The White Album (urspr publ 1979; utgåvan 1990)

This is the second time I have read this book, the first being almost 40 years ago. It still moves me. ( )

it is nice when anyone can eloquently transcribe their thoughts. ( )

I initially only wanted to read Joan Didion's essays because she covers Los Angeles of the late 1960s, at the time of the Cielo Drive murders: 'I remember all of the day’s misinformation very clearly, and I also remember this, and wish I did not: I remember that no one was surprised'. But there are also a lot of other random subjects, from Hollywood to Hawaii, shopping malls and traffic systems, the Hoover Dam and piping water into the arid landscape of California. I enjoyed 'The White Album' and the personal details in her writing - 'I want you to understand exactly what you are getting: you are getting a woman who for some time now has felt radically separated from most of the ideas that seem to interest other people' - but did start skim-reading through some of the other articles. ( )

I like that Joan Didion, like Tom Wolfe, never pretends to play it cool: she is stuffy, neurotic, often out of place. And I like narrative accounts of the sixties and seventies, always, but her efficiency alienates me. At times she managed to be so succinct, so precise, I was blown away, but most of the time (!) I just didn't care. Like Play It As It Lays this is a very, very dry read and one that alienated me more than it awed me. And no sense of humor whatsoever! Come on! ( )

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



We tell ourselves stories in order to live.

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

In what would probably be the middle of my life I wanted still to believe in the narrative and in the narrative’s intelligibility, but to know that one could change the sense with every cut was to begin to perceive the experience as rather more electrical than ethical. ( )