The White Album

by Joan Didion

☕︎☕︎☕︎☕︎☕︎

"We tell ourselves stories in order to live."

Joan Didion opened The White Album with a line that has since become one of the most quoted sentences in American nonfiction: "We tell ourselves stories in order to live." It is a sentence about survival. About the way the human mind reaches for narrative the way a drowning person reaches for anything solid. And then, with the cold precision that is entirely her own, Didion spends the rest of the book showing us what happens when the story breaks down. When the narrative stops holding. When the center, as she famously wrote elsewhere, cannot hold.

Two things you should know before you read this book. First, Joan Didion is a nonrenewable resource. There are no more essays, no more novels, no more of her absolutely insane vocabulary turned loose on the world. What exists is what we have. Savor it. Second, she is the ultimate cool girl, not in the diminishing way that phrase usually lands, but in the truest sense. Unshakeable. Unsentimental. Precise in a way that feels almost aggressive. The White Album did for experiential journalism what Hunter Thompson would later get far more credit for doing, and if you want to have a feeling about that, Didion would probably find your feeling very interesting and also slightly beside the point.

The essays that hit hardest for me came in the back half of the collection. "The Women's Movement" is a piece of cultural criticism so sharp it still draws blood. Didion writes about the slow watering-down of second wave feminism, about how a vitally important revolutionary movement lost touch with its ideological base and became something else entirely, something closer to the prolongation of adolescence than a genuine new form of liberation. She is not unsympathetic. She is something more useful, accurate. And what she identifies feels less like a period critique and more like a diagnosis of something that keeps happening, to movements, to generations, to America itself. The goal shifts from helping individuals create their own unique destinies unfettered by traditional obstacles, toward something softer, more escapist, more easily marketed. She rarely seems angry about this. She seems disappointed. There is a difference, and Didion always knows the difference.

What runs through all of it, through every essay, every cultural thunderstorm and continental illumination, is wind. Literal wind. Wind blows off the Pacific through an open hotel window as she anticipates both a tidal wave and a possible divorce in Honolulu. Wind stokes fires across southern California until the heat reaches the point where birds explode in mid-air. Wind stirs debris in the streets of Bogota. Wind ripples water already coated with ash. The elements in this collection are never backdrop, they are active participants. Water nourishes Amado Vazquez's thousands of orchids before fire destroys them. Dams hold water back. Flow stations release it. The control and absence of water haunts the collection the way it haunts anyone who has lived in the arid west, where water is never just water but always also power, also scarcity, also the shape of what we could lose.

She is a master at the telling detail, the obscure, specific thing that in three words reveals the whole history of a person or a place. A military graveyard attendant. Lifeguards. Botanists. Filmmakers. Radical activists. Politician's wives. Musicians. Murderers. She moves between all of them and never loses her footing, never loses that quality of balancing the internal and the external, the personal and the political, the intimate and the enormous. What she is really doing, across all of it, is orienting the individual against the massive undulations of a country and an era. California. The 1960s. The specific gravity of a very particular American moment as it came apart.

She rarely seems angry. She often seems like someone standing very still in a high wind, watching, taking notes, making sure the sentence stays balanced. "We tell ourselves stories in order to live." Joan Didion told us the truth instead. Five cups. Read everything she ever wrote.