The White Album
Didion's essays on the late sixties in California, when the stories people lived by fell apart.
Joan Didion’s 1979 collection of essays on California and America in the late 1960s and 1970s. She writes about the Manson murders, the Black Panthers, the Doors, the women’s movement, shopping malls and her own breakdown, and opens with the line We tell ourselves stories in order to live. The pieces capture a time when the old stories stopped making sense.
Recommended by 1 Person
Steven Amsterdam
The book could have been anything, from celebrity worship to offbeat cool, but her deadpan observations and her staccato organisation of the facts manage to cut in between. As a distillation of the moment, it works like the movie Nashville: critically observant, fabulously detached and just a bit mesmerised and horrified by the chaos.
Interview · November 2012
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