Play Book Tag discussion

Reading this was a bittersweet experience: we had booked a trip to San Francisco for next month – now cancelled of course – and I had thought that reading a contemporary description of the 1960s Haight Ashbury hippie scene might add flavour to our sightseeing. Fortunately for my fear of missing out, the account that forms the centrepiece of this collection of essays doesn’t feed into the sentimental or nostalgic view marketed to tourists, but provided a view much closer to the atmosphere of instability and menace described in Nixonland:

"We were seeing the desperate attempt of a handful of pathetically equipped children to create a community in a social vacuum. […] 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. […] 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, Saran-Wrap, diet pills, the Bomb."

The book itself is a product of its times – I found it both grating and illuminating when this up-and-coming female writer referred to a generic journalist as 'him' in her preface, and repeatedly labelled Joan Baez 'Miss Baez' but didn’t use 'Mr' for men. Details like this made the book itself an interesting window on the past as well as an opportunity to see this fascinating time and place through Didion’s eyes.