Character – the willingness to accept responsibility for one’s own life – is the source from which self-respect springs. – Slouching Towards Bethlehem (1968)

The long essay with the same title as the book sets the mood. Never hearing otherwise, I’d assumed the title had nothing whatsoever to do with the white-covered The Beatles album. But it does, though the group and their songs are never named—and rightly so. I’m left wondering if it should’ve been titled something else for even further distance; though, like the piece itself, the title was likely expected to evoke the mood of the time and at the time. I’ve known of this compilation of essays and journalistic pieces for a long time, but only now decided to read it when it happened to come my way. The first half of it flew by, but I found the second half not as engaging, likely because I found its topics not as interesting.

Which are your favourite Didion quotes or books? In what ways did her work inspire you? Share your thoughts in the comments below. E mi pare che il suo essere al centro della scena e del racconto apra prospettive nuove e conceda spazio, trasformi gli oggetti in soggetti, moltiplichi le angolazioni da cui guardare alla stessa cosa. The White Album: Essays was the latest collection of essays that I have read by Joan Didion. I am truly captivated by her observant and edgy writing throughout the late 1960s and 1970s in these beautiful essays previously published in magazines such as Life and Esquire. Joan Didion has her own unique way of looking at American culture in such an oblique way as she attempts to understand her home state of California and the American dream. In her writing, Didion paints a picture of what life was like in California during those turbulent sixties as she searches for the meaning in the narrative. We forget all too soon the things we thought we could never forget. We forget the loves and the betrayals alike, forget what we whispered and what we screamed, forget who we were. – On keeping a notebook, from Slouching Towards Bethlehem (1968)

About Georgia O'Keeffe) At the Art Students League in New York one of her fellow students advised her that, since he would be a great painter and she would end up teaching painting in a girs' school, any work of hers was less important than modeling for him. Another painted over her work to show her how the Impressionists did trees. She had not before heard how the Impressionists did trees and she did not much care.The White Album is rich in another effect, one I cannot name and so will clumsily indicate by invoking Holly’s stereopticon in Badlands and Joseph Cornell’s doll coffins, among other uncanny capsules of ephemera; also, your mother’s tasseled dance card and Flaubert’s assertion that “when everything is dead, the imagination will rebuild entire worlds from a few elderflower twigs and the shards of a chamber-pot”: This was an adequate enough performance, as improvisations go. The only problem was that my entire education, everything I had ever been told or had told myself, insisted that the production was never meant to be improvised: I was supposed to have a script, and had mislaid it. I was supposed to hear cues, and no longer did. I was meant to know the plot, but all I knew was what I saw: flash pictures in variable sequence, images with no “meaning” beyond their temporary arrangement, not a movie but a cutting-room 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. I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear. – Why I Write (essay originally published in the New York Times Book Review in 1976) The other main thing that isn’t there is any kind of literary spaciousness or solidity. Miss Didion has excellent sport with the culturelessness of her fellow Californians: ‘As a matter of fact I hear that no man is an island once or twice a week, quite often from people who think they are quoting Ernest Hemingway.’ Or again, writing about Hollywood: ‘A book or a story is a “property” only until the deal; after that it is “the basic material”, as in “I haven’t read the basic material on Gatsby.”’ Miss Didion has read the basic material on Gatsby; she has even read The Last Tycoon. But what else has she read, and how recently? A few texts from her Berkeley days like Madame Bovary and Heart of Darkness get a mention. Lionel Trilling gets two. And while holidaying in Colombia she takes the opportunity to quote from One Hundred Years of Solitude (‘by the Colombian novelist Gabriel Garcia Marquez’) and Robert Lowell’s ‘Caracas’. Yet at no point does Miss Didion give a sense of being someone who uses literature as a constant model or ideal, something shored up against the randomness and babble that is fundamental to her distress. When Miss Didion herself attempts an erudite modulation we tend to get phrases like ‘there would ever be world enough and time’ or ‘the improvement of marriages would not a revolution make’ or ‘all the ignorant armies jostling in the night’– which might be gems from a creative-writing correspondence course.

And she revisits the connection in the last sentence of the essay: “Quite often I reflect on the big house in Hollywood [...] and on the fact that Roman Polanski and I are godparents to the same child, but writing has not yet helped me see what it means.”This “I” was the voice of no author in my house. This “I” was someone who not only knew why Charlotte went to the airport but also knew someone called Victor. Who was Victor? Who was this narrator? Why was this narrator telling me this story? Let me tell you one thing about why writers write: had I known the answer to any of these questions I would never have needed to write a novel. It is as though she feels deeply that all human effort is foredoomed to failure, a conviction which seems to push her further into a dependent, passive withdrawal. In her view she lives in a world of people moved by strange, conflicted, poorly comprehended, and, above all, devious motivations which commit them inevitably to conflict and failure.