We Tell Ourselves Stories in Order to Live: Collected Nonfiction

by Joan Didion, John Leonard (Introduction)

Joan Didion’s incomparable and distinctive essays and journalism are admired for their acute, incisive observations and their spare, elegant style. Now the seven books of nonfiction that appeared between 1968 and 2003 have been brought together into one thrilling collection.

Slouching Towards Bethlehem captures the counterculture of the sixties, its mood and lifestyle, as symbolized by California, Joan Baez, Haight-Ashbury. The White Album covers the revolutionary politics and the “contemporary wasteland” of the late sixties and early seventies, in pieces on the Manson family, the Black Panthers, and Hollywood. Salvador is a riveting look at the social and political landscape of civil war. Miami exposes the secret role this largely Latin city played in the Cold War, from the Bay of Pigs through Watergate. In After Henry Didion reports on the Reagans, Patty Hearst, and the Central Park jogger case. The eight essays in Political Fictions–on censorship in the media, Gingrich, Clinton, Starr, and “compassionate conservatism,” among others–show us how we got to the political scene of today. And in Where I Was From Didion shows that California was never the land of the golden dream.

Genres: Nonfiction, Essays, Memoir, Short Stories, Journalism, Classics, Biography

1122 pages, Hardcover

First published October 17, 2006

About the author

Joan Didion 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.
Didion's career began in the 1950s after she won an essay contest sponsored by Vogue magazine. Over the course of her career, Didion wrote essays for many magazines, including The Saturday Evening Post, Life, Esquire, The New York Review of Books and The New Yorker. Her writing during the 1960s through the late 1970s engaged audiences in the realities of the counterculture of the 1960s, the Hollywood lifestyle, and the history and culture of California. Didion's political writing in the 1980s and 1990s often concentrated on the subtext of political rhetoric and the United States's foreign policy in Latin America. In 1991, she wrote the earliest mainstream media article to suggest the Central Park Five had been wrongfully convicted. In 2005, Didion won the National Book Award for Nonfiction and was a finalist for both the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Pulitzer Prize for The Year of Magical Thinking, a memoir of the year following the death of her husband, writer John Gregory Dunne. She later adapted the book into a play that premiered on Broadway in 2007. In 2013, she was awarded the National Humanities Medal by president Barack Obama. Didion was profiled in the Netflix documentary The Center Will Not Hold, directed by her nephew Griffin Dunne, in 2017.

Reviews

[Jake · Rating 5 out of 5]

Joan Didion is the Shakespeare of things that don't quite add up. Situations where what's being said and what's being done are at odds and places where the postcard picture hides ugly, painful truths. Her non-fiction is the opposite of easy reading: the sentences uncurl slowly, and sometimes you don't quite know where she's taking a paragraph or a page until the last few words, when suddenly everything stabs into focus. And given the length of this book (1122 pages), the time-span it covers (forty plus years), the enormous geography (an incomplete list: New York, California, Mexico, Hawaii, El Salvador, Miami, Washington), and the range of subjects (crime, politics, hydrology, civil war, personal history, social history, and more), you might expect it to be a difficult read. But you'd be wrong. Didion is engaging start to finish, as good a writer at 75 as she was at 35, or vice-versa. I'm not sure if there's any subject she could make dull- if one exists, it's been omitted here. And at the end of it, you feel like she has held up a mirror to our times: fractured, weird, often unhappy, but ultimately worth having lived.

[Darwin8u · Rating 5 out of 5]

We look for the sermon in the suicide, for the social or moral lesson in the murder of five.



We interpret what we see, select the most workable of the multiple choices. We live entirely... 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.
― Joan Didion

Having just finished Political Fictions, I have now killed this 1122 pg collection of Joan Didion's nonfiction (Slouching Towards Bethlehem through Where I Was From). This Everyman's Library collection contains seven of her works of nonfiction. Rather than review this collection as a whole, I'll just say it is brilliant and point my fair readers toward my seven sub-collection reviews:

1. Slouching Towards Bethlehem
2. The White Album
3. Salvador
4. Miami
5. After Henry
6. Political Fictions
7. Where I was From

Also, since it is a collection of Didion nonfiction that spans 1968 to 2003 it obviously doesn't include:

A. Fixed Ideas: America Since 9.11, 2003; or
B. The Year of Magical Thinking, 2005; or
C. Blue Nights, 2011.

As of this writing, I've read The Year of Magical Thinking (this was my first Didion ever).

[David · Rating 3 out of 5]

This big fat collection clocks in at over 1100 pages and comprises the seven books of Didion's nonfiction that appeared between 1968 and 2003. These are

Slouching Towards Bethlehem
The White Album
Salvador
Miami
After Henry
Political Fictions
Where I Was From

What can I add to what's already been said about Joan Didion's writing? The standard review cliches come to mind - spare, taut, elegant, polished, not a word out of place.

All true. And yet, I admire these pieces, but I don't love them. There's a coldness at the core of Didion's writing that terrifies me. She regards everything within her line of vision (herself included) with unflinching, unforgiving clarity and delivers her verdict. Nothing ever really measures up. Reading these pieces exhausts me.

I recommend this collection, but only in small doses.

[Tessa · Rating 5 out of 5]

My soulmate is a 74 year old woman.

[M · Rating 5 out of 5]

I am almost done with this tome of non-fiction from one of my favorite writers. Before this book, I had only read The Year of Magical Thinking (which I *loved*) but Didion had always held a certain fascination for me because I had the hugest crush on Ed O'Brien of Radiohead for the longest time and he said Joan Didion was his favorite writer and his dream woman. So of course I set about finding out who this lady was, and whether she was worthy of this praise. :) The crush has long since faded (though I still think he's dreamy) but my crush on Didion continues unabated. This collection is a particular gift to lazy types like myself; I know I would have found it such a pain to acquire all of her non-fiction separately, and in chronological order, so I'm very glad Everyman did it for me. My favorite essays so far include "On Self-Respect", "Goodbye to all That", "In the Islands" and "Pacific Distances", but really it's like picking a favorite child. Some essays do nothing for me, but I still love the way they're written. So... yeah. Read Didion.

[ALLEN · Rating 5 out of 5]

This now twelve-year-old volume from the Everyman's Library is a kind of summa of Joan Didion's nonfiction writing, gathering eight of her prior collections including Slouching Toward Bethlehem, The White Album, and After Henry and covering such topics as Ronald Reagan's then-new mansion, the "aqueous suspension of personality" obtainable in covered shopping malls, and the exploits of politicians as disparate as Jesse Jackson and Newt Gingrich. At over eleven hundred pages, hardbound, it's a real "chest-crusher" as one of my GR friends calls it, but it's indispensable and comes at a good price. If you are interested in 20th Century writing, particularly American writing, this is a must-have.

[Anne Walbridge · Rating 5 out of 5]

Joan Joan Joan! God the woman can write! Some of her essays get a little tiresome as she tries to shock, but you have to remember she was writing them back in the '70s.

[James Murphy · Rating 5 out of 5]

Joan Didion earns respect as one of the important writers of our time. I hadn't read a lot of her work, more fiction than nonfiction, as it turned out, and so I dived into We Tell Ourselves Stories in Order to Live because we read artistry in order to read well. This huge book contains all of Didion's nonfiction up to 2003. Her last 3 books appeared after this publication. I had read only Slouching Towards Bethlehem before and am still besotted with it, think it the most impressive of the works reprinted here. Though she always writes well, she wrote best at her beginning. And that 1st book most resembles what I admire particularly, a collection of essays. Maybe it's a truth that she writes best about California. The book's last work is 2003's Where I Was From which is a family memoir heavily reflective on the inherent qualities of California. In between are books on Central America, the Reagans, an extended portrait of Miami, and reportage on the national politics of the 1990s. These middle works didn't always rivet my attention: El Salvador and Miami are probably much-changed since her portraits, the politics of the Clinton years seem like inconsequential history when read against today's ominous headlines. What's always up-to-date with Didion is the fine quality of her writing. She writes with such acute observation and analysis that she'll blow the buttons right off your shirt. I'm impressed enough to feel her last 3 books--The Year of Magical Thinking, Blue Nights, and South and West--are readings I don't want to miss.

[Aric Cushing]

Incredible. The nonfiction piece 'Dreamers of the Golden Dream' I have read over and over through the years. An incredible depiction of California desert life, and the 'true crime' murder of a dentist. I cannot do it justice here because I am writing quickly, but this POSITIVELY is a MUST READ, if not just for the first nonfiction piece in this voluminous collection.

[Pascal Vanenburg · Rating 5 out of 5]

Als ik al een minpunt kan bedenken van deze bundel, dan is het dat het begint met Kruipend naar Bethlehem (Slouching Towards Bethlehem) dat direct zulke hoge verwachtingen schept dat het bijna oneerlijk is voor alles wat erna komt. Gelukkig stelt Didion werkelijk geen moment teleur. Neem alleen al het briljante The White Album, om maar iets te noemen. Elke zin die ze schrijft is even mooi. Joan Didion bezit de gave om je volledig mee te sleuren in haar verhaal, soms zonder dat je weet waar het nou precies over gaat, om je vervolgens aan het eind haarfijn te wijzen op wat er volgens haar mis is met de maatschappij (of met zichzelf, ze spaart ook haar eigen ego niet), dit alles zonder ook maar een enkele keer belerend of hautain over te komen. Dit was mijn eerste kennismaking met Didion en na deze bundel wil ik alles lezen wat ze ooit op papier heeft gezet.

[Will · Rating 4 out of 5]

Soms wil ik Joan even over haar rug aaien.

[Plo]

Voelt ongepast om Joan Didion met sterren te beoordelen. Zij is van een andere orde. 👸🏼

[Tuesday · Rating 3 out of 5]

JOAN DIDION (1934-2021)

This morning a real writer, a poet who wrote prose, died. I hope peacefully so, and not by herself, though lord knows. I would go to her funeral if it wasn’t so far away. Never met her in person, seen her on the page, on screen. I am a fan: who feels like a student of her work. She is someone whose advice I diligently follow. She elucidated an identifiable tone, a lens to perceive with. I, too, have typed up Hemingway’s sentences. I bought a mass market paperback of Conrad’s Victory. By speaking out about her process, she has validated my compulsion to re-type everything, to spend the time to get back into the rhythm of the sentences. Her way of being was to stay hungry and alert. I’ve read her work but cannot recall sentences: just images. If it doesn’t stick it is because it has gone directly to the unconscious. We were better off with her in the world. I’d rather think of the life of a writer when I’m not living it. She was an artist who photographed with words. She sketched as she sequenced, practicing the form again and again, accruing a certain patina before performing it once more, straight through. Her voice is there with me whenever I’m editing a piece. This ambiguous loss really feels like losing a loved one. I’m grieving for someone I never knew but knew existed. You know the feeling. She’s all I could think of today: the dominating presence. But fortunate for us she has left a body of work behind her. I’m not planning to return to it immediately. I wait until it feels right, feels necessary to plunge. I can only bring myself to forfeit my attention to what matters to me at any given moment. Form leads my decision making process more than content. I want language that fires up my brain, sends shivers up the spine. I adore those who are patient, and aren't afraid of assuming first-person singular. It all seems so simple to those who don’t actively do it. The true effect of her work is to give other writer’s courage. Stand where you are and say what you see with style. Replace thinking with thoughts that feel—what does that even mean? She wrote despite the nothingness, never against or with it. She worked alongside it, “as a journalist,” Mr. Als said. Every now and then a train flashed past and she caught a glimpse of it and found a way to make meaning out of history. She was what it looked like when introverts extroverted. She lived for the next; for the right word. She, someone who counted, was someone who counted. Long ago the flowers had been laid at her feet. I read her and thought, “Yes. This is how things are for me too. I thought we were supposed to repress all that. But here we are." Now, when I re-read, I shall see how it was. When a star dies there is a black hole in the sky. I open up the book to page one and begin. Every time one reads one resuscitates a consciousness. As long as we keep reading, her essence remains alive. As long as we are thinking we remain standing in line. There is a high chance each of us might see those who’ve come before us leave. This is a part of being a human being. She was and is and will be loved by strangers. She gave us something to know her by. Read her! Then become your own teacher. Don’t live to tell stories; underestimate a single instant; stop paying deep yet distant attention. Write, write, or die. Die having written. Some of us write in order to live. Forget about stories: think, goddammit, think! It’s all about the words—the following sentence, the mood of a single paragraph. She taught as that by example. Like no one else this past century, I think, it was Joan Didion who best understood the ambiguous assignment hovering over each writer’s head. Her work will endure.

[David Gross · Rating 5 out of 5]

First, a disclaimer: having read Slouching Towards Bethlehem, The White Album, and Where I Was From before, I skipped those sections of the anthology and read the parts I hadn't seen before.

Joan Didion is a first-class writer and journalist, so much so that even reading today about the behind-the-scenes intrigues of a 25-year-old Los Angeles mayoral race remains gripping.

Her best journalistic virtue is not that she gets the scoop that nobody else gets, but that she reports the interesting things that all the reporters know but that they keep concealed because they would embarrass the reporters' fraternity or they wouldn't fit the formula or the reporters aren't savvy enough to know that what interests them would also interest their readers if only they knew how to convey it.

Not for her is "the genuflection toward 'fairness'"

...a familiar newsroom piety, in practice the excuse for a good deal of autopilot reporting and lazy thinking but in theory a benign ideal. ...[W]hat '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.

Didion doesn't passively report "what was said" at the press conference, but how the press conference came about, how the reporters came to be there, what they said amongst themselves, the things they decided not to report. She has an eye for the telling moment, against those who are content to be an amplifying or distorting medium for the message, who "prefer the theoretical to the observable, and [who] dismiss that which might be learned empirically as 'anecdotal.'"

If she has a fault, it's that the sophistication and ironic distance that give her the depth of field she needs to brutally criticize modern political campaigns or the bland hagiography of a Bob Woodward puts her out of her depth when she encounters a situation where earnest simplicity is more called for -- something she noticed when she tried to cover the civil war in El Salvador in the 1980s:

I knew how to interpret, the kind of inductive irony, the detail that was supposed to illustrate the story. As I wrote it down I realized that I was no longer much interested in this kind of irony, that this was a story that would not be illuminated by such details, that this was a story that would perhaps not be illuminated at all, that this was perhaps even less a "story" than a true noche obscura. As I waited to cross back over the Boulevard de los Heroes to the Camino Real I noticed soldiers herding a young civilian into a van, their guns at the boy's back, and I walked straight ahead, not wanting to see anything at all.

[David Anderson · Rating 4 out of 5]

By way of commentary, I can do no better than to direct everyone to this piece from The New Yorker, "Out of Bethlehem: The Radicalization of Joan Didion" by Louis Menand. Ostensibly a review of Tracy Daugherty’s "The Last Love Song" (St. Martin’s), a biography of Joan Didion, this article is really an overview of Didion's career and the evolution of her world view. http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/201...

The only thing I would like to add is this quote from John Leonard in his introduction to this collection: "...I have been trying forever to figure out why her sentences are better than mine and yours ... something about cadence. They come at you, if not from ambush, then in gnomic haikus, icepick laser beams, or waves. Even the space on the page around these sentences is more interesting than it ought to be, as if to square a sandbox for a Sphinx." Yes! This is what makes her prose so compelling. Even in the early pieces that make me distinctly uncomfortable, like her sensationalized portrayal of the counterculture, or the Black Panthers, or her (especially) wrong headed dismissal of radical feminism, I find it hard to shake off that prose and certainly will not forget it. Of course, this makes it all the more delicious when she turned her focus to the emptiness behind the traditional picture of the American Dream (especially California Style), to the dissection of US foreign policy in Central America, and to dismantling the Political Class in America and their media sycophants. It is the quality of her prose style that places her among the greats of the New Journalism, along side Hunter S. Thompson; it also makes me want to find the time to read some of her fiction.

[Margaret · Rating 4 out of 5]

We Tell Ourselves Stories in Order to Live is a collection of Didion's nonfiction work, including Slouching Towards Bethlehem, The White Album, Salvador, Miami, After Henry, Political Fictions, and Where I Was From, stopping in 2003 before the deaths of her husband and daughter. I got bogged down in the more historical and political essay collections and took a long break after Miami but picked it back up and finished reading.

Slouching Towards Bethlehem and The White Album are stellar, with Didion's sparse and biting prose describing the way of life and climate of the 1960's. Didion's essays on more personal topics, like keeping a journal, are insightful and interesting. Where I Was From comes back to this theme and is the later of Didion's work that I enjoyed best.

The more historical and political focused ones are less interesting. I'm not sure if I got bogged down in Didion's somewhat indignant tone or maybe the actions of the United States in the latter half of the 20th century are just going to be very depressing. In Political Fictions especially, with the focus American politics of the 1990's, Didion took a heavy hand in condemning those involved. It's justly deserved criticism, but lacks the variety in topic of some of Didion's other work.

I'm glad I stuck with this one, and Slouching Towards Bethlehem I would definitely read again.

[Jonathan · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is the last book to have rocked my world. Before this I'd only read "The White Album" and upon beginning this book I felt the same thrill that I felt discovering some of my other favorite authors, people like Harry Crews or Dennis Cooper.

Didion is quite unlike the writers I tend towards. She's much more a child of the New Yorker reading, grad school attending, fans of Saul Bellow and more recently David Foster Wallace set, if that makes sense to anyone besides myself. People consider her sparse. I consider her wordy, but in a good way. She's got a way for pentrating the blood/brain barrier with her sentences. Her non-fiction has a way of feeling like fiction and vice versa. She's got a way of summing up the crux of her stories with these haulting beautiful sentences that seem to come out of nowhere. I'd say that her story endings can feel a bit abrupt at times though.

Read this big fat book.

[Angie · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is the most amazingly clear writing that I've ever read. Didion writes what she observes, clearly and precisely. She doesn't use judgmental words, but since she writes so clearly about her subjects, we can get an idea of what she thinks about said subjects.
I'm not yet finished with this collection, but will tell you that as a younger baby boomer, reading "Slouching Toward Bethlehem" gave me a better, nonglamorous picture of the sixties than anything else I've ever read.
As an aspiring writer, this is someone I wish to emulate.

[Tiffany Conner · Rating 5 out of 5]

Ah, where to begin when it comes to Didion. I adore her. Plus, when she was younger she was totally smokin'! I sh*t you not. Go google some photos of the broad. Hottttttt! And intelligence. I'm a bigger sucker for intelligence.

I've read a few of the books in this collection on their own, but once this collected essay edition came out I peed my pants. All of this Didion in one place? It's like a dream come true for me.

[Peter · Rating 5 out of 5]

Just read another great essay, written in the 70's, on the development of shopping malls as pictures both of American ingenuity and the aimlessness of modern consumer culture (from The White Album). Her nonfiction continues to impress me.

[Stephanie Vatz · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book was a wonderful book to start 2022 with. Joan Didion is a sense of place, a raised eyebrow, a matter of fact. There are seven books here in one. Not all books or essays of hers are created equal but her essays on California, on politics, on herself and her family are all a delight.

I giggled at her wry humor, I cried at her gutting use of metaphor, I Google'd madly -- trying to gain updated information about her absurdly well-researched points on topics ranging from Central American politics to California land use to urban planning to 1980s politics to shopping mall design to the pull of the prison guard unions.

I'm so grateful to have this collection to revisit her and her California.

[Raimo Wirkkala · Rating 5 out of 5]

Joan Didion is simply the supreme essayist of American literature. Updike and Vidal, to name two others, were great; Didion is the best. This 'Didion Bible', as I've taken to calling it, comprises 7 books that, taken as a whole, are a glittering testament to this woman's courage, wit, empathy, and exquisite writing talent. Included here is "Political Fictions" which contains the most clear-eyed writing about US politics that I have ever come across. We may not see its like again. #sad.

[Len Buggenhout]

Wat valt er te zeggen. Haar verhalen mogen dan wel de late twintigste eeuw een spiegel voorhouden, ze lezen nog steeds alsof ze hard willen inbeuken op de staat van de wereld en onze moraal. Haar stijl is scherp, spitsvondig en nietsontziend. Deze Nederlandstalige bundeling bevat enkele van haar beroemdste essays, een paar memorabele columns en een aantal doorwrochte politieke analyses. Alles samen slechts een beperkte selectie uit haar omvangrijke oeuvre, maar niettemin de moeite waard.

[B · Rating 4 out of 5]

I hate to call this book a slog, but my god. At 1100+ pages and dense topics to cover, it took me a very, very long time to finish this anthology.

Didion is massively important to the American canon. I am rather ashamed I never read her before. That being said, while I would implore everyone to read her, I would caution against reading this. We Tell Ourselves Stories in Order to Live contains 7 of her books. While each one is an interesting compilation of articles, reading them all together over the span of 1.5 months was a lot, especially considering the depressing realities Didion is touching on.

Slouching Toward Bethlehem is an excellent collection of how the end of the 1960s rocked the nation. It touches on senseless crime, on drugs, on the listlessness that can set in.

The White Album becomes more of an introspective. Didion writes some personal essays, but still stays true to her reporting background.

Salvador is investigative journalism through-and-through, with some Didion flair inserted for good measure.

Miami I didn't much like, I have to say.

After Henry sort of drags a bit, since I do not care about the celebrities of yesteryear.

Political Fictions was infuriating. In a good way. Nothing has *&$(%*@(# changed in American politics in the past 30 years.

Where I was From Is memoir-esque, and I'm sure good on its own. But after reading everything preceding it all I really wanted was a nap.

So read her, but pick one up one at a time, and leave some space between. Didion has some amazing insights and observations to share with us, but we need to be able to pay attention.

[sam Eccleston · Rating 3 out of 5]

Probably as much Didion as anyone needs to own. Doesn't include "Year of Magical Thinking," which is cool by me. Since "Play It as It Lays" stands in my mind as one of the more obnoxious books I've ever read, I'm always a little askance of Didion. But the first 2/3 of this is pretty live. Though this might be a purely idiosyncratic choice, the tales of decrepit Californian rurality got me where I lived (pun!), and I really liked her distaste for hippies. But "Political Fictions" is one of the most boring things I've ever read, an imagistic taster's diary of politicians Didion has liked and not liked. Reading this all at once might have been the problem, but if that's the case, this shouldn't have been published like this. Peace to "The White Album," though.

[Barbara · Rating 5 out of 5]

The type is way too small but I struggled through because she is such an excellent writer! I wish I had read every single one of these when they were first published. Loved her take on LA and NYC. Loved her take on politics and El Salvador. All if it rings so exactly true. Every page I would just shake my head at her insight. I definitely need the large print version. I learned way too much about Miami - yikes.

[Wendy · Rating 5 out of 5]

I love and hate Joan Didion. Love her sentences, but often can't quite put my finger on the point.

[Jim · Rating 5 out of 5]

Lucid, brave writing from a "reporter of life" who has never hesitated to tackle the toughest stories - even her own.

[Annette · Rating 5 out of 5]

My Thoughts:

Joan Didion is one of my favorite nonfiction authors. I dislike the term fan because I have a mental image of an Elvis or Beatle’s fan screaming and crying and pulling on their hair. I’ve read some of the books in this volume before. I have read what I can find about her online. Several times I have watched the Netflix original, The Center Will Not Hold. I’m so thankful her nephew directed it.

Several reasons why she is a favorite!

1. She is an approachable type of person. She is someone I’d smile at if we met at a grocery store. She is a person I’d love to scan her bookshelves or listen to her talk about Ernest Hemmingway or George Eliot. Those are favorite authors of ours.
2. She is a person I can related to, to an extent. We both had lengthy marriages to hot heads. We are writers. We come across as people who don’t have much to talk about (people tend to overlook.) Yet, our inner dialogue and writings have much to say.
3. She is a varied writer. She writes about subjects that are from personal experience or political or celebrities or true crime. She stretched her writing to beyond what she thought capable. She was encouraged to do so, but it took courage. She wrote about personal sufferings. She wrote in hopes of understanding or at least as a way to process what had happened.
4. Joan Didion was born in 1934. My mother was born in 1926. This is a generation of women who did not talk about the hard experiences and sufferings of life. They kept things to themselves. Joan chose to write about certain life experiences. For example, contemplating divorce, and the adopting of a child. This reason is significant and can be overlooked by our saturated social media world where people tend to talk too much about some things and miss other ideas all together.

If I could ask her one question it would be: what stories did you not write (and wanted to) or have published?

I read the book cover to cover. The political essays were my least favorite because I am not a political reader (I don’t consider myself to be.)

My favorite essays are Some Dreamers of the Golden Dream, John Wayne: A Love Song, Slouching Towards Bethlehem, On Keeping A Notebook, On Morality, On Going Home, Letter From Paradise, Rock Of Ages, Goodbye To All That. All of that list is from Slouching Towards Jerusalem. The second book is The White Album. The first essay I love, and it’s titled the same as the book. Other essays I love are The Women’s Movement, Georgia O’Keeffe, In the Islands, On the Morning After the Sixties, and Quiet Days in Malibu. I enjoyed the piece on Salvador. I did not think I’d enjoy reading it. It is informative and a keen observer of various people she met. These people are from different walks of life. I enjoyed reading After Henry. It is piece that shares the remarkable friendship and his legacy. New York is a piece about the white middle class woman who went running in Central Park New York City and was brutally beaten and raped. Didion examines a bit further, rapes of black women who are raped more often and the media did not impress upon their readership to pay attention. The last essays of the book are about her parents, and it ends with her mother’s death and the sorting through of her things.

I love Joan Didion’s writing style. The sentences are often short, crisp, and to the point. Aptly chosen words that do not rush me through the sentence. There is a patience and calmness to her writing, even if there is chaos in the subject. She is a keen observer of people. The first sentence is often memorable, and replays in my mind long after I’ve finished. That first sentence grabs hold of my attention, and it sets the tone for the rest of the essay.

There is an old saying “this goes without saying” but I don’t really know Joan Didion. However, I feel there is a humanity and vulnerability and realness in her, and it shows in her writing. She expresses enough for me to get a glimpse of her life and views and subject material. But in that glimpse, she allows me to move towards her a bit by the knowledge that she understands, she is listening, and observing quietly, and she has valuable and cherished words to share.

Genre: Nonfiction. Essays. Memoir.
Pages: 1122.
Format: Hardcover.
Source: Self-purchase.
Audience: Nonfiction readers. Essay readers. Readers of Joan Didion.
Rating: Excellent.

[Els · Rating 4 out of 5]

De verhalen die we onszelf vertellen. Door: Joan Didion. Samengesteld en ingeleid door: Joost de Vries.

Dank je wel Joost om ons deze geweldige essaybundel te brengen en hem zo goed in te leiden. Didion is en blijft één van de grootste schrijvers en haar essays blijven relevant al zijn ze niet langer actueel. Met niet langer actueel heb ik het enkel over de datum waarop ze geschreven zijn, niet over de inhoud. Want Didions ideeën blijven boeiend, confronterend en blikverruimend.

Ik hou het meeste van de essays waarin ze het over haar persoonlijke leven heeft. Die geven een boeiend inkijkje in haar leven en hoofd. Inkijk-je. Want hoe persoonlijk het ook wordt, echt intiem is ze nooit. Misschien is dat omdat Joan Didion in de eerste plaats schrijver is en pas op de tweede plaats mens. Ik las een poosje geleden Notities voor John. Ook een ferme aanrader, zeker in combinatie met De verhalen die we onszelf vertellen.

Didion lezen is anders leren kijken. Boeiend. Lees De verhalen die we onszelf vertellen en laat je verruimen.