White Album

Nora says: I was prompted to re-read Didion after hearing of her passing, and am once again moved by her intellect, her observations, her style. The White Album is a great place to start if you haven't read her non-fiction yet. Critics have pointed to the pieces on the sixties and James Jones' Hawaii as prime examples of her idiosyncratic style , but for my money, Many Mansions (Ronald Reagan's failed Governor's mansion project) and Quiet Days In Malibu (orchid breeding), are right up there!

"Didion is an original journalistic talent who can strike at the heart, or the absurdity, of a matter in our contemporary wasteland with quick, graceful strokes." –San Francisco Chronicle

"We tell ourselves stories in order to live . . . We interpret what we see, select the most workable of the multiple choices. We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images . . . Or at least we do for a while."

First published in 1979, The White Album is a mosaic—of people, places, events—from the late 1960s and 1970s. Among other artifacts and personalities from those years, it includes the dark journeys and impulses of the Manson family, a Black Panther Party press conference, portraits of Doris Lessing and Georgia O'Keeffe, the romance of water in an arid landscape, and a visit to the disorienting city of Bogota—a varied and vibrant portrait of the times as seen through Joan Didion's clear-eyed perspective. With commanding sureness of mood and language, she exposes the realities and dreams of that age of self discovery whose spiritual center was California.