Joan Didion

The counterculture reporting

In and among the “personals” of “Slouching” and “The White Album” are Didion’s cucumber-cool lacerations of the late ‘60s, casting twin gimlet eyes on the delusions of both the rock-ribbed squares and the child revolutionaries. From the gaudy populism of the Getty and the Sacramento Reagans to a requiem for John Wayne, the marriage of bad taste and bad money fills in where the center fails to hold. The title essay of “The White Album” swirls with Jim Morrison, the Manson “family,” Linda Kasabian’s famous dress, Huey P. Newton and all the rest as Didion bravely declines to make sense of it all. The title essay in “Slouching” culminates, likewise, in the senseless final image of a 3-year-old boy, neglected and imperiled in a hippie squat. “On Morality” and “The Women’s Movement” exude the skeptical libertarianism that distanced her from the madness.

To see not just where the nation moved but where Didion did, it’s worth reading the early California pieces, including “Notes from a Native Daughter,” followed by “Where I Was From” (2003), which utterly demolishes California’s disastrous myth of self-reliance step by step, anatomizing its dependence on government largesse from the days of the Gold Rush — the water, the power, the military-industrial muscle. And finally she goes in on herself: the pioneer woman who never was.

Throughout her career, Didion was best known for her nonfiction, but her five novels conjure an equally pungent sense of place and time. Her first book, “Run River ” (1963) — inspired, she later wrote, by profound homesickness — is a family melodrama about the descendants of pioneers that draws heavily on Didion’s Sacramento upbringing. Perhaps her most famous novel, “Play It As It Lays” (1970), is set in a very different California: the Hollywood of the late ‘60s and early ‘70s, suffused with the anomie of its dissolute heroine, Maria Wyeth. (Her opening monologue famously begins with an ice-cold allusion to Othello: “What makes Iago evil? Some people ask. I never ask.”)

But Didion’s most underrated writing may be found in three novels that reflected her growing interest in — and suspicion of — America’s empire abroad. Set in the fictional Central American nation of Boca Grande, “A Book of Common Prayer” (1977) features both acid satire of corrupt U.S.-backed regimes and a tragic riff on the tale of Patty Hearst, as protagonist Charlotte Douglas searches for her daughter Marin, who is on the lam with a Marxist terrorist organization. Her interest in U.S. interference in the region and the absurdities of the late Cold War reappears in her final work of fiction, “The Last Thing He Wanted ” (1996), about a reporter and a government official who fall in love amid a secret arms-dealing operation reminiscent of Iran-Contra.

Joan Didion, wearing a white shirt, stands in the hallway of her apartment, next to a portrait of her late husband

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Photos: Joan Didion, masterful essayist, novelist and screenwriter, dies at 87

Photos from the life of Joan Didion, who chronicled California, politics and sorrow in ‘Slouching Towards Bethlehem’ and ‘Year of Magical Thinking.’

It is “Democracy” (1984), though, that gathers these personal and political themes into the most extraordinary whole, tracing a history of violence and exploitation from the colonization of Hawaii through the dawn of the atomic age to produce Didion’s answer to the Vietnam War novel. She even casts herself as narrator: “Democracy,” set in the early 1970s, is told from the perspective of “Joan Didion,” whose focused repetitions and circular logic as she attempts to piece together the tale of a U.S. senator, his wife and her lover presage those of her blockbuster memoir, “The Year of Magical Thinking” (2005).

The political commentary

Though most Joan Didion primers begin, as this one does, with the personal essays, my introduction to Didion — and one I recommend if you would like to become as obsessed with her writing as I am — came through “Democracy” and the essays in “Political Fictions” (2001). Beginning in the 1980s, when she forged a close working relationship with legendary New York Review of Books editor Robert Silvers, Didion shifted the focus of her reporting away from culture: She relayed searing descriptions of war-torn El Salvador in “Salvador” (1983), captured the the conspiratorial fever surrounding much of U.S.-Cuba politics in “Miami” (1987) and detailed the ways in which Sept. 11 became a jingoistic cudgel in “Fixed Ideas” (2003).

But for their exceedingly thorough and ultimately devastating authority, there may be no better place to go to understand our current political disaster, and the media’s role in it, than Didion’s dispatches from the presidential campaigns of 1988 (“Insider Baseball”) and 1992 (“Eyes on the Prize”), her exasperated reflections on the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal (“Clinton Agonistes”) or her poisonously funny takedown of Bob Woodward (“The Deferential Spirit,” 1996), author of books “in which measurable cerebral activity is virtually absent.”

She also applied the technique in the damning “Sentimental Journeys” (collected in 1992’s “After Henry ”), detailing the process by which politicians and the press railroaded the Central Park Five in the hothouse atmosphere of late-’80s New York.

"The Year of Magical Thinking," by Joan Didion

The late memoirs

Despite a career in which she befriended celebrities like Natalie Wood and Tony Richardson — and employed Harrison Ford as a carpenter — Didion reached the height of her prominence with her bestselling memoir, “The Year of Magical Thinking, ” published in 2005. While she had experimented with the form two years prior in “Where I Was From,” it was her heartbreakingly lucid dissection of grief that captured the imagination of the broader public, earning her wide acclaim and the National Book Award. “Magical Thinking” recounts a year in Didion’s life in which she grappled with Dunne’s 2003 death from cardiac arrest and daughter Quintana Roo’s serious illness, combining her readings of Sigmund Freud and Emily Post with vivid memories from one of 20th century literature’s most intimate marriages. Her follow-up , “Blue Nights” (2011), which looked back on Quintana’s untimely death in 2005, offered a more caustic vision, searching her relationship with her daughter for moments she wrong-footed herself while revealing her own declining health. In the process she developed a late style all her own — incantatory and poetic but never (God forbid) sentimental.

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Matt Brennan is a Los Angeles Times’ deputy editor for entertainment and arts. Born in the Boston area, educated at USC and an adoptive New Orleanian for nearly 10 years, he returned to Los Angeles in 2019 as the newsroom’s television editor. He previously served as TV editor at Paste Magazine, and his writing has also appeared in Indiewire, Slate, Deadspin and numerous other publications.

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Joan Didion’s Magic Trick

What was it that gave her such power?

Illustration of Joan Didion standing on a beach with several large houses on the cliffs behind her

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“T hink of this as a travel piece,” she might have written. “Imagine it in Sunset magazine: ‘Five Great California Stops Along the Joan Didion Trail.’ ”

Or think of this as what it really is: a road trip of magical thinking.

I had known that Didion’s Parkinson’s was advancing; seven or eight months earlier, someone had told me that she was vanishing; someone else had told me that for the past two years, she hadn’t been able to speak.

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I didn’t want her to die. My sense of myself is in many ways wrapped up in the 40 essays in Slouching Towards Bethlehem and The White Album . I don’t know how many times I’ve read Democracy .

“Call me the author,” she writes in that novel. “Let the reader be introduced to Joan Didion.”

There are people who admire Joan Didion, and people who enjoy reading Joan Didion, and people who think Joan Didion is overrated. But then there are the rest of us. People who can’t really explain how those first two collections hit us, or why we can never let them go.

I picked up Slouching Towards Bethlehem in 1975, the year I was 14. I had met Didion that spring, although she wasn’t famous yet, outside of certain small but powerful circles. She’d been a visiting professor in the Berkeley English department, and my father was the department chair. But I didn’t read her until that summer. I was in Ireland, as I always was in the summer, and I was bored out of my mind, as I always was in the summer, and I happened to see a copy of Slouching Towards Bethlehem in a Dublin living room. I read that book and something changed inside me, and it has stayed that way for the rest of my life.

Over the previous two years people kept contacting me with reports of her decline. I didn’t want to hear reports of her decline. I wanted to hear about the high-ceilinged rooms of the Royal Hawaiian Hotel, and about all the people who came to parties at her house on Franklin Avenue. I wanted to go with her to pick out a dress for Linda Kasabian, the Manson girl who drove the getaway car the night of the murders. I wanted to spend my days in the house out in Malibu, where the fever broke.

In 1969, Didion wanted to go to Vietnam, but her editor told her that “the guys are going out,” and she didn’t get to go. When her husband had been at Time and asked to go, he was sent at once, and he later wrote about spending five weeks in the whorehouses of Saigon.

Being denied the trip to Vietnam is the only instance I know of that her work was limited by her gender. She fought against the strictures of the time—and the ridiculous fact of being from California, which in the 1950s was like being from Mars, but with surfboards.

black and white family photo of Joan Didion on a deck at home, smoking and looking at her husband and Quintana Roo

She fought all of that not by changing herself, or by developing some ball-breaking personality. She did it by staying exactly as she was—unsentimental, strong, deeply feminine, and a bit of a seductress—and writing sentence after sentence that cut the great men of New Journalism off at the knees. Those sentences, those first two collections—who could ever compete with them?

Slouching Towards Bethlehem and The White Album created a new vocabulary of essay writing, one whose influence is on display every day of the week in the tide of personal essays published online by young writers. Those collections changed the way many people thought about nonfiction, and even the way they thought about themselves.

A thousand critics have addressed the worthy task of locating the errors of logic in those essays and calling out the various engines that turn the wheels: narcissism, whiteness, wealth. Frustrated by the entire cult of Didion, they’ve tried to crash it down by making a reasonable case against its foundational texts. God knows, none of that is heavy lifting. Joan Didion: guilty as charged.

From the September 2015 issue: The elitist allure of Joan Didion

But what no one has ever located is what makes so many people feel possessive not just of the stories, but also of their connection to the writer. What is it about these essays that takes so many people hostage?

At a certain point in her decline, I was gingerly asked if I would write an obituary. No, I would not. I was not on that particular train. I was on the train of trying to keep her alive.

I wanted to feel close to her—not to the mega-celebrity, very rich, New York Joan Didion. I wanted to feel close to the girl who came from Nowhere, California (have you ever been to Sacramento?), and blasted herself into the center of everything. I wanted to feel close to the young woman who’d gone to Berkeley, and studied with professors I knew, and relied on them—as I had once relied on them—to show her a path.

The thing to do was get in the car and drive. I would go and find her in the places where she’d lived.

The trip began in my own house in Los Angeles, with me doing something that had never occurred to me before: I Googled the phrase Joan Didion’s house Sacramento . Even as I did, I felt that it was a mistake, that something as solid and irrefutable as a particular house on a particular street might put a rent in what she would have called “the enchantment under which I’ve lived my life.” What if it was the wrong kind of house? Too late: A color photograph was already blooming on the screen.

2000 22nd Street is a 5,000-square-foot home in a prosperous neighborhood with a wraparound porch and two staircases . The Didions had moved there when Joan was in 11th grade. It was a beautiful house. But it was the wrong kind of house.

photograph of large 2-story house with porch and enormous old trees on a corner lot

The Joan Didion of my imagination didn’t come from a wealthy family. How did I miss the fact that what her family loved to talk about most was property—specifically, “land, price per acre and C-2 zoning and assessments and freeway access”? Why didn’t I understand the implications of her coming across an aerial photograph of some land her father had once thought of turning into a shopping mall, or of the remark “Later I drive with my father to a ranch he has in the foothills” to talk with “the man who runs his cattle”?

Perhaps because they came after this beautiful line:

When we talk about sale-leasebacks and right-of-way condemnations we are talking in code about things we like best, the yellow fields and the cottonwoods and the rivers rising and falling and the mountain roads closing when the heavy snow comes in.

On my first morning in Sacramento, there was a cold, spitting rain, and my husband drove me to the grand house on 22nd Street , where people are always dropping by asking to look at “Joan Didion’s home.” It was the largest house on the block, and it was on a corner lot. (“ No magical thinking required ,” the headline on Realtor.com had said when it was listed for sale in 2018.)

I stood in the rain looking up at the house, and I realized that something was wrong. She had described going home to her parents’ house to finish each of her first four novels, working in her old bedroom, which was painted carnation pink and where vines covered the window . But it was hard to imagine vines growing over the upstairs windows of this house; they would have had to climb up two very tall stories and occlude the light in the downstairs rooms as well.

Later, I spoke with one of Didion’s relatives, who explained that the family left the house on 22nd Street not long after Joan graduated from high school. The house where she finished her novels, and where she brought her daughter for her first birthday, was in the similarly expensive area of Arden Oaks, but it has been so thoroughly renovated as to be almost unrecognizable to the family members who knew it. In fact, the Didions had owned a series of Sacramento houses. But myths take hold in a powerful and permanent way, and the big house on 22nd Street is the one readers want to see.

The neighborhood was very pretty, and the gardens were well tended. But Joan Didion wasn’t there.

In some ways, Sacramento seemed to me like a Joan Didion theme park. In less time than it takes to walk from Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride to the Pirates of the Caribbean, you could get from the Didions’ house on 22nd Street to a house they had lived in earlier, on U Street.

We drove around looking at places that I had read about almost all my life. Nothing seemed real, and there was almost no sign that Joan Didion had grown up there. If I lived in Sacramento, I would rename the capitol building for her. I would turn a park into the Joan Didion Garden, with wide pathways covered in pea gravel, as in the Tuileries.

I never imagined that I would see the two governor’s mansions she describes in “Many Mansions.” The essay contrasts the old governor’s mansion—a “large white Victorian gothic”—with the new, 12,000-square-foot one that was to be the Reagans’ home, but that was left unfinished after his second term. During this period she loathed the Reagans, but not for political reasons. She hated their taste.

The size of the house was an affront to Didion, as was the fact that it had “no clear view of the river.” But above all, she hated the features built into the mansion, things representative of the new, easy “California living” she abhorred. The house had a wet bar in the formal living room, a “refreshment center” in the “recreation room,” only enough bookcases “for a set of the World Book and some Books of the Month,” and one of those kitchens that seems designed exclusively for microwaving and trash compacting.

She didn’t just hate the house; she feared it: “I have seldom seen a house so evocative of the unspeakable,” she wrote. (This is why some people hate Joan Didion, and I get it. I get it.)

Then there’s the old mansion, which she used to visit “once in a while” during the term of Governor Earl Warren, because she was friends with his daughter Nina. “The old Governor’s Mansion was at that time my favorite house in the world,” she wrote, “and probably still is.”

In the essay, she describes taking a public tour of the old mansion, which was filled with the ghosts of her own past and also the crude realities of the present. The tourists complained about “all those stairs” and “all that wasted space,” and apparently they could not imagine why a bathroom might be big enough to have a chair (“to read a story to a child in the bathtub,” of course) or why the kitchen would have a table with a marble top (to roll out pastry).

It is one of those essays where Didion instructs you on the right kind of taste to have, and I desperately wanted to agree. But in my teenage heart of hearts, I had to admit that I wanted the house with the rec room. I kept this thought to myself.

When my husband and I arrived at the old governor’s mansion, I started laughing. Nobody would want to live there, and certainly nobody in the boundless Googie, car-culture future of 1960s California. (It looked like the Psycho house, but with a fresh coat of paint.) That said, we drove over to the house that was originally built for the Reagans and that the state had since sold, and it was a grim site : It looked like the world’s largest Taco Bell.

The funny thing about all of this is that at the time Didion wrote that essay, Jerry Brown was the governor of California, and he had no intention of living in any kind of mansion. Instead he rented an apartment and slept on a mattress on the floor, sometimes with his girlfriend, Linda Ronstadt. And—like every California woman with a pulse—Didion adored him.

This is Joan Didion’s magic trick: She gets us on the side of “the past” and then reveals that she’s fully a creature of the present. The Reagans’ trash compactor is unspeakable, but Jerry Brown’s mattress is irresistible.

Before we left Sacramento we made a final stop, at C. K. McClatchy Senior High School, Didion’s alma mater. There was one thing I wanted to see: a bronze plaque set into cement at the top of a flight of stairs. I couldn’t believe that it hadn’t been jackhammered out, but there it was.

This building is dedicated to truth liberty toleration by the native sons of the golden west. September 19, 1937

These plaques were once all over the state at different civic institutions, and especially in schools. The Native Sons of the Golden West is a still-extant fraternal organization founded to honor the pioneers and prospectors who arrived in California in the middle of the 19th century. The group’s president proclaimed in 1920 that “California was given by God to a white people.” The organization has since modernized, but you cannot look at the pioneers’ achievements without taking into account the genocide of California’s actual Native peoples. “Clearing the land” was always a settler’s first mission, and it didn’t refer to cutting down trees.

People from the East often say that Joan Didion explained California to them. Essays have described her as the state’s prophet, its bard, its chronicler. But Didion was a chronicler of white California. Her essays are preoccupied with the social distinctions among three waves of white immigration: the pioneers who arrived in the second half of the 19th century; the Okies, who came in the 1930s; and the engineers and businessmen of the postwar aerospace years, who blighted the state with their fast food and their tract housing and their cultural blank slate.

In Slouching Towards Bethlehem , there’s an essay called “Notes From a Native Daughter”—which is how Joan Didion saw herself. It’s generally assumed that she began to grapple with her simplistic view of California histor y only much later in life, in Where I Was From . But in this first collection, she’s beginning to wonder how much of her sense of California is shaped by history or legend— by stories, not necessarily accurate , that are passed down through the generations.

sepia-toned family photo of man in military uniform and woman with curled hair standing behind a young girl in dress and young boy in cuffed jeans, all squinting in bright sunlight

“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,” she writes. And she describes swimming in the same rivers her family had swum in for generations: “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.”

She’s writing about a feeling of deep rootedness not just to the land but to the generations of her own family who lived on it. But she already knows that it won’t last. “All that is constant about the California of my childhood is the rate at which it disappears,” she writes.

When my husband and I had arrived in town, we’d stopped for a cup of coffee at the McDonald’s at Old Auburn Road and Sunrise Boulevard. You could see how flat the terrain was and how obviously it had once been ranchland. Who had sold that beautiful land to the McDonald’s Corporation? The Didions. Then we went to a clutch of small, unlovely tract houses, and found the street sign I was looking for: Didion Court. The tract houses were there because, according to the author Michelle Chihara , Joan and her family had once again sold a parcel of land.

What happened to the yellow fields and the cottonwoods and the rivers rising and falling? None of my business, I guess.

Sacramento was a bust. I had the feeling that I could stay on the road forever and not understand Joan Didion. But as soon as we got on the freeway, it stopped raining, and after a while there were actual patches of sunshine and dry cement.

In Berkeley, things would begin to look familiar.

I was sitting on the floor of the “television room” in the Tri Delta sorority house on Warring Street in Berkeley. I hadn’t been in a sorority house in 40 years, but it all came back to me: the sleepy, underwater feel of the house at midday; the muffled sounds of a meal being prepared in the kitchen; the constant effort to keep a mild depression from growing; and the endless interest in candies and snacks.

The house was large and attractive, dove gray and—like all sorority houses—fortified. A gate, a locked door, a security camera, and a housemother, busy on the phone. The chapter’s president, Grace Naylor, gave me a tour and we chatted with a few girls sitting in the TV room. There was a wide staircase with a landing, perfect for making a dramatic entrance in a new dress or storming upstairs in a fit of anger. The rooms on one side looked out onto pretty Warring Street; the ones on the other side were filled with the view burned into the retinas of everyone who has ever lived in Berkeley: the beautiful campus and campanile, the flatlands, and beyond them the Golden Gate and the bay, the alluring city on the other side.

Naylor told me that until she’d gotten my email, no one had known that Joan Didion had lived in the house, although several members were fans of her writing. How could they possibly not know that, I wondered, and then was faced with the obvious answer: Didion had lived there 70 years ago.

When we sat down in the television room, I suddenly realized that I didn’t have a single question I could ask. What is it like to live in a sorority house that you recently discovered Joan Didion once lived in? I was at a loss. But Naylor was the chapter president of a top-tier sorority, and she certainly knew how to organize a house visit.

“All our old scrapbooks are in here,” she said, gesturing toward some cupboards, and I glanced at them, suddenly on high alert. Would I like to look through them to see if we could find one from Didion’s years in the house?

I thought two things simultaneously: Eureka! (which is the California state motto) and This is the most exciting thing that has ever happened to me .

The scrapbooks were piled in the cupboards and weren’t necessarily in the best condition—what were the chances of finding one from 70 years ago? They were at once just some old scrapbooks of minor sociological interest, and also a slice of Didion’s life that the other vultures hadn’t yet picked over. Regarding Joan Didion, Tri Delt, I was vulture No. 1.

We started shuffling through the crumbling scrapbooks, and then suddenly the 1954 volume appeared. Because Joan Didion is cool, and because UC Berkeley is cool, many people assume she was in some way part of the revolution. But she arrived at Berkeley a decade too early.

The 1954 scrapbook was a testament to the Tri Delt house being the next right place for a rich girl from Sacramento who had gone to ballet class and Sunday school. It contained a photograph of the winners of a father/daughter look-alike contest, and a press clipping describing “one of the Gayest Parties for the young set,” which had taken place “in the Pebble Beach home of Dr. and Mrs. A. Carol McKenny.” It also contained so many engagement announcements that marriage seemed to be not just one tacit aim of ballet class, Sunday school, and Tri Delt but the entire point.

Toward the end of the scrapbook and with the vague suggestion that even our tiny, troubled Joan Didion had something of her own to look forward to: a Daily Cal clipping announcing that two Berkeley undergrads were headed to New York to take part in the Mademoiselle magazine program. Didion’s selection for the program revealed, if nothing else, that the people who chose the winners had an uncanny ability to spot early talent, all the way from Sylvia Plath in the ’50s to Mona Simpson in the late ’70s. The famous era was the 1950s. Girls from around the country were brought to the city of dreams, housed in the Barbizon Hotel, taught about layouts and martinis, and—should the worst happen—given the names of certain Park Avenue doctors.

Didion’s editorship took place between her junior and senior years of college; when she returned to Berkeley, she moved out of the Tri Delt house and into an apartment. I didn’t have much hope for the little brown-shingled apartment building she had lived in after the Tri Delt house. The house on 22nd Street in Sacramento had been interesting, but cold. The sorority house had presented me with a historically accurate picture, but a remote one.

Yet I pulled open the wooden gate of 2520 Ridge Road and stepped into a little garden that was shaded and filled with dark-green plants—and just like that, her living ghost rushed past me. She lingered for a few moments, and then she left, stepping into the vivid past, wearing her dirty raincoat and heading to the seminar that most freighted and engaged her: the writing class of the great Mark Schorer, whom I knew very well when I was growing up. He was a very kind person and also a peerless literary critic, and he found in Didion’s early work evidence not just of a great writer. “One thinks of the great performers —in ballet, opera, circuses,” he said. “Miss Didion, it seems to me, is blessed with everything.”

And then Berkeley was over, and she headed back to New York because she had won the really big prize in the world of women’s magazines: the Prix de Paris at Vogue , which led to a job at the magazine. This was a marker of being the right kind of young woman—of having the right family, or the right schools, or the right wardrobe—in New York in the glamorous 1950s.

It had begun.

Joan Didion’s greatest essay is “Goodbye to All That.” It’s about the excitement and intoxication of being young in New York, from the moment she got off the plane “and some instinct, programmed by all the movies I had ever seen and all the songs I had ever heard sung and all the stories I had ever read about New York, informed me that it would never be quite the same again. In fact it never was.”

She had “come out of the West and reached the mirage,” and the epigraph to the essay is part of an old nursery rhyme:

How many miles to Babylon? Three score miles and ten— Can I get there by candlelight? Yes, and back again.

For years it was known as the greatest leaving–New York essay of all time. It’s about the revolving door, the way you can arrive there young, innocent, and new, but the very process of adapting to the city will coarsen and age you.

In 1996, a writer for New York magazine revealed something that had been carefully protected from the press, and that gives the essay a completely different meaning: What’s tearing her apart is a love affair that has ended with a man named Noel Parmentel. With that reading, you understand the essay’s insistently romantic tones: She can no longer bear to look at blue-and-white-striped sheets, to smell certain perfumes or Henri Bendel jasmine soap. “I cut myself off from the one person who was closer to me than any other,” she wrote.

Soon after coming to the city, she had fallen for Parmentel, a figure on the New York literary scene. A southerner who attended several parties a night, Parmentel was famous for getting drunk, insulting hostesses and guests, and letting loose with ethnic slurs. The heart wants what it wants.

Read: The things I would never do

In 2014, Parmentel agreed to be interviewed about the relationship by Tracy Daugherty, who wrote the indispensable biography of Didion, The Last Love Song . “She was better than all of them,” Parmentel said of the Vogue editors. “Far above those people in every way.” A lot of her colleagues at Vogue were jealous of her, he said: “This little nobody from Sacramento shows up in her little dresses and outshines them all. She’s smarter. Mannered. Better-bred.”

He helped her sell her first novel, which was in part dedicated to him, and which has an epigraph from the Robert Lowell poem “Man and Wife.” He would call her service and leave long messages; he would insult her, forget about her, reappear—but he wouldn’t marry her.

“This is the guy you ought to marry,” he famously told her about his mentee John Gregory Dunne. And—after visiting Dunne’s family home and noting the orderliness of its routines and the impeccable way that his mother kept house—she did.

The marriage “was a very good thing to do but badly timed,” Didion wrote. She was emotionally devastated, she didn’t know what to do with herself, and one night she and John ended up getting ferociously drunk at a party. They went to a diner for breakfast, and she cried. Later that day, he called her from his office at Time and asked her, “Do you mind if I quit?” She said no, and soon they were in California for a six-month trial that lasted 24 years.

image of a contact sheet of black and white photos of Didion with a Corvette, with two photos outlined in red grease pencil

Franklin Avenue

How many miles to Babylon? One and a half, as it turned out, but I didn’t know it yet.

I moved to Los Angeles in 1988 with a new job, a first husband, my Joan Didion books, and the gray-and-pink jersey dress I’d worn to my rehearsal dinner. Every day I drove through Hollywood on my way to the Valley, and I’d cross Franklin and think to myself, That must be the same Franklin Avenue that Joan Didion lived on .

I never went looking for the house, because Didion had explained in The White Album that it had been slated for demolition: “The owners were only waiting for a zoning change to tear the house down and build a high-rise apartment building.”

Once, it had been the most happening place in a certain world, the absolute crossroads of thrilling, louche Hollywood and the crackling world of ideas that were pouring in from the East.

Franklin Avenue Joan Didion is the one we all fell in love with. In that house she became the woman who walked barefoot on hardwood floors and onto airplanes, and went to the supermarket wearing a bikini. She’s the reason so many readers misunderstood the obvious fact of her conservatism—because she was cool. (How conservative? Throughout the ’60s she was famous for telling Hollywood friends that if she could she would vote for Barry Goldwater over and over again.)

She’s the one who paid the babysitter who told her she had death in her aura, then opened the French doors and went to sleep in the dark of a “senseless-killing neighborhood.” This is the Joan Didion who invented Los Angeles in the ’60s as an expression of paranoia, danger, drugs, and the movie business. The Joan Didion who took amphetamines to work and bourbon to relax, the tiny girl who was entirely in command of the helpless ardor she inspired.

The parties. How to account for what a huge hit the couple were almost as soon as they got to Hollywood? And also, how to account for Joan Didion, one of the century’s greatest prose stylists, doing all of that cooking, while being pestered by Nora Ephron for her Mexican-chicken recipe, keeping in mind the eccentric drinks orders of various rock-and-roll people (brandy and Benedictine for Janis Joplin), and clearing the drug takers from the landing outside her daughter’s bedroom?

Read: We sell ourselves stories in order to live

Those parties were something to see. But in 1979, Didion published The White Album and revealed that this period had been the hardest time in her life. In the opening pages of that collection, she reproduces part of her psychiatrist’s report, which caused a sensation; it was an advertisement for whichever idea you had of Joan Didion, either that she was bravely exposing what others might work hard to conceal, or that she was an exhibitionist.

In the report, she is said to have an “increasing inability of the ego to mediate the world of reality and to cope with normal stress,” and a “fundamentally pessimistic, fatalistic, and depressive view of the world around her. It is as though she feels deeply that all human effort is foredoomed to failure.” She is, the report reveals, being pushed “further into a dependent, passive withdrawal.”

Didion writes that things she had been taught all her life no longer seemed to apply, that the script for how she had been raised to lead her life was never meant to be improvised on. “It was hard to even get my attention,” she says; her mind was on other things.

It was also in this place—and in this heavy weather—that she raised her only child, Quintana, from infancy through age 5. The couple had adopted the little girl a few days after her birth at Saint John’s Hospital in Santa Monica, and she appears throughout these essays as a dream, a perfect child, almost as an abstraction. Her name alone—Quintana Roo, the name of a Mexican state—seemed to me, at 14, the perfect name for a baby: unique, mysterious, feminine. The kind of name a girl would give to a doll.

What really happened during those years? There is no reason, now, not to ask.

“We are here on this island in the middle of the Pacific in lieu of filing for divorce.”

Everyone who loves Joan Didion remembers that sentence—the shock of it, the need to race back up to the top of the essay to see if you’d missed something. “I had better tell you where I am, and why,” that essay, “In the Islands,” begins. She’s at the Royal Hawaiian Hotel in a high-ceilinged room, the trade winds making the long, translucent curtains billow. She’s with her husband and 3-year-old Quintana, “blond and barefoot, a child of paradise in a frangipani lei.”

But Didion hasn’t gone to Honolulu merely for the flowers or the trade winds. She is there “trying to put my life back together.”

When I first read The White Album , I was in my bedroom in my parents’ house and it was the deep middle of the night, and there it was, this flaming arrow. What could I do? Reach for my cellphone and type Did Joan Didion get divorced? There were no cellphones then. Reading, in those days, was just you and the writer, and all she had to reel you in with was a line of words. When I fell in love with Joan Didion, it was just the two of us and all of those electric sentences, and that was enough.

Everyone remembers that line about divorce, but no one seems to remember a different and perhaps more consequential line that appears later. She reports that during that week in Honolulu, husband and wife were considerate of each other, and no mention was made of “kicked-down doors, hospitalized psychotics, any chronic anxieties or packed suitcases.”

Kicked-down doors?

We all know about the famous and in many ways marvelous (in the sense of the miraculous, the supernatural) marriage of Joan Didion and John Gregory Dunne. We know about it from The Year of Magical Thinking and from countless interviews and profiles and perhaps from personal experience. We know that their lives and writing careers were so deeply intertwined that they were rarely apart. They kept to a daily schedule that was like a dream writing life, each writing in the morning, then breaking for lunch; each returning to work until the early evening, when they had drinks and dinner together. If Joan went to get her teeth cleaned, John read the newspapers in the waiting room.

Dunne was fantastic company; he loved gossip and he always had A-plus intel. Calvin Trillin wrote a novel, Floater , in which a character is based on Dunne. When they both worked at Time , Dunne was forever coming into Trillin’s office, dramatically holding up his hand, and saying, “ This you will not believe.” The Didion-Dunnes’ marriage was one long conversation between two writers completely in sync about their beliefs on writing and always interested in what the other had to say.

But Dunne also had a legendary and vicious temper, and he was an incredibly mean drunk. Even his pals reported as much, because it would be impossible to assess the man without admitting to these central facts of his nature. They had read about the kicked-down doors, and many who were close to the couple had witnessed more examples of his rage.

Susanna Moore, who was the couple’s close friend and lived with them for a while on Franklin Avenue, writes in her memoir, Miss Aluminum , that there was “love between them, and respect.” But she adds that Joan “was also afraid of him, given the violence of his temper.”

Moore recounts a time when she was out to dinner with the couple, and she mentioned a bit of gossip she’d heard: There was talk in town that Jann Wenner was gay. Dunne exploded in rage, and took after her in such a manner that he had to excuse himself from the table. As he walked away, Moore started to get out of her chair. “Joan grabbed my arm and begged me to stay, making me promise that I would not leave her alone with him.”

There weren’t words in those days for how a man’s rage could shape the life of a woman who lived with him, but we have one now: abuse .

Didion never spoke openly about Dunne’s rage until near the end of her life. In 2017 her nephew, Griffin Dunne, made a documentary about his aunt, The Center Will Not Hold , which is full of photographs and family memories. As far as I know, the interviews she gave him are, poignantly, her last statements to the public.

At one point, she’s talking about marrying Dunne and the idea of falling in love, and she almost flinches. “I don’t know what falling in love means. It’s not part of my world.”

Later, she adds: “He had a temper. A horrible temper.”

What would set him off? Griffin asks.

“Everything would set him off.”

Someone recently told me that the house on Franklin was, in fact, still there—and when I thought about it, I remembered that at the very end of the street, the apartments give way to rambling 1920s houses. That’s where she lived.

I drove west on Franklin until I got to Camino Palmero, where the zoning changes. I parked down the street from the house, realizing I’d been walking right past it for 30 years. With each step closer, I felt more emotional. And there it was, in better shape than when Didion had lived in it, the cracked front path now covered in smooth pavement, the house freshly painted white, the lawn in perfect condition. It’s a healing center now, for a new-age spiritual group.

I stood looking at it as though I had found the way to Manderley, as though it were possible to take something out of the dream of reading and into the bricks and mortar of the other thing. Life. The tall French doors looked into the living room where there had been so many parties, the doors Joan had opened before going to sleep.

The house on Franklin was the only one that brought tears to my eyes. But of course they were tears for myself, not her. When she was in New York, there was a song on all the jukeboxes: “But where is the schoolgirl who used to be me?”

Gone, gone, gone.

When Joan Didion was living in Malibu, she learned that in one of the canyons there was a nursery that grew only orchids, and she began to visit it. Even as a child she had loved greenhouses; once she was informed that the purchase of a five-cent pansy did not entitle her to “spend the day.”

The orchid nursery was owned by the Hollywood producer Arthur Freed and his brother Hugo, but it was in the care of Amado Vazquez, a gentle and courtly person, transmitting, “in his every movement, a kind of ‘different’ propriety, a correctness, a cultural reserve.” She spent hours in those greenhouses filled with “the most aqueous filtered light, the softest tropical air, the most silent clouds of flowers.” Vazquez seemed to assume she had her own reasons for being there, and he would speak only to offer her “a nut he had just cracked, or a flower cut from a plant he was pruning.”

This was before orchids were widely cloned, imported by the millions, and sold in Walmart and Trader Joe’s. This was when orchids were rare, expensive, often propagated by hand . And, as Didion eventually realized, Vazquez was “one of a handful of truly great orchid breeders in the world.”

Didion learned how to read the labels of the hybrids he was growing, two orchids cross-pollinated and resulting—with luck, and after four years—in a new variety: Amabilis x Rimestadiana = Elisabethae . Eventually, she learned that the orchids there were worth “ten thousand to more than three-quarters of a million dollars,” and occasionally she would watch “serious men in dark suits” come to talk with Hugo, their voices hushed, “as if they had come to inspect medieval enamels, or uncut diamonds.”

The passage about the nursery comprises some of the final pages of The White Album , and I have thought about it so many times. From the tumult of Slouching Towards Bethlehem and the near divorce to the danger of living in the “senseless-killing neighborhood” in a rented house slated for destruction—after all of that, she wants us to know, she had gotten to safety.

After seven years in Malibu, and very much against her own desires, she and Dunne moved to Brentwood—carefully groomed, hugely expensive, and with easy access to the best private schools—which was the beginning of the end of my great interest in her.

But in Malibu there was the house, and the crashing ocean, and Quintana was a little girl in elementary school, whose troubles had yet to emerge. Of all the things receding from Didion, Quintana was always the most urgent. Didion wrote two novels— A Book of Common Prayer and Democracy —about a daughter leaving her mother.

A few months after Didion and her family moved away, the notorious Agoura-Malibu firestorm roared through the canyons. Birds exploded in midair; more than 200 houses were destroyed; people waited on the beach to be rescued, because nowhere else was safe.

Shortly before the fire, Amado Vazquez had saved enough money to buy out the Freed brothers, and now the greenhouses were destroyed. He and Didion stood in the ruins, almost in tears. Years of his work destroyed, a fortune in stud plants.

One winter day, my husband and I made good time up the Pacific Coast Highway to Joan’s house. It had 132 private stairs down to the beach, and a long driveway. From the street, all you could see was the house number, 33428, on a simple, weathered sign. It wasn’t the kind of sign you associate with Malibu; it was the kind you associate with Stinson Beach or any of the other Northern California beaches where underplaying your hand is the thing to do, and putting your house number on a piece of driftwood nailed to the fence is the right way to do it. The setting was perfect. But the old house that she loved so much was gone, replaced with the modern one that’s there now.

The Didion-Dunnes would sometimes drive over the Ventura County line to eat fried fish. We did the same, eating in the huge open-air dining room at Neptune’s Net—established in 1956—and feeling very cheerful. That’s the thing about marriage: You can go for two whole weeks thinking, That’s it, we’ve gotten to the very bottom of things to talk about , but then you go for a drive on a sunny day and there you are, same as you ever were.

I hadn’t looked up the house on Franklin Avenue, because I thought it had been destroyed, and I had never looked up Vazquez’s nursery, because how could he have ever rebuilt it? But a few days before heading up the coast, I looked up the name— Zuma Orchids —and found it, about a mile up Zuma Canyon from the beach.

When I was young, I was so troubled for so long. My mind would rage beyond my control, and many times I would think of those trembling clouds of blossoms and that soft tropical air and wish I could go there, and now here I was, driving down a canyon road, all but deserted—and there it was.

I almost wanted to turn around. I realized—perhaps the lesson of the whole excursion—that I didn’t want these places to be real, because they lived so vividly in my mind. But I stepped through the greenhouse door and landed in Oz: more color and beauty than I could take in. An extremely kind man—Oliverio Alvarado—chatted with us. He had worked with Vazquez, who had died about a decade ago, and he welcomed us to look at the flowers. There were some of the common moth orchids, but there were other orchids, some so delicate and unusual that they lifted the flowers entirely out of the realm of Walmart and Trader Joe’s and once again elevated them to something precious and rare.

My husband picked out a few plants, and I worried that they would cost $10,000, but they didn’t. They were beautiful orchids, not stud plants. At one point Alvarado asked us how we had heard of the nursery—he must have seen something of the reverence I had for the plants, my sense of wonder.

I said that I had read about the nursery in a book by Joan Didion.

“Oh yes,” he said, brightening. “Amado made a hybrid for her.”

For a moment everyone was alive—Amado and also Joan and John and Quintana. But they’re all gone, of course. The difficult husband she adored, the difficult daughter she shaped her life around, and then Joan herself.

When I looked for the Joan Didion orchid, I couldn’t find it. But then I realized that I’d been looking for the wrong name.

Phal. James McPherson x Phal. Stuartiana = Phalaenopsis Quintana Roo Dunne

“When John Wayne rode through my childhood, and perhaps through yours,” Joan Didion wrote in Slouching Towards Bethlehem , “he determined forever the shape of certain of our dreams.”

The only John Wayne movie I’ve ever seen all the way through is The Searchers . But when Didion walked through the front door of my parents’ house when I was 14 years old, that’s what she did for me. She was a hot stock rising and I was a young girl falling, and she broke my fall.

From the January/February 2012 issue: Caitlin Flanagan on the autumn of Joan Didion

She was in Berkeley as a Regents’ Lecturer, and because my father was then the chair of the English department, he was sort of serving as her host. She came to our house for dinner, and she hardly said a word. But a week or so later, when my father said, “There’s something weird going on with Joan Didion and women,” that got my attention . Apparently, her office hours—usually the most monastic of an academic’s life—were being mobbed. Not just by students; by women from the Bay Area who had heard she was there and just wanted to see her. All of these women felt that Slouching Towards Bethlehem had changed them.

It wasn’t a book that was supposed to change anyone. Not only because that was by no means Joan Didion’s intent, but also because—look at the subjects. How can an essay about Alcatraz (as an attractive, mostly deserted place, not as a statement on either incarceration or the land theft perpetrated against California’s Indian tribes); an essay about a baby’s first birthday party; a forensic investigation of the marital tensions that led Lucille Miller to kill her husband—how can all of those add up to something life-changing?

Because in 1968, here was a book that said that even a troubled woman, or a heartbroken woman, or a frightened woman could be a very powerful person. In “Why I Write”—which was, in fact, the Regents’ Lecture—she famously described writing as an act of aggression , in which a writer takes control of a reader and imposes her own opinions, beliefs, and attitudes on that reader. A woman could be a hostage-taker, and what she held you hostage to were both shocking public events and some of the most interior and delicate thoughts a woman can have. This woman with the vanda orchid in her hair and her frequent states of incapacitation could put almost anyone under her power.

I had no power growing up, but I did have books and ideas, and I could be funny. I know I could have ended up being a magazine writer without ever having that chance experience. But what Joan Didion taught me was that it didn’t matter that I had such a messy, unenviable life—I could sit down, all alone, and write enough drafts to figure out what I thought about something and then punch it out into the culture.

Two years after her lecture, Mark Schorer died, and the year after that, my parents sold the house we lived in on Bret Harte Road. For reasons I don’t know, the current owner has allowed the house to return to nature. My mother’s flower beds are gone, and the lemon and lime trees, and the two glazed ceramic pots on either side of the front door that were always filled with flowers. Over the years, it’s been returning to the ground at the same rate I seem to be. When I was in Berkeley this fall, I only slowed down when I drove past it, because everyone was inside—Mark and my parents and so many of the professors who were in many ways my own professors. The only people who weren’t in there were my sister and me. The Flanagan girls—somehow the point of the whole thing.

I didn’t cry the day in December I learned Joan Didion had died , because I’d been told by so many people that it was going to happen soon. But I realized that in some part of my mind, I thought she’d pull it off, that she’d show illness and death a thing or two.

Read: Joan Didion was our bard of disenchantment

A couple of months later, during one of my endless Google searches, I came across one of those companies that track down addresses and phone numbers and public records. “We found Joan Didion!” it said, and offered to provide access to her cellphone number, address, email, and even “more!”

And for some reason, that was when I finally cut my losses.

I hadn’t gone looking for the actual Joan Didion or your Joan Didion or even “the reader’s” Joan Didion. I went looking for the Joan Didion who was partly a historical figure, and partly a great writer, and partly a fiction of my own design. And she lives right where she always has.

This article appears in the June 2022 print edition with the headline “Chasing Joan Didion.” It has been updated to reflect that New York magazine was the first publication to name and interview Noel Parmentel about his romantic relationship with Didion. The New York Times had previously reported that Didion was in a relationship in New York, but did not name Parmentel.

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January 14, 2022, the making of joan didion: from fuzzy facts to peerless prose, a re-read of didion's work shows the evolution of excellence that came through years of hard work and self scrutiny.

By Dale Keiger

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Writer Joan Didion in her New York apartment in 2007

Author Joan Didion in her New York apartment in 2007, before being interviewed for a short promotional film for David Halberstam's "The Coldest Winter," the final book by the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who was killed earlier that year in a California car accident. AP Photo/Kathy Willens

This interests me now because when I return to her work, her essays and journalism from that era strike me as not all that good — lots of glossy sentences and a striking voice that applied varnish to skimpy reporting, sketchy reasoning, and confirmation bias. Her prose was not yet peerless, but it did let her get away with a lot, especially among readers who were not paying enough attention to her flaws because look at her in that Julian Wasser photograph, leaning against a Corvette Stingray, all California cool and fragile but for the cigarette and frosty gaze that hinted at an inner bad girl.

Joan Didion in an iconic photo from the 1960s

That was Sixties Didion. Twenty years later, she had turned herself into the estimable journalist and essayist who has elicited so much admiration. That could only have been done with tremendous hard work from someone who could have coasted on her reputation (and big paydays from Hollywood screenplays) but did not.

To illustrate the arc of her development, let’s consider four pieces that span more than 20 years: from 1966, “Some Dreamers of the Golden Dream;” from 1967, “Slouching Towards Bethlehem;” from 1978, “The White Album;” and from 1988, “Insider Baseball.”

Rhetorical tricks and fuzzy connections

“Dreamers” was the story Wolfe selected for his collection alongside work by Truman Capote, Norman Mailer, Michael Herr, Gay Talese, Garry Wills and others, including himself in typical Wolfean self-promotion. That’s quite the peer group. The piece first appeared in The Saturday Evening Post as a true crime narrative about Lucille Maxwell Miller, who was convicted of murdering her husband in October 1964 by setting fire to their Volkswagen with him unconscious inside it. The piece is ambitious to be more than just a seedy crime story. Didion seemed to be reaching well past conventional reporting for some sort of impressionistic social critique that portrayed mid-’60s California as a dark and creepy place no more authentic than a movie set. She announced her intent with the first line: “This is a story about love and death in the golden land, and begins with the country.”

Keen reporting and dazzling social commentary

About 10 years later, Didion produced “The White Album,” and the title essay proves how far she’d come. Once again, she’s working in mosaic, but now each of the mosaic’s segments is grounded in material fact and acute observation and arranged with more rigorous thought and intent. This time she arrives at meaning that holds up under scrutiny. There are fewer cryptic portents, fewer dubious assertions, less wobbly reasoning. With great skill she assembles 15 set pieces that don’t seem to add up until they do, with potent effect. Didion centers herself in the story as a successful, prosperous, privileged writer who nevertheless seems to be cracking up. She seeks medical assistance, which isn’t much help. (She reprints her actual psychiatric evaluation, which diagnoses her as “a personality in process of deterioration.”) She tries entertaining friends and hanging out with her favorite band, The Doors. Neither provides relief. Immersing herself in more crime stories, one involving the Black Panther leader Huey P. Newton, could not have been much help.

And then the Manson murders happen. All of this refracted through Didion’s overwrought sensibility may not be your idea of fun and can feel disingenuous. (Grizzuti Harrison, who could tear into Didion with the glee of a 4-year-old pulling the wings off a bug, recalled Gloria Steinem once telling a reporter on her way to interview Didion, “Ask her how come, if she spends all her time crying and swimming and struggling to open a car door, she finds the energy to write so much?”) But it was dazzling work that felt true in all the ways her earlier work had not.

Didion’s nominal subject in “The White Album” was how destabilizing her life in Los Angeles was in 1967 and 1968, with good reason. But her deeper subject was the danger of a life ordered or driven by false narratives that go unchallenged. The first sentence of “The White Album” — “We tell ourselves stories in order to live.” — has been taken out of context to become a sort of affirmative credo, especially by writers. That’s not what Didion meant. She was sounding a warning: Fail to question these stories at your peril.

In 1988, she covered the Dukakis-Bush U.S. presidential campaign for The New York Review of Books and delivered a superb piece of political journalism, “Insider Baseball.” She stepped away from her self-absorption — no more updates on her migraines or deteriorating personality — and focused her formidable intelligence and acute eye on how the professional political operatives and campaign press collaborated to shape the narrative of the presidential race that put George H.W. Bush in the White House. No one — candidates, advisors, speechwriters, flacks, pollsters, reporters — seemed to have any interest in the real lives and concerns of the electorate. She wrote:

When we talk about the process, then, we are talking, increasingly, not about ‘the democratic process,’ or the general mechanism affording the citizens of a state a voice in its affairs, but the reverse: a mechanism seen as so specialized that access to it is correctly limited to its own professionals. … What strikes one most vividly about such a campaign is precisely its remoteness from the real life of the country.

Didion marshals one example after another of all she observed and overheard to back up that charge. With carefully modulated indignation, she indicts everyone involved. In a later essay, “Political Pornography,” she would write:

The genuflection toward ‘fairness’ is a familiar newsroom piety, in practice the excuse for a good deal of autopilot reporting and lazy thinking but in theory a benign ideal. In Washington, however, a community in which the management of news has become the single overriding preoccupation of the core industry, what ‘fairness’ has often come to mean is a scrupulous passivity, an agreement to cover the story not as it is occurring but as it is presented, which is to say as it is manufactured.

The hard work of speaking the truth

By 1988 and “Insider Baseball,” Didion had become an exemplary journalist. And she’d done something much harder and more important than that: She had developed the ability and the resolve to step outside of the pervasive narratives, including her own, to see if they stood up to scrutiny, to reveal their falsity and the consequences when they didn’t, and to deliver voltage to our passivity. Because most of us, most of the time, are passive. We seek comfort by settling into the lee of the stories we tell ourselves, the auto-narratives that shelter us from life’s headwinds. I think we have little choice. We can only work with the minds we’ve been given. But we can ask far more questions than we usually do, and that’s what I take from Joan Didion. That, and the decades of relentless effort she put into becoming the writer who deserved the praise prematurely bestowed on her 50 years ago.

Dale Keiger is the retired editor of Johns Hopkins Magazine and author of “The Man Who Signed the City: Portraits of Remarkable People,” from 10,000 Days Press.

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What Is Cinema?

How Joan Didion the Writer Became Joan Didion the Legend

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In a 1969 column for Life, her first for the magazine, Joan Didion let drop that she and husband, John Gregory Dunne, were at the Royal Hawaiian hotel in Honolulu “in lieu of filing for divorce,” surely the most famous subordinate clause in the history of New Journalism, an insubordinate clause if ever there was one. The poise of it, the violence, the cool-bitch chic—a writer who could be the heroine of a Godard movie!—takes the breath away, even after all these years. Didion goes on: “I tell you this not as aimless revelation but because I want you to know, as you read me, precisely who I am and where I am and what is on my mind. I want you to understand exactly what you are getting.” I suppose I’m operating under a similar set of impulses—a mixture of candor, self-justification and self-dramatization, the dread of being misapprehended coupled with the certainty that misapprehension is inevitable (Didion’s style is catching, but not so much as her habit of thought)—when I tell you I’m scared of her.

Before I get into why, I need to clarify something I said. Or, rather, something I didn’t say and won’t say, but which I’m anxious you’re going to think I said: that Didion isn’t a brilliant writer. She is a brilliant writer—sentence for sentence, among the best this country’s ever produced. And I’m not disputing her status as cultural icon either. As large as she looms now, she’ll loom larger as time passes—I’d bet money on it. In fact, I don’t want to diminish or assault her in any way. What I do want to do is get her right. And over the past 11 years, since 2005, when she published the first of her two loss memoirs, one about Dunne, the other about Quintana, her daughter, she’s been gotten wrong. And not just wrong, egregiously wrong, wrong to the point of blasphemy. I’m talking about the canonization of Didion, Didion as St. Joan, Didion as Our Mother of Sorrows. Didion is not, let me repeat, not a holy figure, nor is she a maternal one. She’s cool-eyed and cold-blooded, and that coolness and coldness—chilling, of course, but also bracing—is the source of her fascination as much as her artistry is; the source of her glamour too, and her seductiveness, because she is seductive, deeply. What she is is a femme fatale, and irresistible. She’s our kiss of death, yet we open our mouths, kiss back.

The subject of this piece, though, is not just a who, Didion, but a what, Hollywood. So to bring them together, which is where they belong, a natural pairing, this: I think that Didion, along with Andy Warhol, her spiritual twin as well as her artistic, created L.A.—that is, modern L.A., contemporary L.A., the L.A. that is synonymous with Hollywood. And I think that Didion alone was the vehicle—or possibly the agent—of L.A.’s destruction. I think that for the city of Los Angeles, Didion is the Ángel de la Muerte.

There. I said it. Now you know why I’m scared. Who wants to get on the Ángel de la Muerte’s bad side? Not that I believe I’m going to. Because I have one last thing to add, and I don’t care how weird and screw-loose it sounds: I think she wanted me to say it.

An Ingénue, Disingenuous

The Joan Didion who moved from New York to L.A. in June of 1964 was no more Joan Didion than Norma Jeane Baker was Marilyn Monroe, or Marion Morrison was John Wayne, or, for that matter, Andrew Warhola was Andy Warhol. She was a native daughter, but only sort of. The California she grew up in—the Sacramento Valley—was closer in spirit to the Old West than to the sun-kissed, pleasure-mad movie colony. Just shy of 30, she’d recently married Dunne. Both had been working as journalists, she for Vogue, he for Time. Her first book, a novel, the traditional if not quite conventional Run River, had been published the year before. Critics hadn’t taken much notice; neither had readers. Hurt, likely a little angry too, she was ready for a new scene. Dunne was equally itchy to blow town. Plus, he had a brother in the industry, Dominick —Nick.

In his memoir Popism, Warhol wrote, “The Hollywood we were driving to that fall of ‘63 was in limbo. The Old Hollywood was finished and the New Hollywood hadn’t started yet.” Old Hollywood, of course, didn’t know it was finished. Was carrying on like it was show business as usual. And it still hadn’t wised up the following spring when the Didion-Dunnes arrived.

Nick, young though he was, was Old Hollywood. Professionally he hadn’t made it: a second-rate producer in a second-rate medium, TV. But socially he’d hit the heights. He and wife Lenny threw lavish, stylish parties, and lots of them. A month before the Didion-Dunnes showed, they’d thrown their most lavish and stylish, a black-and-white ball inspired by the Ascot scene in My Fair Lady. (That the ball—a ball!—wasn’t in color is a detail almost too on the nose. Soon the whole town would turn psychedelic, and such evenings would seem so old-fashioned as to have been in black and white even if they weren’t.) Among the splendidly monochromatic: Ronald and Nancy Reagan, David Selznick and Jennifer Jones, Billy Wilder, Loretta Young, Natalie Wood. Also present, Truman Capote, who, in a gesture either of rip-off or homage, would stage his own black-and-white ball in New York. Nick’s invitation would get lost in the mail.

In later years, Didion and Dunne would play a double game with Hollywood: they were participants who were also onlookers; supported by the industry but not owned by it; in the thick of it and above the fray. They seemed much less ambivalent in their early years. In their early years, they wanted in. A line invoked by both so often you know they must have believed it gospel is from F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Last Tycoon: “We don’t go for strangers in Hollywood.” How lucky for them then that they were the brother and sister-in-law of Nick, and thus part of the Hollywood family, if poor relations. And, as poor relations, they were given castoffs: clothes, Natalie Wood’s (for Didion); houses, too. They rented Sara Mankiewicz’s, fully furnished, though Mankiewicz did pack up the Oscar won by her late husband, Herman, for writing Citizen Kane.

So Didion and Dunne wanted in and got in, but they wanted in deeper. Hollywood’s appeal for writers isn’t hard to figure: it’s about the only place they can strike it rich. And doing it for the money seems to be how a writer stays respectable, at least in the eyes of fellow writers. Says writer Dan Wakefield, a friend of the couple’s from New York, “They didn’t give a shit about the movies except it was a way to make a lot of money. And I totally respect that.” Only maybe the Didion-Dunnes weren’t just tricking after all. Wrote Dunne, “The other night, after a screening, we went out to a party with Mike Nichols and Candice Bergen and Warren Beatty and Barbra Streisand. I never did that at Time. ” They were doing it then for love, too, if not of the movies, of the glamour and celebrity that movies bring. Says writer Josh Greenfeld, a friend of the couple’s from L.A., “Joan and John were star fuckers. They wouldn’t miss a party. They could do four in a night—come, see what had to be seen, go.” And Don Bachardy, the artist and longtime lover of Christopher Isherwood, then a reigning figure on the L.A. literary scene, recalls their ardent pursuit of Isherwood. “They were both highly ambitious, and Chris was a rung on the ladder they were climbing. I don’t like to tell on Chris, but he wasn’t very fond of either of them. I think he found her clammy.” (Isherwood already told on himself. He makes numerous unflattering references to Didion and Dunne—“Mrs. Misery and Mr. Know-All”—in his diaries.)

The basic plan, careerwise, seems to have been that Nick would provide Didion and Dunne with introductions and they’d try their hands, collective—it would be a team effort—at scriptwriting. Their hands would remain idle for seven years, not counting an episode of Kraft Suspense Theatre. Well, idle and full. In 1964, Didion struck up a relationship with a magazine highly receptive to her sensibility and interests, The Saturday Evening Post. It would become the primary home for her work until its publisher filed for bankruptcy in 1969. And in 1966, she’d have a baby—or, have a baby without quite having had a baby. She and Dunne adopted, at birth, a girl, Quintana Roo. So Didion had plenty to keep her occupied.

Besides, she didn’t need the movies to become a star.

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ONE HAPPY FAMILY Joan, John, and Quintana, photographed by Julian Wasser in their L.A. home in 1968.

A Star Is Born, an Immaculate Conception

In 1968, Didion published Slouching Towards Bethlehem, a collection of essays mostly and most strikingly about California, and, with a single exception, composed entirely while living in her new hometown. Slouching would become a touchstone for a decade and an era, its readers more than mere readers but followers, devotees, fans. The critics were just as beguiled. The New York Times called it “a rich display of some of the best prose written today in this country.” And the writing is great: direct and matter-of-fact, yet lyrical and poetic and hypnotic, too—writing that casts a spell, though whether you’ve been enchanted or cursed isn’t wholly clear. The true triumph of Slouching, however, is Joan Didion, or, rather, “Joan Didion,” the central character in a book that famously denies that the center exists, or at least that it’s capable of holding; also, as it happens, the most enduring creation of Joan Didion.

We’re told at *Slouching’*s outset that it was written in a state of acute emotional distress. From the preface: “I went to San Francisco [for the title piece, about the hippie scene in the Haight] because I had not been able to work in some months, had been paralyzed by the conviction that writing was an irrelevant act, that the world as I had understood it no longer existed.” And many of the stories “Didion” tells are real-life horror stories: a suburban housewife who, one night when she was out of milk, set fire to her dumb lug of a husband; High Kindergarten, where children were given LSD; Howard Hughes. And yet the tone of the telling is noticeably, conspicuously not horrified; nor is it distressed, or even emotional; it’s the opposite, is composed, affectless, flat. There are, I should note, two places in the book where the tone changes, becomes tender. The first is in “John Wayne: A Love Song.” (Didion admirers like, I suspect, to believe that that “Love” is ironic—it’s not; she’s sweet on the Duke, who in his simplicity and stoicism represents to her a masculine ideal.) The second is in “Goodbye to All That,” her profile of her young self.

Like Warhol, “Didion” presents herself as an observer—no, a witness—to unspeakable acts. In fact, “Death and Disaster,” Warhol’s early-60s series depicting all manner of grisliness—car accidents, riots, suicides—could have been the title of Slouching, and maybe a better one. (The Yeats reference, in retrospect, seems a little alarmist.) “Didion” is absorbed, intensely, in what’s going on around her, but is not involved; her gaze fixed, even salivating, yet also vacant. Her motto might be: See everything, hear everything, do nothing. Still, her nothing is something, her extreme passivity a form of extreme aggression. She takes events, people, places that inspire violent and chaotic feelings—passion, hope, terror, despair—and subdues them, controls them, counteracting their awesome power simply by looking at them in a certain way. Her look, Warhol’s look, too—it’s aestheticizing, providing a psychic distance, a paradoxical kind of a cool. A burned-out cool. A cool that gives off heat.

The Strange Case of Earl McGrath

So New York had missed Didion’s star quality, its eye passing right over her. Not L.A., though. (Warhol, too, incidentally, would have to leave New York, go to L.A., to get discovered. It was the Ferus Gallery, on La Cienega, that gave him his big break, his first fine-arts show back in 1962, him and his soup cans.) L.A. knew how to talent-spot. But in 1968, it didn’t know much else. It was in a state of flux, or maybe crisis. The culture had swung counter, and the movies hadn’t swung along with it, not fully. Nineteen sixty-eight, remember, was the year of John Wayne’s The Green Berets, about what a super-fantastic idea the Vietnam War was. Music, not movies, had captured the hearts and minds of the younger generation. Old Hollywood, though, now knew it was Old. Wrote Nick Dunne, “Everything was changing…. People were starting to smoke pot…. Hairdressers started to be invited to parties.” And even if it wasn’t clear what exactly the New was, it was clear that Didion was part of it. She and Dunne began to move in different circles, most notably Earl McGrath’s.

Who is Earl McGrath? A mystery man I was never able to solve, is the short answer. Didion dedicated The White Album, her essay collection mainly about L.A. during the years she and Dunne and Quintana lived in a house on Franklin Avenue in Hollywood (1966–71), to him, which should give you some idea of his importance to her. He reminds me of Jay Gatsby, not for the obvious reason, though for that reason too—he threw killer parties—but because the claims made about him seem outlandish yet, somehow, plausible: “he ran Bobby Kennedy’s career”; “he ran Rolling Stones Records”; “he ran an art gallery”; “he was head of production for Twentieth Century Fox”; “he married an Italian countess”; “he gave Steve Martin his I’m-a-Little-Teapot routine.” All of that—some of that, none of that—though, was just a front, a cover. What he did really was get to know the ultra-hip and get them to know each other. Says artist Ron Cooper, “Earl is the Gertrude Stein of our era. He had a salon like Stein. I met Andy Warhol through him and Jack Nicholson and Dennis Hopper and Michelle Phillips and Michael Crichton and Joan and John, of course—and, oh, just an amazing roster of people.” Says singer-actress Michelle Phillips, “If you went to Earl’s, you were going to a party that you knew was going to be staffed and stuffed with the most interesting, fuckable people, always, always.”

Drugs were a big part of the scene. Says writer Eve Babitz, “Mostly pot and acid and speed—Dexedrine, Benzedrine. I thought Joan was more in control than we were, but I reread the The White Album. She didn’t sound in control, did she?” So was Harrison Ford. Says Babitz, “Harrison was a carpenter then, a terrible one. He built a deck for John Dunne and John was outraged it took so long. John really expected him to build it! And Earl was in love with Harrison. He let Harrison basically get away with murder as far as his carpentry was concerned. But Fred Roos [famed casting director for Francis Ford Coppola] hired Harrison and made him finish his project, and then got him in Star Wars. ”

The Bachelorette Had Its Most Dramatic Finale Ever, but at What Cost?

Didion’s social life was now so vibrant, so vivid, so potent, her imaginative life became vulnerable to it. Says Babitz, “Michelle Phillips told the best stories in town. I remember her once lying down on the floor and telling that amazing story about Tamar Hodel. [Hodel, then 26, decided to kill herself after a love affair ended badly. She asked Phillips, then 17, to help. Phillips, believing it her duty as a friend, agreed. Hodel swallowed a bottle of Seconal. Phillips fell asleep beside her in bed. Fortunately, other friends came home in time to call an ambulance.] I guess Joan was listening.”

The Auteur Theory

In 1969, Didion completed her third book, Play It as It Lays. “Joan Didion” was back, no matter that she was now called Maria Wyeth, and Play It a novel. Maria, a B actress fast sliding down the alphabet, has an estranged director-husband and a brain-damaged child, and is telling her story from a sanatorium. Things she does: has sex, listlessly, takes drugs, also listlessly, bleeds a lot—from a botched abortion—cries even more—from the abortion, but for other reasons, too. In the climactic scene, she cradles her friend, the homosexual producer, BZ, in bed as he overdoses on Seconal (sound familiar?).

Play It is a Hollywood book, not just because it’s about Hollywood people, but because it’s a book that’s also a movie. Didion’s the star. (I should mention here that “writer” was only ever her fallback plan; as a child she’d wanted to act.) The author photo on the jacket, taken by Julian Wasser, is an arresting one—Didion was always a shrewd subject, understood how the camera should see her, had an actress’s sixth sense about lighting and mood—and shows a young woman, pretty and slight and troubled-looking. Between her fingers, a cigarette, rakishly angled, smolders. All decidedly Maria-ish. And if you’d caught the shots of Didion in Time in ‘68 (Wasser again), you’d know that, like Maria, who cruises the nerve pathways of the city to soothe hers—the San Diego Freeway to the Harbor to the Hollywood, and so on—she drives a Corvette. It’s a snap to picture her cracking hard-boiled eggs on her steering wheel, drinking Coca-Colas at gas stations.

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A STAR IS BORN Quintana, Joan, John, and his nephew Tony that same year.

Stars, though, weren’t really stars in Hollywood, directors were. And in Play It, Didion was that kind of star, too. If there’s a prose equivalent to freeze-frames and jump cuts, this book is full of them; chapters are fractured, one just 28 words long; and the amount of white on the pages makes them look like miniature movie screens. Plus, her eye is eerily close to that of a camera’s: all-seeing yet uncaring, a mode of perception both alienated and alienating.

And with Play It, Didion was able to return a favor. L.A. discovered Didion; now she was discovering it. Because if Play It actually were a movie, surely its opening credits would have read AND INTRODUCING L.A. The L.A. in Play It wasn’t the L.A. that existed in the popular imagination of the time: a sunny land of innocent, adolescent pleasures, Surfin’ U.S.A., Eden before the fall. It’s shadow L.A., jaded L.A., and it’s hell on earth, or, L.A. being L.A., hell in paradise. It’s the L.A. of plastic lemons and silver medallions and masseurs who want to be screenwriters. Didion intended, I think, to write a hate letter to L.A.; it’s a love letter, though, in spite of itself. For Auden, L.A. was “The Great Wrong Place.” It was for Didion, too, only her Wrong was so Wrong it was Right. She seduced even as she condemned. And there’s also this: the fact that Didion, the girl New Journalist, the novelist who’d figured out how to be a female Hemingway (a contradiction in terms, yet she’d done it), chose the city as her subject was its own kind of validation and recommendation. Says Babitz, “Joan made it O.K. to be serious about L.A.” Warhol made it O.K. before Didion, but only just. The profane assertion of his Marilyn Diptych (1962) was that movie stars had replaced religious icons as objects of worship; and, by extension, that L.A., home of Hollywood, was the country’s new spiritual mecca. What’s more, L.A., thanks to Warhol and Didion—maybe a handful of others—was becoming the country’s new cultural mecca, too. New York? How about Old Hat.

Psycho Killer, Qui Est-Ce Qu’il Est?

The times were wild and weird, and getting ever wilder and weirder. Didion was almost uncannily in touch with them. Her health, mental and physical, began to break down. After an attack of vertigo and nausea, she checked herself into a psychiatric clinic. Later she’d write, “An attack of vertigo and nausea does not now seem to me an inappropriate response to the summer of 1968.”

As bad as that summer was, though, it would get worse. Dark forces were gathering, gaining momentum. From The White Album: “I imagined that my own life was simple and sweet, and sometimes it was, but there were odd things going around town.... Everything was unmentionable but nothing was unimaginable.” And then the disciples of an aspiring musician and ex-con named Charles Manson slaughtered Sharon Tate, eight months pregnant, and four others at the house Tate rented with husband Roman Polanski on Cielo Drive, and suddenly everything was both. Didion: “Many people I know in Los Angeles believe that the Sixties ended abruptly on August 9, 1969.” Perhaps most unsettling of all: there was murder, but no murderer, not at first. Says Julian Wasser, “The cops didn’t know shit, as usual. Roman took me and Tommy Thompson [a journalist] and a psychic to the house. He’d just gotten back from Europe. It was his first time on the scene. The carpet had a three-foot circle of jellied blood. Roman was crying. He wanted me to take pictures to give to the psychic so he could find out who did it.” Says Michelle Phillips, “For a long time, nobody knew it was Manson. Everyone was a suspect. I started carrying a gun in my purse. To me, that was the end of the party.”

Manson embodied so many counterculture clichés he was an almost allegorical figure: a singer-songwriter who’d come to L.A. with a guitar and hopes of stardom. You could find one of him on every corner, at least the corners by the Troubadour and the Whisky. Bogeyman as Everyman. And the Manson “Family” was like some grotesque parody of the era’s peace-love-and-brotherhood ethos, the monster under the flower child’s bed.

Didion and the Manson murders were linked, if only in Didion’s mind. She sees occult significance in the fact that Polanski, at a party he attended with Tate, had spilled red wine on the dress she wore to her wedding, and that she and he were godparents to the same child, even if she can’t figure out exactly what that significance is, even if her cool intelligence won’t allow her to use the word “occult.” Yet there’s no question of the guilt in her tone. Is that because she felt somehow responsible for him? Did she believe he was a hallucination she’d conjured mid-migraine (her “vascular headache[s] of blinding severity”)? A vision sprung to life during her psychic collapse the summer before (from the doctor’s report: “In [the patient’s] view she lives in a world of people moved by strange, conflicted, poorly comprehended, and, above all, devious motivations”)? Her bad juju (“I remember a babysitter telling me that she saw death in my aura”) made flesh?

Or maybe these are the wrong questions. Maybe this is the right one: Did Didion believe herself so harmonically—or, rather, disharmonically—in tune with the vibrations being struck around her, so imaginatively sympathetic a participant in her time and place, in the melancholy and despair lurking beneath hippiedom’s blissed-out surface, in the hate that is the flip side of the Love Generation, that she became the medium of an evil spirit, the conduit through which it passed into the world, or did she believe she summoned it? In other words, was she Manson’s instrument or was he hers?

Who’s Afraid of John Gregory Dunne?

John Gregory Dunne was Didion’s husband, the father of her child, her first editor—that “in lieu of filing for divorce” clause, written, you’ll recall, in 1969, went through his red pencil before *Life’*s—and co-screenwriter. All of which gives you some idea of how essential to her he was. Not the whole idea, though. Here’s how essential: without Dunne there would have been no Didion, not Didion as we know Didion. But before I talk about him, I want to talk about Didion’s other mate, maybe her soulmate, if only in my imagination, Andy Warhol.

Didion is, and always has been, small, frail, quiet, recessive. As was Warhol. In so many ways, Didion was a Warhol who could pass, her smallness and frailness registering as pretty, gamine; her quietness and recessiveness as feminine, refined. She was, too, that least threatening figure—a wife. He, in contrast, was homely—blotchy-skinned and bulbous-nosed and bewigged—and obviously sexually Other. His weirdness was unconcealable, writ large. He had no choice but to turn it into personal style. In any case, these two mice became—not just against the odds, but seemingly against nature, certainly against their natures—social lions. How?

Entourages. The world’s rawness was too much for Warhol. A protective layer was necessary. Says Ferus co-owner Irving Blum, “Andy needed to travel with people—he used them as shields.” (It could easily be argued, by the way, that Warhol summoned his evil spirit. Valerie Solanas—a flamboyant oddball, just his type—was a member of his entourage. She’d written a play she thought he was going to produce. When she realized he wasn’t, she shot him. In a physical sense, she failed. Not in a metaphysical, though. Once her bullets entered his body on June 3, 1968—the summer that had Didion’s head spinning, stomach churning—it was the end of much of what was daring and original in his work.) Entourages, too, were good for the mystique.

Didion’s entourage was an entourage of one: Dunne. “Joan was very soft-spoken and shrinking,” says Don Bachardy. “John was very talky. He was her mouthpiece.” Didion, no doubt, is genuinely introverted. But she’s also somebody who, by her own admission, can spend “most of a week writing and rewriting and not writing a single paragraph.” She’s a control freak, basically. And conversation, as opposed to writing, is interactive, improvisatory. To engage in one you have to renounce a measure of control. Dunne’s garrulousness allowed her to take some of that control back, to pick and choose her spots. Says writer David Freeman, “John was the talker. I’ll tell you this, though. When she started talking, he knew to shut up.”

This, too: while shyness can be a symptom of insecurity, it can also be a weapon in a power play. Says Josh Greenfeld, “Joan’s weakness is her strength. It got John to run interference.” And run it he did. To get to Didion you had to go through Dunne. This was true socially—at parties, and on the telephone (it was he who always answered). And professionally. He did the meetings and the memos, the pushing around. The last sentence in a fax he sent to the Writers Guild when a studio was slow on payment: “[O]ur position is fuck them, let’s arbitrate.” He was Didion’s protector. And her caretaker. Says writer-actress Jennifer Salt, a one-time neighbor, “John was a very concerned and doting husband. A big part of their life was her migraines.”

So, essentially, their marriage was an endless re-enactment of a classic scenario: a damsel in distress, a big strong man coming to her rescue. (Big strong men, we know from Didion’s John Wayne profile, are very much her thing.) Or was it? Dot dot dot.

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The couple in New York City in 1983.

Dunne wasn’t Didion’s match artistically. Not so much a slight as it might sound. Dunne was a fine writer; Didion just happens to be more than that. And he seemed to have accepted his second-best status. Says Greenfeld, “John told Brian [Moore, the Irish novelist] he was walking on the beach one night and he ran into Jesus and Jesus said, ‘I love your wife’s work!’ ” Very smartly, too, Dunne carved out his own literary territory, his interests running to crooked cops and crooked crooks, gangsters and studio heads, i.e., gangsters by another name. Harder for Dunne to accept: that he wasn’t Didion’s match psychologically either. Greenfeld again: “What you see in John, you get in Joan. He came on blustering and tough, but he was softhearted.”

That Didion could wipe the floor with Dunne anytime she chose must’ve been disturbing for him. And confusing. The girl he’d married, a slip of a thing, bookish and wallflowerish, turned out to be this spooky genius, a poet of paranoia or possibly a clairvoyant of paranoia fulfilled. And those were boozy days. From Isherwood’s Diaries: “[Joan] drinks quite a lot. So does [John].” Dunne was a rager too. In that Life piece, Didion mentions “kicked-down doors.” Says Babitz, “Joan had migraines because she was married to John. He’d give anyone a migraine. He was an alcoholic and he broke down doors.” Often, though, when a man gets violent with a woman physically, it’s because he feels beat-up emotionally. Scratch a bully find a victim.

There’s a scene, very revealing, I think, in Vegas (1974), carefully described by Dunne as “a memoir” and “a fiction which recalls a time both real and imagined,” though in a letter to writer Jane Howard he admitted that the “real and imagined” was a fakeout, an attempt to throw his mother—“the Mum”—off the autobiographical scent. Vegas is about a writer who leaves his wife—also a writer—and child—a little girl, adopted—to live in Las Vegas, precisely what Dunne did for six months in the early 70s. (In lieu of divorce coming perilously close to divorce divorce.) The scene is a phone call between the protagonist and his wife:

“What’s new with you?” she said. “Jackie’s got me a date with a nineteen-year-old tonight. She’s supposed to suck me and fuck me.” “It’s research … You’re missing the story if you don’t meet her.” “But I don’t want to fuck her.” There was a long silence at the other end of the telephone. “Well, that can be part of the story, too,” she said. There seemed nothing more to say. I was the one who was supposed to be detached.

This isn’t a conversation. It’s warfare. And the wife defeats the husband. A no-contest contest. How she does it: by not doing anything. She exhibits neither shock nor rage nor sadness at the prospect of his getting together with a teenager. In fact, she encourages him to, all but dares him. Which is the exact moment he turns meek and little-boy, backs down and off. Plainly, he’s terrified of his wife. Well, why not? She’s a dangerous character. (The answer to the section’s opening question, by the way: Not Joan Didion.)

Interestingly, Quintana, at around this time, seems to have been driven to equal extremes to attract Didion’s attention. In her memoir Blue Nights, Didion tells a story of a five-year-old Quintana calling Camarillo, the state mental hospital, to ask what she should do if she was going crazy. Didion tells another story of Quintana, at the same age, calling Twentieth Century Fox to ask what she should do to become a movie star. Quintana was clearly desperate to turn herself into one of her mother’s characters—an insane person or a famous person, preferably both, like Maria Wyeth.

But back to Dunne: once this period—the publication of Play It, the book’s major-cultural-eventness—passed, he mellowed or was tamed, depending on your viewpoint. Either way, the marriage settled down. And by the 80s, Didion would be telling The New York Times that she and Dunne were “terrifically, terribly dependent on one another,” a statement that warms the heart or chills the blood, again depending on your viewpoint.

Kiss Me Deadly

In 1971, the Didion-Dunnes would move out of the house on Franklin Avenue to a house in Trancas, just north of Malibu. The couple’s careers as screenwriters would begin in earnest, starting with that year’s The Panic in Needle Park, and lasting until Dunne’s death in 2003. The moment they leave Hollywood to go Hollywood, though, is the moment I lose interest in them as Hollywood figures.

There is one movie of theirs, however, I do want to discuss: Play It as It Lays (1972). As I already said, the book is both book and movie. Didion’s temperament is a director’s in that her controlling intelligence is so, well, controlling. The world Maria inhabits is a contrived one—an artifice. Not for an instant do you believe that the story can end other than in calamity, that life’s random energies have a shot against tragedy’s classic structure. If a character burped or cracked a joke, you feel the whole thing would collapse. Which is why Play It, taken on its own terms, is profound, high art; and, not taken on its own terms, profoundly silly, high camp. Pauline Kael’s assessment of the book (she slammed it en route to slamming the movie) was so devastating because she laughed at it—“I found the … novel ridiculously swank, and I read it between bouts of disbelieving giggles”—and once you start laughing, you can’t stop.

A movie, by definition, is not taking the book on its own terms, since a movie is made by many people, even if one of them is a “Didion freak” (Frank Perry, the director, a self-description) and two others are Didion and Dunne (they wrote the script). The movie exposed the book. Showed how weak the central concept was, how purest-corn and junk-Hollywood: the glamour of desolation, the romance of despair, how low-life are those living the high life, etc. Only, unlike the junk-Hollywood product, Play It took itself seriously. The movie also showed that for Play It to work—and the book, whether you like it or not, does work—it needed the magic of Didion’s prose. Otherwise it’s just a bummer version of The Bad and the Beautiful.

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Play It as It Lays (1970).

It didn’t have to be. Didion’s first pick for director was Sam Peckinpah. Didion in a letter to Peckinpah: “I want you to [do the movie]—you are the only person … I can see taking it beyond where it is and bringing back a picture of the very edge.” Peckinpah seems, on the face of it, a counter-intuitive choice. The material was contemporary, urban, feminine. He was a director of Westerns, often set in the past, and extremely violent. Yet his violence was beautiful—sensuous and painterly—and he was a fatalist, and thus close to Didion in sensibility. Her hope, too, was that he would not just film the book—what Perry ended up doing—but reimagine it, and “[bring] back a picture of the very edge.” Or, maybe, over the edge. It always struck me as false that Maria was so tranquil behind the wheel. How much more joy would she have gotten from her rides if she’d left devastation in her wake? Is there a better way for one of the most alienated characters in modern literature to connect than inside her metal shell, her barest touch resulting in blood and guts and severed limbs? (Didion: “Actually, I don’t drive on the freeway. I’m afraid to.”) Peckinpah, I think, would have said what Didion couldn’t quite: that Maria—that Didion—was a victim who was also a victimizer. He’d have turned Play It into Warhol’s Orange Car Crash Fourteen Times at 24 frames per second.

That version, of course, never happened. The studio balked at Peckinpah. Missed opportunities are always a shame. This one, though, was especially shameful because it was also Didion and Dunne’s best opportunity to catch the American New Wave.

In 1969, the summer of Manson, Easy Rider roared onto screens trailing clouds of motorcycle exhaust and marijuana smoke. A new era in movies had begun. This new era, New Hollywood, was really an end-of-an-era era. Its decade was the 70s, and the 70s were less the 70s than the post-60s, the 60s once the light had been snuffed out. Its movies were, unsurprisingly, dark: innocence was lost or violated, promise unfulfilled, effort futile. Forget it, Jake, it’s Chinatown. And while Didion and Dunne were in New Hollywood, literally (their house in Trancas was a stone’s throw from New Hollywood Central, the houses of Julia and Michael Phillips, producers of Taxi Driver, and actresses Jennifer Salt and Margot Kidder, where every weekend people like Martin Scorsese, Steven Spielberg, and Paul Schrader—all unknowns then—could be found drinking wine, smoking grass, and talking movies), they were never of it, even if they’d occasionally attend its parties. I don’t think they quite knew what “it” was.

“A few decades hence, these years may appear to be the closest our movies have come to the tangled, bitter flowering of American letters in the 1850s.” Pauline Kael wrote those words in her introduction to Reeling, her collection of reviews, 1972–75, including that humdinger of Play It. In the 70s, movie culture would become central to American culture. Kael was its voice, which meant she was American culture’s voice, which meant Didion no longer was. Didion didn’t take the usurpation lying down. She went after Kael, writing in 1973, “The review of pictures has been … a traditional diversion for writers whose actual work is somewhere else.” No serious writer takes movies seriously, is, essentially, what she’s saying. And yet movies were, at that moment, it, the hot art form. So Didion, who missed nothing, had missed a major cultural shift. And just like that, the sharpest point on the cutting edge was dull, out of it, passé. That the movie she and Dunne are best known for is A Star Is Born (1976), a remake of a remake of a remake of a remake, tells, I think, the story of their Hollywood career.

So after 1969, Didion’s special extra intuition was gone. (Kael, incidentally, wouldn’t outlast her decade either. Her moment ended in 1979, when Warren Beatty, that skilled seducer, sweet-talked her into leaving The New Yorker for Paramount.) Didion would continue to be a great writer, but would cease to be a visionary one. While a number of her later books hit the best-seller list, they failed, with the exception of The White Album, published in 1979 though about the earlier period, to truly resonate. Her days as a cultural phenomenon were over.

Until the passing of Dunne and Quintana. In their deaths, Didion was resurrected professionally. The Year of Magical Thinking (2005) was a critical sensation—winner of the National Book Award—and a commercial one, selling a million-plus copies, far more than any other book in her career. And its sequel, Blue Nights (2011), was another smash. Why?

In this piece’s opening I called Didion a femme fatale. I said it to startle and I said it because it’s true. I suspect she’s one in life. I know she’s one in art. Her method, which is also her genius, has been to attenuate nature, strip it of its force and vitality. And then nature did that to her. Did it by aging her, taking away her youth and beauty. Did it again, and more violently, by taking away those she loved most. With just about anybody else, it would have ended there—heartbreak of that magnitude breaking the spirit and the will, as well. Not with Didion, though. She did it right back to nature. Magical Thinking and Blue Nights are loss and grief and pain transformed into meditations on loss and grief and pain; they’re loss and grief and pain aestheticized. Death has always been Didion’s great subject and theme, as it was Warhol’s. And in these memoirs, she’s confronting it directly, more than confronting it, besting it. Art won out over life, another way of saying the artist won out over the human being. It’s her triumph. It’s also her tragedy.

Joan Didion and John Dunne: Photos of Their Life in L.A.

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How the Manson murders changed Hollywood, explained by Joan Didion

“No one was surprised.”

by Alissa Wilkinson

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.

Similarly, the murders would, for many, feel like the definitive end of the 1960s, and their optimism along with it. As Joan Didion wrote in her essay “The White Album,” the title piece of her 1979 collection , “Many people I know in Los Angeles believe that the Sixties ended abruptly on August 9, 1969, ended at the exact moment when word of the murders on Cielo Drive traveled like brushfire through the community, and in a sense this is true. The tension broke that day. The paranoia was fulfilled.”

But right after the murders happened, it was the community surrounding Tate’s house on Cielo Drive, and the broader group of people involved in show business in LA — which included Didion and her husband, the writer John Gregory Dunne — whose nerves jangled most sharply. Didion explained in her essay:

There were rumors. There were stories. Everything was unmentionable but nothing was unimaginable. This mystical flirtation with the idea of “sin” — this sense that it was possible to go “too far,” and that many people were doing it — was very much with us in Los Angeles in 1968 and 1969. A demented and seductive vortical tension was building in the community. The jitters were setting in. I recall a time when the dogs barked every night and the moon was always full. On August 9, 1969, I was sitting in the shallow end of my sister-in-law’s swimming pool in Beverly Hills when she received a telephone call from a friend who had just heard about the murders at Sharon Tate Polanksi’s house on Cielo Drive. The phone rang many times during the next hour. These early reports were garbled and contradictory. One caller would say hoods, the next would say chains. There were twenty dead, no, twelve, ten, eighteen. Black masses were imagined, and bad trips blamed. I remember all of the day’s misinformation very clearly, and I also remember this, and I wish I did not: I remember that no one was surprised .

The first sentence of “The White Album” furnishes one of Didion’s most quoted lines: “We tell ourselves stories in order to live.” She goes on to explain, through the rest of the essay, what she means: that humans survive the confusion and brutality of life by trying to find connections between events and extract meaning from those connections. We’re constantly trying to force seemingly random happenings into the framework of a story that might teach or show us something. But Didion isn’t so sure that the meaning we crave is truly available to us.

“The White Album” isn’t only about the Manson family and the murders; in it, Didion writes about hanging out with the Doors in the recording studio, visiting Huey Newton in jail, and navigating her own anxiety and suitcase-packing practices as a reporter during the late 1960s.

But the title makes it clear that the shadow of Manson hangs over the whole essay. It’s a reference to the 1968 Beatles album best known by its pure white cover art. But Manson was obsessed with that album, and told his followers it was the Beatles’ way of sending coded messages to the Manson family , warning them of the upcoming race war apocalypse (which he called “helter skelter,” after one of their songs). It’s part of what inspired him to tell his followers to kill the “pigs” on the weekend of August 8.

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.)

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.”

And she revisits the connection in the last sentence of the essay: “Quite often I reflect on the big house in Hollywood [...] and on the fact that Roman Polanski and I are godparents to the same child, but writing has not yet helped me see what it means.”

“The White Album” viscerally recreates the anxiety of the period: not just Didion’s, but the country’s. It locates the nexus of that anxiety as the summer of 1969, and especially the Tate murders. And while the country would go on to try to make sense of Manson and the murders in the coming months and years — people have been trying to make sense of them ever since — Didion suggests, in the end, that it’s an impossible task.

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On Self-Respect: Joan Didion’s 1961 Essay from the Pages of Vogue

Joan Didion , author, journalist, and style icon, died today after a prolonged illness. She was 87 years old. Here, in its original layout, is Didion’s seminal essay “Self-respect: Its Source, Its Power,” which was first published in Vogue in 1961, and which was republished as “On Self-Respect” in the author’s 1968 collection, Slouching Towards Bethlehem. Didion wrote the essay as the magazine was going to press, to fill the space left after another writer did not produce a piece on the same subject. She wrote it not to a word count or a line count, but to an exact character count.

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Once, in a dry season, I wrote in large letters across two pages of a notebook that innocence ends when one is stripped of the delusion that one likes oneself. Although now, some years later, I marvel that a mind on the outs with itself should have nonetheless made painstaking record of its every tremor, I recall with embarrassing clarity the flavor of those particular ashes. It was a matter of misplaced self-respect.

I had not been elected to Phi Beta Kappa. This failure could scarcely have been more predictable or less ambiguous (I simply did not have the grades), but I was unnerved by it; I had somehow thought myself a kind of academic Raskolnikov, curiously exempt from the cause-effect relationships that hampered others. Although the situation must have had even then the approximate tragic stature of Scott Fitzgerald's failure to become president of the Princeton Triangle Club, the day that I did not make Phi Beta Kappa nevertheless marked the end of something, and innocence may well be the word for it. I lost the conviction that lights would always turn green for me, the pleasant certainty that those rather passive virtues which had won me approval as a child automatically guaranteed me not only Phi Beta Kappa keys but happiness, honour, and the love of a good man (preferably a cross between Humphrey Bogart in Casablanca and one of the Murchisons in a proxy fight); lost a certain touching faith in the totem power of good manners, clean hair, and proven competence on the Stanford-Binet scale. To such doubtful amulets had my self-respect been pinned, and I faced myself that day with the nonplussed wonder of someone who has come across a vampire and found no garlands of garlic at hand.

Although to be driven back upon oneself is an uneasy affair at best, rather like trying to cross a border with borrowed credentials, it seems to me now the one condition necessary to the beginnings of real self-respect. Most of our platitudes notwithstanding, self-deception remains the most difficult deception. The charms that work on others count for nothing in that devastatingly well-lit back alley where one keeps assignations with oneself: no winning smiles will do here, no prettily drawn lists of good intentions. With the desperate agility of a crooked faro dealer who spots Bat Masterson about to cut himself into the game, one shuffles flashily but in vain through one's marked cards—the kindness done for the wrong reason, the apparent triumph which had involved no real effort, the seemingly heroic act into which one had been shamed. 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 O'Hara, is something that people with courage can do without.

To do without self-respect, on the other hand, is to be an unwilling audience of one to an interminable home movie that documents one's failings, both real and imagined, with fresh footage spliced in for each screening. There’s the glass you broke in anger, there's the hurt on X's face; watch now, this next scene, the night Y came back from Houston, see how you muff this one. To live without self-respect is to lie awake some night, beyond the reach of warm milk, phenobarbital, and the sleeping hand on the coverlet, counting up the sins of commission and omission, the trusts betrayed, the promises subtly broken, the gifts irrevocably wasted through sloth or cowardice or carelessness. However long we postpone it, we eventually lie down alone in that notoriously un- comfortable bed, the one we make ourselves. Whether or not we sleep in it depends, of course, on whether or not we respect ourselves.

Joan Didion

To protest that some fairly improbable people, some people who could not possibly respect themselves, seem to sleep easily enough is to miss the point entirely, as surely as those people miss it who think that self-respect has necessarily to do with not having safety pins in one's underwear. There is a common superstition that "self-respect" is a kind of charm against snakes, something that keeps those who have it locked in some unblighted Eden, out of strange beds, ambivalent conversations, and trouble in general. It does not at all. It has nothing to do with the face of things, but concerns instead a separate peace, a private reconciliation. Although the careless, suicidal Julian English in Appointment in Samarra and the careless, incurably dishonest Jordan Baker in The Great Gatsby seem equally improbable candidates for self-respect, Jordan Baker had it, Julian English did not. With that genius for accommodation more often seen in women than in men, Jordan took her own measure, made her own peace, avoided threats to that peace: "I hate careless people," she told Nick Carraway. "It takes two to make an accident."

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Like Jordan Baker, people with self-respect have the courage of their mistakes. They know the price of things. If they choose to commit adultery, they do not then go running, in an access of bad conscience, to receive absolution from the wronged parties; nor do they complain unduly of the unfairness, the undeserved embarrassment, of being named corespondent. If they choose to forego their work—say it is screenwriting—in favor of sitting around the Algonquin bar, they do not then wonder bitterly why the Hacketts, and not they, did Anne Frank.

In brief, people with self-respect exhibit a certain toughness, a kind of moral nerve; they display what was once called character, a quality which, although approved in the abstract, sometimes loses ground to other, more instantly negotiable virtues. The measure of its slipping prestige is that one tends to think of it only in connection with homely children and with United States senators who have been defeated, preferably in the primary, for re-election. Nonetheless, character—the willingness to accept responsibility for one's own life—is the source from which self-respect springs.

Self-respect is something that our grandparents, whether or not they had it, knew all about. They had instilled in them, young, a certain discipline, the sense that one lives by doing things one does not particularly want to do, by putting fears and doubts to one side, by weighing immediate comforts against the possibility of larger, even intangible, comforts. It seemed to the nineteenth century admirable, but not remarkable, that Chinese Gordon put on a clean white suit and held Khartoum against the Mahdi; it did not seem unjust that the way to free land in California involved death and difficulty and dirt. In a diary kept during the winter of 1846, an emigrating twelve-year-old named Narcissa Cornwall noted coolly: "Father was busy reading and did not notice that the house was being filled with strange Indians until Mother spoke about it." Even lacking any clue as to what Mother said, one can scarcely fail to be impressed by the entire incident: the father reading, the Indians filing in, the mother choosing the words that would not alarm, the child duly recording the event and noting further that those particular Indians were not, "fortunately for us," hostile. Indians were simply part of the donnée.

In one guise or another, Indians always are. Again, it is a question of recognizing that anything worth having has its price. People who respect themselves are willing to accept the risk that the Indians will be hostile, that the venture will go bankrupt, that the liaison may not turn out to be one in which every day is a holiday because you’re married to me. They are willing to invest something of themselves; they may not play at all, but when they do play, they know the odds.

That kind of self-respect is a discipline, a habit of mind that can never be faked but can be developed, trained, coaxed forth. It was once suggested to me that, as an antidote to crying, I put my head in a paper bag. As it happens, there is a sound physiological reason, something to do with oxygen, for doing exactly that, but the psychological effect alone is incalculable: it is difficult in the extreme to continue fancying oneself Cathy in Wuthering Heights with one's head in a Food Fair bag. There is a similar case for all the small disciplines, unimportant in themselves; imagine maintaining any kind of swoon, commiserative or carnal, in a cold shower.

But those small disciplines are valuable only insofar as they represent larger ones. To say that Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton is not to say that Napoleon might have been saved by a crash program in cricket; to give formal dinners in the rain forest would be pointless did not the candlelight flickering on the liana call forth deeper, stronger disciplines, values instilled long before. It is a kind of ritual, helping us to remember who and what we are. In order to remember it, one must have known it.

To have that sense of one's intrinsic worth which, for better or for worse, constitutes self-respect, is potentially to have everything: the ability to discriminate, to love and to remain indifferent. To lack it is to be locked within oneself, paradoxically incapable of either love or indifference. If we do not respect ourselves, we are on the one hand forced to despise those who have so few resources as to consort with us, so little perception as to remain blind to our fatal weaknesses. On the other, we are peculiarly in thrall to everyone we see, curiously determined to live out—since our self-image is untenable—their false notions of us. We flatter ourselves by thinking this compulsion to please others an attractive trait: a gift for imaginative empathy, evidence of our willingness to give. Of course we will play Francesca to Paolo, Brett Ashley to Jake, Helen Keller to anyone's Annie Sullivan: no expectation is too misplaced, no rôle too ludicrous. At the mercy of those we can not but hold in contempt, we play rôles doomed to failure before they are begun, each defeat generating fresh despair at the necessity of divining and meeting the next demand made upon us.

It is the phenomenon sometimes called alienation from self. In its advanced stages, we no longer answer the telephone, because someone might want something; that we could say no without drowning in self-reproach is an idea alien to this game. Every encounter demands too much, tears the nerves, drains the will, and the spectre of something as small as an unanswered letter arouses such disproportionate guilt that one's sanity becomes an object of speculation among one's acquaintances. 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. Without it, one eventually discovers the final turn of the screw: one runs away to find oneself, and finds no one at home.

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Eating And Health
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Food History & Culture

The far out history of how hippie food spread across america.

Menaka Wilhelm

Despite the disbanding of communes and the persistence of capitalism, culinary contributions from hippies have not only endured, but helped set the framework for the way we eat today. Evening Standard/Getty Images hide caption

Despite the disbanding of communes and the persistence of capitalism, culinary contributions from hippies have not only endured, but helped set the framework for the way we eat today.

Frustrated with the Vietnam War, The Man, and the general state of the nation, hippies set out to do everything differently. They founded rural communes, dabbled in psychedelics and cultivated a laissez-faire approach to personal hygiene. But, like everyone else in the world, they had to eat.

Mainstream fare — Wonder Bread and frozen vegetables — clashed with their politics. So they explored and invented new foods, then enthusiastically shared their creations. And despite the disbanding of communes and the persistence of capitalism, many of those culinary contributions were long lasting. Jonathan Kauffman's new book, Hippie Food: How Back-to-the-Landers, Longhairs and Revolutionaries Changed the Way We Eat, follows the people and places throughout the country that brought organic vegetables and whole wheat bread into the counterculture, and then, eventually, mainstream supermarkets.

Growing up in Indiana, Kauffman was raised on hippie food. Early exposure to carob didn't turn him away from the cuisine; he still delights in the atmosphere of food co-ops. "There's this smell that's always the same, I'm not able to pinpoint what it is, but it's a mix of bulk spices, essential oils, roast coffee," he says. "It just makes me feel at home."

Around a decade ago, Kauffman started to wonder where the roots of health food stores and vegetarianism led. So he took up this project alongside his day job as a food reporter at the San Francisco Chronicle . For the past five years, he's rifled through old alternative newspapers, studied archives — including one dedicated to soy alone — and interviewed hippie organizers and cooks. His research left him with a fascinating picture of what longhairs ate and where they got it.

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The earliest influences on counterculture cuisine cropped up before most hippies were even born. The Seventh Day Adventist Church pushed followers toward a vegetarian diet in the late 1800s, reaching pockets of people in the Midwest and Northeast. And on European communes in the early 1900s, naturmenschen , or natural men and women, eschewed meat and embraced free love.

One naturmensch , Arnold Ehret, brought his life-reform principles to Los Angeles in 1914. He espoused a "mucusless" diet, essentially fruits and vegetables with the occasional slice of toasted bread. And his approach took hold among an early cadre of people hoping to look young and beautiful forever: the Hollywood film industry. Southern California became the first hotbed of health food proselytizers, complete with specialized groceries and restaurants hawking juice, sprouts and avocados. While these foods laid the groundwork for a new approach to nutrition, they were a bit brighter than the meals that reached the first hippie plates.

The grub that initially fueled the hippie movement, macrobiotics, was similar to the grain bowls on offer today, but not as Instagram-ready. The founder of the macrobiotics movement, George Ohsawa, left Japan for America in 1960. He advocated a balance of dietary yin and yang, and plenty of brown rice, in his book, Zen Macrobiotics . Macrobiotics quickly took off in hippie circles in Boston and New York. "Counterculture kids picked it up in the late '60s, so they were basically reinterpreting Japanese peasant food through the lens of 20-year-olds who didn't know how to cook," Kauffman says.

Culinary experimentation was widespread, and flavor wasn't always the first consideration. In 1967, Joan Didion's essay, Slouching Towards Bethlehem, followed young hippies in San Francisco. "Roots and things," one woman told Didion, while someone else cooked up a batch of seaweed in the kitchen. "You can eat them."

The Rise Of Mock Meat: How Its Story Reflects America's Ever-Changing Values

The prioritization of nutrition and vegetarian protein, coupled with a DIY ethos that prized self-sufficiency, also made it difficult to make truly delicious food, at first. Early organic carrots in Vermont came out of the ground blackened and small. Tennessee commune tables featured soybean tortillas and grayish tofu stir-fries. Other snacks were even worse. "The wonderfoods smoothies that they were concocting back then had molasses and skim milk and brewers yeast and wheat germ and, sometimes, raw eggs," says Kauffman.

Understandably, many reactions to hippie food involved nose wrinkling, but that didn't stop the hippies. They shared books, held lectures, published newspapers filled with writing and recipes. They started cooperative houses and businesses where they collectively decided to do things their own way. Kauffman encountered one grocery in Austin, Texas, that did its accounting by the phases of the moon. Most importantly, they hitchhiked around the country. Hippie travelers spread ideas far and wide, as fast as van wheels could roll.

Mollie Katzen, who wrote The Moosewood Cookbook , invented The Enchanted Broccoli Forest, a cheesy brown rice casserole topped with broccoli spears standing upright in the pan to resemble trees. Tracy Wood/NPR hide caption

Mollie Katzen, who wrote The Moosewood Cookbook , invented The Enchanted Broccoli Forest, a cheesy brown rice casserole topped with broccoli spears standing upright in the pan to resemble trees.

Eventually, cooks in the '70s brought a little more levity to the table. Incorporating international seasonings as well as more dairy, books like The Vegetarian Epicure and The Moosewood Cookbook began to feature tastier meatless food. Around that time, Mollie Katzen, who wrote The Moosewood Cookbook , invented The Enchanted Broccoli Forest , a cheesy brown rice casserole topped with broccoli spears standing upright in the pan to resemble trees. Tastier than the bare-bones macrobiotic fare of earlier years, The Enchanted Broccoli Forest was whimsical, and also heartier. In an effort to make more enticing food, dishes did sometimes feature gratuitous substitutions in place of meat. "Some of the world's culinary glories were reduced to puddles of melted cheese," Kauffman writes.

Fifty years later, the trial and error of the '60s and '70s can seem far away, but so many of these foods are still around. They've just wriggled free of their once-smelly reputations. Weightlifters wax poetic about brown rice, and Gwyneth Paltrow recommends cashew cream. In many ways, discerning eaters today reach for the same goals they did in the 1930s. "We're still chasing after this mix of beauty and vitality and miracle transformation that just feels so American to me," Kauffman says.

So next time you see a shopping cart that features gluten-free ingredients or organic vegetables for a Whole30 recipe, consider the hippies that first found their way to those foods. They didn't succeed at rebuilding society or the economy. But, as they built and shared a cuisine that stretched beyond beige, mushy meals, they laid the foundation for the way we eat today.

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What We Get Wrong About Joan Didion

In the spring of 1967, Joan Didion and John Gregory Dunne, freelance writers married to each other and living in Los Angeles, were engaged to write a regular column for the Saturday Evening Post . This was a good gig. The space they had to fill was neither long nor short—about twelve hundred words, a gallop larger than the Comment that opens this magazine. The Post paid them well, and Didion and Dunne each had to file one piece a month. The column, called “Points West,” entailed their visiting a place of West Coast interest, interviewing a few people or no people, and composing a dispatch. Didion wrote one column about touring Alcatraz, another on the general secretary of a small Marxist-Leninist group. The Post was struggling to stay afloat (it went under two years later), and that chaos let the new columnists shimmy unorthodox ideas past their desperate editors. Didion’s first effort was a dispatch from her parents’ house. A few weeks later, her “Points West” was about wandering Newport, Rhode Island. (“Newport is curiously Western,” she announced in the piece, sounding awfully like a writer trying to get away with something.) The column work left time for other projects, and Didion spent the spring through September of 1967 on a ten-thousand-word assignment about the hippie movement, the rest on a novel she’d been struggling with. At some point, an editor suggested that she had the makings of a collection, so she stacked her columns with past articles she liked (a report from Hawaii, the best of some self-help columns she’d churned out while a junior editor at Vogue ), set them in a canny order with a three-paragraph introduction, and sent them off. This was “ Slouching Towards Bethlehem ,” her first nonfiction book. It has claims to being the most influential essay collection of the past sixty years.

Didion, now eighty-six, has been an object of fascination ever since, boosted by the black-lace renaissance she experienced after publishing “ The Year of Magical Thinking ” (2005), her raw and ruminative account of the months following Dunne’s sudden death. Generally, writers who hold readers’ imaginations across decades do so because there’s something unsolved in their project, something that doesn’t square and thus seems subject to the realm of magic. In Didion’s case, a disconnect appears between the jobber-like shape of her writing life—a shape she often emphasizes in descriptions of her working habits—and the forms that emerged as the work accrued. For all her success, Didion was seventy before she finished a nonfiction book that was not drawn from newsstand-magazine assignments. She and Dunne started doing that work with an eye to covering the bills, and then a little more. (Their Post rates allowed them to rent a tumbledown Hollywood mansion, buy a banana-colored Corvette Stingray, raise a child, and dine well.) And yet the mosaic-like nonfiction books that Didion produced are the opposite of jobber books, or market-pitched books, or even useful, fibrous, admirably executed books. These are strange books, unusually shaped. They changed the way that journalistic storytelling and analysis were done.

Because a sentence of Didion is unmistakable, people often presume that her advances were in prose style. The opening of the “Slouching Towards Bethlehem” collection announced her voice:

The San Bernardino Valley lies only an hour east of Los Angeles by the San Bernardino Freeway but is in certain ways an alien place: not the coastal California of the subtropical twilights and the soft westerlies off the Pacific but a harsher California, haunted by the Mojave just beyond the mountains, devastated by the hot dry Santa Ana wind that comes down through the passes at 100 miles an hour and whines through the eucalyptus windbreaks and works on the nerves.

There’s the entwining of sensuous and ominous images. And there’s the fine, tight verbal detail work: the vowel suspensions (“ways an alien place”), the ricocheting consonants (“harsher . . . haunted . . . Mojave”), the softly anagrammatic games of sound (“subtropical twilights and the soft westerlies”). Didion worked hard at her sentences, and no magazine journalist has done better than her best. But style is just the baseline of good writing. Didion’s innovation was something else.

Most writers of nonfiction operate in the sphere of high craft: like a silversmith producing teapots, they work to create elevated and distinctive versions of known objects. A master will produce a range of creative variations, yet the teapots always remain teapots, and the marks of individuation rise from a shared language of form and technique. Didion’s nonfiction was produced in that craftwork tradition, but it operates more in the sphere of art: it declares its own terms and vernacular, and, if successful, conveys meaning in a way that transcends its parts.

The title essay of her second collection, “ The White Album ” (1979), offers the clearest glimpse of how that reimagination happens. The heart of the essay is a cluster of “Points West” columns: brief reports on protests at San Francisco State, a Huey Newton press conference, a studio visit with the Doors—her normal craftwork as a working writer. When composing the “White Album” essay, Didion lined those pieces up like flagstones in a path. Together, she knew, they had to tell a bigger story, because they came from the same place (coastal California) in the same time (1968) and from the same vantage (hers). But what was the story?

To figure it out, Didion started adding stones from elsewhere in the quarry: circumstances surrounding the production of the newsstand columns, details from her home life. She included an extract from a psychological evaluation she’d had that summer. (“The Rorschach record is interpreted as describing a personality in process of deterioration with abundant signs of failing defenses.”) She wrote about remembering a line by Ezra Pound on the drive to report at San Francisco State. She threaded these bits with what she called flash cuts, scene changes separated by space breaks; in other words, she started with the craft part—the polished sentences, the tidy magazine page—and built outward, collaging what was already published with what wasn’t, reframing and rejuxtaposing what had been previously pinned in pristine prose. This process of redigesting published craftwork into art is how Didion shaped her nonfiction books for fifty years. It made her farseeing, and a thorny voice about the way public stories were told.

The prickliness of Didion’s project was on my mind as I read her new collection, “ Let Me Tell You What I Mean ” (Knopf). “New” here refers mostly to the state of the binding, because the newest thing that Didion contributed is twenty years old. The foreword, very fruitful, is by Hilton Als . The volume’s keystone is a few “Points West” columns from 1968 which she in some cases had collaged into previous books but which have not been reprinted in their original, stand-alone form until now. In that sense, “Let Me Tell You What I Mean” is less a selected essays than a rejected essays, a director’s un-cut of her older work. Traditionally, this is the sort of collection squeezed out by itchy heirs after an author’s death.

Dog with assault rifle in its mouth startles humans.

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It’s happy news, then, that the book still offers some familiar pleasures. The earliest columns, from the late sixties, remain crisp and engaging on the page (not a given for late-sixties writing). Other essays, such as a piece on the photographer Robert Mapplethorpe, from 1989, are, if not exactly urgent, nice to have around. Didion stopped publishing new material in 2011, a silence that’s well earned but bittersweet in light of recent events, and “Let Me Tell You What I Mean” is meant to summon the old feelings. Yet the book ends up a study in the limits of Didion’s prose, because its parts, for all their elegance, don’t make a whole. Devoted readers will find the book unrecognizable as a Didion collection in any real sense.

To understand why, it is useful to go back to the summer of 1967, when Didion was writing her report on the hippies—the title essay of “Slouching Towards Bethlehem.” The late-sixties youth movements purported to be about community and coming together, but Didion saw them as a symptom of a shared society unravelling and public communication breaking down. (The title comes from a Yeats poem that begins, “Turning and turning in the widening gyre / The falcon cannot hear the falconer.”) “It was the first time I had dealt directly and flatly with the evidence of atomization,” she later explained. Struggling to describe this dissolution, she decided to express the problem structurally. The hippie essay, written as a series of pruned scenes from the Haight-Ashbury separated by breaks, marked her first true use of flash cuts.

The piece “failed to suggest that I was talking about something more general than a handful of children wearing mandalas on their foreheads,” Didion later wrote. But the concept of atomization, and the collage technique, stuck. When Didion was gathering essays for her first collection, she did something notable with a piece she called “Los Angeles Notebook.” She took one of her “Points West” columns, about the Santa Ana wind, and put a flash cut after it. She lopped off the opening to a critics piece she’d written on books by Helen Gurley Brown and dropped that in, followed by another cut. In this way, she built a new essay from the wholes and bits of old material, tracing out flares of life around Los Angeles in the mid-sixties. They were part of one story, but, crucially, they did not connect.

Didion had spent four years failing to write a novel called “ Play It as It Lays .” What she disliked in the work in progress, about an actress in Los Angeles, was that it smelled of “novel”; everything seemed formed and directed in a way that was untrue to life. In 1969, after reworking the “Los Angeles Notebook” essay, Didion saw how to make the novel work. “Play It as It Lays” (1970) is commonly said to be about anomie, but more specifically it’s about a world in insular pieces, of characters trapped in their Hollywood realms. (Didion envisioned a novel of tight scenes, consumed in a single sitting—a book written as a movie, in other words, and thus caged within the storytelling rhythms of the industry.) The novel’s short chapters, some of them less than a page, change vantage and jump characters among disparate spheres using freeways and white space. “I played and replayed these scenes and others like them, composed them as if for the camera, trying to find some order, a pattern. I found none,” one of her characters says. “Play It as It Lays” was Didion’s first fiction of atomization.

Didion went on to use the collage technique to assemble the long pieces in “The White Album” and the books that followed, reconsidering her own published craftwork and later bringing that scrutiny to texts produced by other people. Where she saw evidence of atomization in American society, she made efforts to push back.

“The only American newspapers that do not leave me in the grip of a profound physical conviction that the oxygen has been cut off from my brain tissue, very probably by an Associated Press wire, are the Wall Street Journal , the Los Angeles Free Press , the Los Angeles Open City , and the East Village Other ,” Didion wrote in a “Points West” column from 1968 which opens the new collection. She likes the alternative press not because it’s good or useful (“I have never read anything I needed to know in an underground paper”) but because it breaks past a communication barrier. These papers assume that the reader “will understand if they talk to him straight; this assumption of a shared language and a common ethic lends their reports a considerable cogency of style.”

Shared language and a common ethic are precisely what Didion had noticed coming apart in the supposedly liberated togetherness of the late sixties. And the problem, in her view, did not fade when the love beads went away. In “ Insider Baseball ,” her influential piece for The New York Review of Books , born of tagging along with the Presidential campaigns of 1988, she argued that the so-called “democratic process” had become unlinked from the people it was supposed to speak to and for:

Access to it is correctly limited to its own professionals, to those who manage policy and those who report on it, to those who run the polls and those who quote them, to those who ask and those who answer the questions on the Sunday shows, to the media consultants, to the columnists, to the issues advisers, to those who give off-the-record breakfasts and to those who attend them; to that handful of insiders who invent, year in and year out, the narrative of public life.

Politics had come to be programming produced for élites, by élites, in a bubble disconnected from others. If this warning seemed eccentric on the eve of electing an institutional Vice-President and, four years later, the Man from Hope, it does not seem so today. The problem Didion first identified in 1967 has been treated as a revelation in recent years.

Her position as a disaffected insider—hanging out with the Doors but crying foul on the Summer of Love, writing for the newsstand but declaiming its idiocy—made her an aggressive contrarian. In fact, her recent canonization notwithstanding, Didion spent most of her career as a magnet for daggers in the letters columns. “Between Joan Didion and me it is still a missed connection,” a reader complained in 1969, responding to a Life column she wrote for a while (abortively, owing to its unpopularity with editors). In The New York Review of Books a decade later: “Evidently where Joan Didion lives problems of love and psyche evaporate in a haze of margaritas by age twenty-one and folks can get down to the real business of living.”

That was in response to a searing broadside against the films of Woody Allen which Didion published in 1979. Allen had recently released “Annie Hall” and “Manhattan,” reaching his peak of appeal among people likely to read essays by Joan Didion in The New York Review of Books . She objected to the films’ urbane-sounding references (“the false and desperate knowingness of the smartest kid in the class”), and she was annoyed by characters’ superficial-seeming efforts to be deep (“They share sodas, and wonder ‘what love is’ ”). In Didion’s view, Allen’s movies were a simpleminded person’s idea of a smart person’s picture. She was needling her readers, naturally, but the objection also shows a lot about her narrative intelligence and about the way she should be read.

If atomization is one of the key concepts in Didion’s work, another is what she came to call “sentimentality”: belief in a story with a preordained shape and an emotional logic. That kind of storytelling was everywhere in America, she thought. And it was insidious, because it allowed destructive ideas to sneak in underneath the petticoats of right-thinking endeavors. One of the columns in the new collection picks apart a meeting of Gamblers Anonymous. What irked Didion was that although the meeting seemed to be about taking responsibility, it actually refracted blame. “I thought that it was simply the predilection of many of the members to dwell upon how ‘powerless’ they were, how buffeted by forces beyond their control,” she wrote. “There was a great deal of talk about miracles, and Higher Presences, and a Power Greater Than Ourselves”—prefab sentimental stories that let gamblers avoid seeing things squarely. Done well, contrarianism is based on the idea that what matters isn’t which team colors you wear but which goal the ball lands in when you kick it. Didion did it well and, as with the hippies , traced how a moment of supposed healing spun toward delusion and drove people farther apart.

Atomization and sentimentality exacerbate each other, after all: you break the bridges of connection across society, and then give each island a fairy tale about its uniqueness. Didion was interested in how that happens. One of her most frequently read essays is a late-sixties account of loving and leaving New York, “Goodbye to All That.” It tends to be remembered as a half-trite paean to a white-collar New York youth, a kind of classed-up precursor to the “ Emily in Paris ” Weltanschauung. Yet the essay’s actual point is astringent. New Yorkers’ mythology about their city’s sophistication and specialness, Didion suggested, was another sentimental narrative. She had found her place in town by embracing that view, but outgrew it in time—“at some point the golden rhythm was broken, and I am not that young any more,” she wrote. And so she moved to Los Angeles, where the grownups live.

This claim for California as a stronghold of urbanity and groundedness was contrary, even petulant. Didion had grown up in Sacramento and began her reporting from California at a moment when the national narrative of the West Coast—what went on there, what it meant—was shaped by editors and emissaries from New York. (That hasn’t changed.) But, where the Eastern press had decided that California stood for futurism, beaches, lush life, and togetherness, Didion insisted on a California of dusty houses, dry inland landscapes, fires and snakes, and social alienation. Like her contemporary the Bay Area poet Robert Hass, she was obsessed with the motions of mind but shy of abstractions; both realized that what is often called “the world of ideas” is vulnerable to tendentious manipulation. And so they pinned their ideas to details of landscape: this realization fixed to this tree, or the sight of the Bevatron at night, that one to a jasmine-covered porch—the Northern California style of intellection. What this meant was that thinking was an experiential process that emerged in movement from place to place—in the flash cuts—and you didn’t need a sentimental narrative in order to give it sense, as you did in New York.

Didion left the city in 1964, but this remained her perception when she returned twenty-four years later:

The insistent sentimentalization of experience . . . is not new in New York. A preference for broad strokes, for the distortion and flattening of character, and for the reduction of events to narrative, has been for well over a hundred years the heart of the way the city presents itself: Lady Liberty, huddled masses, ticker-tape parades, heroes, gutters, bright lights, broken hearts, eight million stories in the naked city; eight million stories and all the same story, each devised to obscure not only the city’s actual tensions of race and class but also, more significantly, the civic and commercial arrangements that rendered those tensions irreconcilable.

Man walks past movie theater called “Neurotoplex” that plays movies about neuroses.

This description of “distortion and flattening,” of reducing life to recognizable story lines, is from “ New York: Sentimental Journeys ,” a study of the Central Park jogger case that Didion wrote, in 1991, for The New York Review of Books . The case—in which a twenty-eight-year-old female banker was brutalized and raped and five youths of color were convicted, and then, decades later, exonerated—became a Rorschach blot, with some people (largely white) seeing a city “systematically ruined, violated, raped by its underclass” and others (largely of color) seeing a city “in which the powerless had been systematically ruined, violated, raped by the powerful.”

Didion saw something else: a city victimized by decades of fatuous thinking and poor planning. New York, she thought, had clung to sentimental narratives about melting pots and special opportunities—“the assurance that the world is knowable, even flat, and New York its center, its motor, its dangerous but vital ‘energy’ ”—to the extent of being blind to the fraying of its civic and economic fibre. In crisis, New Yorkers simply doubled down, appointing heroes or villains in the jogger case, trying to keep the fairy tale aloft. “Sentimental Journeys” was a controversial piece when it appeared, yet it offered a frame for New York’s dramas over the next three decades. Even more important, it insisted on a link between the fate of a society and the way that its stories were told.

What it meant to be a writer—imaginatively and morally—had interested Didion since she spent her teen-age years retyping Hemingway sentences, trying to understand the way they worked. Fifty years later, she wrote about his afterlives in “ Last Words ,” an essay for this magazine condemning the publication of books that Hemingway had deemed incomplete. To edit a dead author’s near-finished work for publication, Didion thought, was to assume that he or she was playing by the usual rules. But it was precisely not working in this consensus realm that made great artists great.

A common criticism of Didion suggests that the peppering of her prose with proper nouns (the Bendel’s black wool challis dress, the Grès perfume) is somehow unserious. (For whatever reason, these complaints usually come from men.) But the correct way to understand this impulse is in the lineage of front writing. As Adam Gopnik has noted in these pages, it is Hemingway who’s forever telling you which wines to enjoy while fighting in Spain, how to take your brasserie coffee—how to make his particular yours. Didion feminized that way of writing, pushing against the postwar idea that women writers were obliged to be either mini Virginia Woolfs, mincing abstractions from the parlor, or Shulamith Firestones, raging for liberation. Part of what Didion took from Hemingway, by her account, was a mind-set of “romantic individualism,” “looking but not joining,” and a commitment to the details that gave distinctiveness and precision to that outside view. A trip to the Royal Hawaiian in the midst of a rocky marriage, the right soap to pack for a reporting trip while your husband stays with the baby: in Didion’s work, these were as important in their hard details as Hemingway’s crabe mexicaine and Sancerre at Prunier. Hemingway mythologized his authorial life style so well that generations of writers longed to live and work his way. Didion saw what he was doing, and appropriated the technique.

Yet what made the modernists daring was sometimes a weak point of their endeavor: the writing doesn’t always let readers know how it wants to be read. Hemingway’s theory was that if you, the writer, could reduce what you saw in your imagination to the igniting gestures and images—don’t elaborate why you feel sad about your marriage ending; just nail the image of the burning farmhouse that launched you on that train of thought—then you could get readers’ minds to make the same turns at the same intersections, and convey the world more immersively than through exposition. He explained his theory rarely and badly (hence the endless rancid chestnuts about lean prose, laconic dialogue, and crossing important things out), but Didion didn’t miss the point. “When I talk about pictures in my mind I am talking, quite specifically, about images that shimmer around the edges. . . . The picture tells you how to arrange the words and the arrangement of the words tells you, or tells me, what’s going on in the picture,” she noted, in “Why I Write.” And yet she added in signposts Hemingway left out. A first-rate Didion piece explains its terms as it goes, as if the manual were part of the main text. She is perpetually on guard about saying stuff either not clearly enough (the title “Let Me Tell You What I Mean” emerges from her work) or so clearly as to be subject to “distortion and flattening,” and thus untrue to what she means.

“I wanted not a window on the world but the world itself. I wanted everything in the picture” is how she puts it in “Telling Stories,” an essay from 1978 included in the new collection. She is explaining why she lost, or maybe never had, a desire to write salable short stories—tightly constructed pieces hung on a “little epiphany.” For her, the key to capturing life on the page without the usual sort of reduction, she says in the same essay, was figuring out how to use the first person across time.

Didion’s “I” ended up nearly as known as Hemingway’s “and,” and carries the same mixed blessing of being caricatured more than characterized. The caricature has Didion as a histrionic oversharer—a kind of literary Tori Spelling. Yet her reasons for embracing the “I” were mostly technical. You had to let readers know who you were and where your camera stood, she thought. It meant that Didion was always in her own crosshairs, and eventually turned the contrarian impulse on herself.

One of the commonest motifs in Didion’s writing is, bizarrely, Oregon Trail-type survivalism. She had been taught that those who colonized California were “the adventurous, the restless, and the daring.” She had been raised to believe that, as her mother put it, California was now “too regulated, too taxed, too expensive.” In “ Where I Was From ” (2003), she finally put this origin story of heroic, contrary individualism under the glass.

Didion built the book in her usual way, setting down reported articles and weaving in flashes of personal context. What created California economically and politically, she showed, was actually constant support from the East-reaching web of American society, industry, and, especially, the federal government. “The sheer geographical isolation of different parts of the state tended to obscure the elementary fact of its interrelatedness,” she wrote. The refusal to acknowledge this public interrelatedness, to insist on the determining value of the personal, the private, and the exceptional, had been California’s fragmenting delusion, and her own. I suspect that “Where I Was From” is among the least read of Didion’s nonfiction books, which is unfortunate, because it’s her “Gatsby”: the book in which she scrutinized her most basic ideas of heroic particularism and found that she had not escaped “the blinkering effect of the local dreamtime.” That’s a moving thing for a writer to acknowledge, and a hard one. The final sentences of the book are Didion’s suggestion that she’s not quite ready, in her life, to give the sentimental story up.

The intense burst of mythologizing that attended Didion’s books about the deaths of her husband (“The Year of Magical Thinking”) and her daughter (“ Blue Nights ,” from 2011) arrived, then, with a certain weirdness. One can now order something called a “Didion dress,” modelled on her late-sixties wardrobe. Not long ago, in a bookshop, I came across a Picador Modern Classics edition of “Slouching Towards Bethlehem” shrunk down to pocket size, presumably to be carried in the way that certain people carry miniature versions of the Bible or the Constitution. I tried and failed to think of a writer who’d treat such a thing more mercilessly than the author of that book.

An artist who has spent years doing the work on her own terms should not look fashionability in the mouth. But it is odd to find Didion embraced by the world of mainstream sentimental thinking which she charged against for decades. One wonders whether the fans for whom she’s now an Instagram totem, or the many journalists who claim her, realize that she cast her career toward challenging precepts and paragons like theirs.

It matters only because everything matters. Didion once wrote, “Style is character,” and, because the phrase has seemed to apply to her life and work, it often gets quoted to mean that character comes down to nothing more than style. But the line, which appears in an essay about Georgia O’Keeffe, is actually about the burden of creative choice. “Every choice one made alone—every word chosen or rejected, every brush stroke laid or not laid down—betrayed one’s character,” Didion wrote. Reducing the world, as on the canvas or the page, is a process of foreclosing on its fullness, choosing this way and not that one, and how you make those choices reveals everything about the person that you are. Didion praised O’Keeffe for “hardness” in trying to render in art what sensible people told her was unrenderable. “ ‘The men’ believed it was impossible to paint New York, so Georgia O’Keeffe painted New York,” she wrote. She was impressed by O’Keeffe’s snubbing of those who received her work devotedly but unseriously: “This is a woman who in 1939 could advise her admirers that they were missing her point, that their appreciation of her famous flowers was merely sentimental.” And she lauded O’Keeffe’s frank engagement with her time. “She is simply hard, a straight shooter, a woman clean of received wisdom and open to what she sees,” Didion wrote, and she meant it, too. ♦

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Joan Didion

Joan Didion is a renowned American author known for her distinctive literary style and insightful observations on American culture and society. Born on December 5, 1934, in Sacramento, California, Didion's writing career has spanned several decades, and she has made a significant impact on the world of literature. Her works encompass a wide range of genres, including novels, essays, and memoirs, and she is celebrated for her keen insight into the human condition.

Didion's writing is characterized by its precise and incisive prose, as well as its introspective and often deeply personal nature. One of her most famous works, "The Year of Magical Thinking," is a memoir that delves into the complexities of grief and mourning following the death of her husband. In this poignant and deeply moving book, Didion explores the raw emotions and psychological turmoil that accompany loss, offering a profound and intimate reflection on the human experience.

In addition to her exploration of personal experiences, Didion's essays often provide a thought-provoking commentary on broader social and political issues. Her collection "Slouching Towards Bethlehem" is a prime example of her ability to capture the ethos of a particular time and place, offering a compelling portrait of 1960s America. Through her astute observations and eloquent prose, Didion paints a vivid picture of the cultural landscape of the era, addressing topics such as countercultural movements, the music scene, and the shifting values of American society.

Moreover, Didion's novels, such as "Play It as It Lays" and "A Book of Common Prayer," showcase her talent for creating complex and emotionally resonant characters, as well as her ability to craft compelling narratives that delve into the human psyche. Her writing style, characterized by its spare and evocative language, has earned her widespread acclaim and cemented her status as a literary icon.

In conclusion, Joan Didion's profound influence on literature and her unique ability to blend personal introspection with astute social commentary have solidified her reputation as one of America's most distinguished writers. Her evocative prose, incisive insights, and unflinching exploration of the human experience continue to captivate readers and inspire writers around the world. Joan Didion's literary legacy is a testament to the enduring power of storytelling and the profound impact of a writer who fearlessly confronts the complexities of life and society.

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Santa Ana Winds are Meaningful to Authors Joan Didion in the Santa Ana and Linda Thomas in In Brush Fire

The Santa Ana Winds, a hot and dry wind that sweeps through Southern California, have long been a source of inspiration for authors. These powerful winds, which typically occur in the fall and winter months, have a profound impact on the landscape and the people who live in the region. For many authors, the Santa Ana Winds serve as a metaphor for change, transformation, and the unpredictability of life. One of the most famous literary references to the Santa Ana Winds can be found in Raymond Chandler's novel "Red Wind." In this classic detective story, Chandler uses the winds as a backdrop for a tale of murder and intrigue. The Santa Ana Winds are described as a force of nature that brings out the worst in people, stirring up emotions and causing chaos. Chandler's vivid descriptions of the winds create a sense of foreboding and tension that permeates the entire novel. Another author who has explored the significance of the Santa Ana Winds is Joan Didion. In her essay "Los Angeles Notebook," Didion reflects on the impact of the winds on the city of Los Angeles and its residents. She describes how the winds can make people feel restless, irritable, and on edge. Didion suggests that the Santa Ana Winds have a way of exposing the underlying tensions and anxieties that exist beneath the surface of everyday life. For many authors, the Santa Ana Winds symbolize a time of transition and upheaval. The winds are often associated with wildfires, which can destroy homes, landscapes, and lives. In literature, the Santa Ana Winds are frequently used to foreshadow dramatic events or to create a sense of unease and uncertainty. Whether they are portrayed as a destructive force or a catalyst for change, the Santa Ana Winds hold a special significance for authors seeking to explore themes of transformation and renewal. In conclusion, the Santa Ana Winds are a powerful and evocative symbol that have captured the imagination of authors for generations. From Raymond Chandler to Joan Didion, writers have used the winds to explore themes of change, unpredictability, and the darker aspects of human nature. Whether they are seen as a destructive force or a harbinger of transformation, the Santa Ana Winds continue to hold a special place in the literary landscape of Southern California....

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Summary Of Slouching Toward Bethlehem By Joan Didion

Joan Didion's essay collection "Slouching Towards Bethlehem" offers a poignant exploration of American society in the 1960s, particularly focusing on the cultural upheavals and existential anxieties of the era. Through a series of essays written with her signature blend of razor-sharp observation and introspective reflection, Didion delves into various facets of American life, from the hippie counterculture to the disillusionment of the suburban middle class. One of the central themes of "Slouching Towards Bethlehem" is the breakdown of traditional values and institutions in postwar America. Didion vividly portrays the disintegration of the American Dream, revealing the disillusionment and alienation felt by many individuals in the face of social and political turmoil. Through her keen eye for detail, she captures the sense of dislocation and uncertainty that permeated American society during this period of rapid change. Another key focus of Didion's essays is the rise of the counterculture and its impact on American youth. She provides an insider's perspective on the hippie movement, offering insights into the motivations and beliefs of its adherents. Didion's portrayal of the hippie lifestyle is both sympathetic and critical, highlighting the contradictions and idealism of the era. She delves into the drug culture, communal living experiments, and the quest for authenticity that characterized the countercultural movement. Moreover, "Slouching Towards Bethlehem" also explores themes of identity, belonging, and the search for meaning in a fractured world. Didion reflects on her own experiences as a young woman coming of age in the tumultuous 1960s, grappling with questions of identity and purpose. Through her vivid prose and evocative imagery, she captures the sense of unease and existential angst that pervaded the era, offering readers a window into the inner lives of those struggling to find their place in a rapidly changing society. In conclusion, "Slouching Towards Bethlehem" is a powerful and incisive exploration of America in the 1960s. Through her masterful storytelling and keen insight, Joan Didion paints a vivid portrait of a nation in flux, grappling with the legacy of its past and the uncertainties of its future. Her essays continue to resonate with readers today, offering timeless reflections on the human condition and the enduring quest for meaning and belonging....

Summary Of Morality By Joan Didion

In Joan Didion's essay "Morality," she delves into the complexities and nuances of morality, exploring how individuals grapple with their own moral codes in the face of life's uncertainties. Didion begins by recounting a personal anecdote involving her decision to return a wallet she found, pondering the motivations behind her actions and the moral implications therein. Through this anecdote, Didion sets the stage for a broader discussion on the subjective nature of morality and the often conflicting desires of self-interest and altruism. Throughout the essay, Didion reflects on the inherent contradictions within human morality, highlighting how individuals may adhere to moral principles in some instances while rationalizing away their moral obligations in others. She explores the concept of moral relativism, acknowledging that what one person deems as morally acceptable may differ from another's perspective. This notion of moral ambiguity is further underscored by Didion's examination of societal norms and expectations, which can often cloud individuals' judgments and lead to moral compromise. Moreover, Didion suggests that moral dilemmas are not confined to grandiose ethical quandaries but are woven into the fabric of everyday life. She emphasizes the importance of personal integrity and the need for individuals to confront their own moral inconsistencies, even in seemingly trivial matters. Through introspection and self-awareness, Didion suggests that individuals can strive towards a more coherent moral framework, aligning their actions with their professed values. In conclusion, Joan Didion's essay "Morality" offers a thought-provoking exploration of the complexities inherent in human moral decision-making. By weaving personal anecdotes with philosophical reflections, Didion invites readers to confront their own moral ambiguities and grapple with the elusive nature of right and wrong. Ultimately, "Morality" serves as a poignant reminder of the enduring struggle to navigate the moral landscape of existence with integrity and conviction....

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Analysis Of Why I Write By Joan Didion

Analysis of "Why I Write" by Joan Didion Joan Didion's essay "Why I Write" delves into the intricacies of the writing process and explores the motivations behind her own compulsion to write. Throughout the essay, Didion reflects on her personal experiences and observations, offering profound insights into the nature of creativity and the writer's psyche. One of the central themes in Didion's essay is the idea of writing as a form of self-exploration and understanding. She describes how writing allows her to make sense of her thoughts and emotions, serving as a tool for introspection and reflection. For Didion, writing is not merely a means of communication but a way to navigate the complexities of the human experience and make sense of the world around her. Moreover, Didion acknowledges the role of insecurity and doubt in the writing process. She confesses to feeling uncertain about her abilities as a writer, grappling with self-doubt and fear of failure. Despite these challenges, Didion finds solace in the act of writing itself, recognizing that the process is inherently cathartic and transformative. Writing becomes a form of therapy, allowing her to confront her fears and insecurities head-on. Additionally, Didion explores the power of language and its ability to shape our understanding of reality. She emphasizes the importance of precision and clarity in writing, noting how the choice of words can profoundly impact the reader's perception. Through her meticulous attention to detail and vivid imagery, Didion creates a sense of immediacy and intimacy, drawing the reader into her world and inviting them to share in her experiences. In conclusion, "Why I Write" offers a profound exploration of the motivations behind the act of writing. Through her introspective reflections and keen observations, Joan Didion provides valuable insights into the creative process and the enduring allure of storytelling. Ultimately, the essay serves as a testament to the transformative power of writing and its ability to illuminate the human condition....

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Analysis Of Joan Didion's In Bed

Analysis of Joan Didion's "In Bed" Joan Didion's essay "In Bed" offers a poignant exploration of the intimate space where illness intersects with the human experience. Through the lens of her own struggles with migraines and vertigo, Didion delves into the physical and emotional realities of being confined to bed. In her typically introspective style, Didion reflects on the vulnerability and isolation inherent in illness. She grapples with the loss of control over her own body and the sense of helplessness that accompanies it. Through her vivid descriptions, she invites readers into the disorienting world of chronic illness, where even the most mundane tasks become monumental challenges. One of the most striking aspects of Didion's essay is her candid portrayal of the impact of illness on relationships. She describes the way in which her illness disrupts the rhythm of her marriage, creating distance and tension between herself and her husband. This raw portrayal challenges the romanticized notion of caregiving, exposing the strain that chronic illness can place on even the strongest of bonds. Didion also explores the intersection of illness and creativity, reflecting on the ways in which her physical limitations shape her writing process. She acknowledges the temptation to romanticize her suffering, but ultimately rejects it in favor of a more honest portrayal. Through her willingness to confront the messy, uncomfortable realities of illness, Didion offers a powerful meditation on the human condition. "In Bed" is a testament to Didion's mastery of the personal essay form. With her keen observational eye and unflinching honesty, she invites readers to confront their own mortality and grapple with the complexities of the human experience. In a world that often seeks to sanitize and idealize illness, Didion's work serves as a vital reminder of the messy, painful reality that lies beneath the surface....

Marrying Absurd By Joan Didion

In her essay "Marrying Absurd," Joan Didion explores the phenomenon of quick, impersonal weddings in Las Vegas. Didion delves into the culture surrounding these hasty unions, highlighting the absurdity of the entire process. She paints a picture of a city where marriage is reduced to a mere transaction, devoid of any real meaning or significance. Didion begins by describing the various wedding chapels in Las Vegas, each offering a different theme or package deal to entice couples to tie the knot. From Elvis impersonators to drive-thru ceremonies, the options are endless and often comical. The ease with which one can get married in Las Vegas is both shocking and amusing to Didion, who sees it as a reflection of the city's overall ethos of instant gratification and superficiality. The author goes on to discuss the motivations behind these impromptu weddings, noting that many couples choose to get married in Las Vegas for the sake of convenience or as a spur-of-the-moment decision. The lack of any real commitment or emotional investment in these marriages is evident, as couples often treat the ceremony as a joke or a form of entertainment. Didion questions the validity of such unions, wondering if they hold any true value or if they are simply a way for people to escape their mundane lives for a brief moment. Ultimately, Didion concludes that the absurdity of marrying in Las Vegas lies in the fact that it reduces a sacred and meaningful institution to a mere spectacle. The lack of seriousness and reverence for marriage in this setting is a stark contrast to the traditional values associated with such a commitment. By shedding light on the frivolity and superficiality of these quick weddings, Didion forces the reader to question the true nature of love and marriage in a society that values instant gratification and spectacle above all else....

Joan Didion On Keeping A Notebook

Joan Didion's essay "On Keeping a Notebook" delves into the intricacies and importance of journaling as a tool for memory, observation, and self-reflection. Didion's distinctive voice and keen observations offer insights into the significance of documenting life's experiences, both mundane and profound, within the pages of a notebook. In her essay, Didion emphasizes the role of the notebook as a repository for capturing fleeting moments and preserving the essence of the past. She suggests that through the act of writing down seemingly inconsequential details, one can unearth deeper meanings and connections that may otherwise be overlooked. Didion views the notebook as a canvas for exploring the nuances of human experience and understanding the complexities of the world around us. Moreover, Didion discusses how keeping a notebook serves as a form of therapy, allowing individuals to confront their thoughts and emotions in a private space. She argues that writing offers a sense of control and agency in a chaotic and unpredictable world. By articulating their innermost thoughts and feelings on paper, individuals can gain clarity and perspective, ultimately fostering a deeper understanding of themselves and their place in the world. Additionally, Didion reflects on the transformative power of hindsight that comes with revisiting past entries in a notebook. She contends that rereading old notes can evoke a sense of nostalgia and illuminate the ways in which one has evolved over time. By revisiting past experiences through the lens of the present, individuals can gain valuable insights into their personal growth and development. Overall, Didion's essay on keeping a notebook serves as a poignant reminder of the importance of introspection and self-expression. Through the act of writing, individuals can cultivate a deeper understanding of themselves and the world around them, while also preserving the fleeting moments that shape their lives. As Didion aptly concludes, "We are not thinking machines, we are feeling machines that think."...

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What Is The Tone Of Los Angeles Notebook By Joan Didion

Los Angeles, often referred to as the City of Angels, is a place that exudes a unique and diverse tone. This sprawling metropolis is a melting pot of cultures, lifestyles, and opportunities, which all contribute to the overall tone of the city. The tone of Los Angeles can be described as vibrant, eclectic, and fast-paced, reflecting the dynamic nature of the city and its inhabitants. One of the defining characteristics of the tone of Los Angeles is its vibrancy. The city is known for its lively atmosphere, with bustling streets, vibrant neighborhoods, and a constant buzz of activity. From the iconic Hollywood sign to the colorful street art that adorns the city's walls, there is a sense of energy and excitement that permeates the air in Los Angeles. This vibrancy is reflected in the city's diverse population, which includes people from all walks of life and backgrounds, contributing to the rich tapestry of cultures that make up the fabric of Los Angeles. In addition to its vibrancy, the tone of Los Angeles is also characterized by its eclecticism. The city is a patchwork of different neighborhoods, each with its own unique personality and charm. From the trendy boutiques of Beverly Hills to the bohemian vibes of Silver Lake, there is a place for everyone in Los Angeles. This diversity is also reflected in the city's food scene, which offers a wide range of culinary delights from around the world. Whether you're craving authentic Mexican tacos or gourmet sushi, you can find it all in Los Angeles, making it a true melting pot of flavors and cultures. Finally, the tone of Los Angeles can be described as fast-paced. The city is always on the move, with a constant stream of traffic, events, and opportunities. From the bustling film industry to the thriving tech scene, there is always something happening in Los Angeles. This fast-paced lifestyle can be both exhilarating and exhausting, as residents navigate the hustle and bustle of city life. Despite the frenetic pace, there is also a sense of laid-back California cool that permeates the city, reminding residents to take a moment to relax and enjoy the sunshine. In conclusion, the tone of Los Angeles is a complex and multifaceted one, reflecting the diverse and dynamic nature of the city itself. From its vibrant energy to its eclectic charm and fast-paced lifestyle, Los Angeles is a place that never fails to captivate and inspire. Whether you're a visitor or a resident, there is something for everyone in the City of Angels, making it a truly unique and unforgettable place to experience....

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Joan Didion and the case against hippies
In 1967 Joan Didion went to San Francisco to cover the hippy scene in Haight Ashbury. After spending weeks hanging out with the hippies and flower people, she didn't feel she 'had' the story, but she filed it anyway, and the essay became a classic of New Journalism and a famous takedown of vacuous spirituality, called 'Slouching Towards Bethlehem'.
Read 12 Masterful Essays by Joan Didion for Free Online, Spanning Her
The essay appears in 1967's Slouching Towards Bethlehem, a representative text of the literary nonfiction of the sixties alongside the work of John McPhee, Terry Southern, Tom Wolfe, and Hunter S. Thompson.In Didion's case, the emphasis must be decidedly on the literary—her essays are as skillfully and imaginatively ...
Slouching Towards Bethlehem
In her transformative essay from 1967, Joan Didion takes a closer look at the dark side of the Haight-Ashbury counterculture during the Summer of Love. ... of the District. Nor was it clear to the press, which at varying levels of competence continued to report "the hippie phenomenon" as an extended panty raid; an artistic avant-garde led ...
The Radicalization of Joan Didion
August 17, 2015. Didion in Golden Gate Park, San Francisco, in April, 1967, reporting the story that became "Slouching Towards Bethlehem." "That piece is a blank for me," she said later ...
Slouching Towards Bethlehem: Joan Didion on 1960s Subculture
Photo Credit: Alchetron. "The center was not holding," Didion wrote in 1967, opening what is now the iconic essay "Slouching Towards Bethlehem.". In the spring and summer of that year, Didion paid frequent visits to the Haights-Ashbury neighborhood of San Francisco—a microcosm of the "social hemorrhaging" that was then sweeping ...
The Adult Amid the Hippies: Why You Should Read Joan Didion's Early Essays
Early last fall, I read Slouching Towards Bethlehem and The White Album, the first two collections of essays of writer Joan Didion. As my emails to my friend Dan and jottings inside the books attest, I was impressed by not only their literary style but also their content. Here was an American original. Alas, on December 23, Ms. Didion died, at ...
What Joan Didion Saw
Didion reported on the hippies—they're the subject of the title essay of "Slouching Towards Bethlehem," which created a technique, later germane to her fiction, of telling a story through ...
The Cult of Saint Joan
The Cult of Saint Joan. In 1979, as a young and intrepid critic, I devoted my books column in The New Leader to Joan Didion's "The White Album. " The essay took a stand against the adulation ...
Joan Didion's radical curiosity
I n the spring of 1967 Joan Didion was gathering material for an essay on the hippie movement. In Haight-Ashbury, a neighbourhood in San Francisco, a man named Otto promised to show her something ...
Joan Didion: A guide to five of her most influential books
A collection of essays about California in the '60s, her work explores the beauty and the ugliness of the decade, from the hippy community of San Francisco's Haight Ashbury to a woman accused of ...
Beyond the Books: Joan Didion's Essays, Profiles and Criticism
Dec. 23, 2021. Joan Didion, who died on Thursday at 87, is best known for her essay collections — " Slouching Towards Bethlehem," " The White Album " and " After Henry," to name a ...
Joan Didion : essays & conversations : Free Download, Borrow, and
Joan Didion : essays & conversations Bookreader Item Preview ... Didion, Joan; Friedman, Ellen G., 1944- Autocrop_version ..17_books-serials-20230720-.3 Bookplateleaf 0010 Boxid IA41280509 Camera USB PTP Class Camera External-identifier urn:lcp:joandidionessays0000unse:epub:cba7e8db-dfe6-4581-b986-9e81a83db510 ...
Joan Didion dead at 87: Essential books, essays to read now
Joan Didion, who died Thursday at 87, produced decades' worth of memorable work across genres and subjects: personal essays, reporting and criticism on pop culture, political dispatches from at ...
Joan Didion's Magic Trick
Joan Didion's greatest essay is "Goodbye to All That." It's about the excitement and intoxication of being young in New York, from the moment she got off the plane "and some instinct ...
The making of Joan Didion: From fuzzy facts to peerless prose
Joan Didion died on December 23, 2021, and by Christmas internet searches were returning page after page of obituaries that described her as a "peerless prose stylist.". She has long been celebrated as a journalist, essayist, novelist and memoirist, and plaudits like "peerless prose stylist" began in the early 1970s, especially when Tom ...
Joan Didion and the Opposite of Magical Thinking
A sentence meant as an indictment has transformed into personal credo. The same goes for "magical thinking.". Magical thinking is a disorder of thought. It sees causality where there is none ...
How Joan Didion the Writer Became Joan Didion the Legend
Joan Didion arrived in Los Angeles in 1964 on the way to becoming one of the most important writers of her generation. ... about the hippie scene in the Haight] because I had not been able to work ...
How the Manson murders changed Hollywood, according to Joan Didion
As Joan Didion wrote in her essay "The White Album," the title piece of her 1979 collection, "Many people I know in Los Angeles believe that the Sixties ended abruptly on August 9, 1969 ...
On Self-Respect: Joan Didion's 1961 Essay from the Pages of
December 23, 2021. Joan Didion, author, journalist, and style icon, died today after a prolonged illness. She was 87 years old. Here, in its original layout, is Didion's seminal essay "Self ...
The Far Out History Of How Hippie Food Spread Across America
In 1967, Joan Didion's essay, Slouching Towards Bethlehem, followed young hippies in San Francisco. "Roots and things," one woman told Didion, while someone else cooked up a batch of seaweed in ...
What We Get Wrong About Joan Didion
In the spring of 1967, Joan Didion and John Gregory Dunne, ... The hippie essay, written as a series of pruned scenes from the Haight-Ashbury separated by breaks, marked her first true use of ...
Joan Didion
Joan Didion (/ ˈ d ɪ d i ən /; December 5, 1934 - December 23, 2021) was an American writer and journalist.She is considered one of the pioneers of New Journalism, along with Gay Talese, Hunter S. Thompson, and Tom Wolfe. [2] [3] [4]Didion's career began in the 1950s after she won an essay contest sponsored by Vogue magazine. [5] She would go on to publish essays in The Saturday Evening ...
Joan Didion (377 words)
Didion's portrayal of the hippie lifestyle is both sympathetic and critical, highlighting the contradictions and idealism of the era. She delves into the drug culture, communal living experiments, and the quest for authenticity that characterized the countercultural movement. ... Joan Didion's essay "On Keeping a Notebook" delves into the ...

Read 12 Masterful Essays by Joan Didion for Free Online, Spanning Her Career From 1965 to 2013

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