It’s not often that I finish a book in one sitting these days. I don’t mean to whine, but I don’t have that luxury most of the time. Perhaps I should say I do make exceptions when the book is right. Joan Didion’s The White Album was right on (pardon the 60s jargon) and I gulped down her book in one day’s swallow.
The White Album, aside from being a famous Beatles’ album, is a collection of Joan Didion’s essays focused on her life in California during the 1960s. Didion was a thriving journalist back in those days and her life was surrounded by interesting people: Jim Morrison, The Mansons, Janis Joplin, The Black Panthers, Ronald & Nancy Reagan, to name a few. Didion writes about her encounters with this lively cast of characters, offers razor sharp observations while she explores a difficult time period, mentally, in her own life. As a whole, the book serves as a witty social commentary of the sixties, not only of the rock-n-roll and political scene, but also of the topography of the sixties: the moral, physical, and socio-economic landscape of California in one of history’s most seminal eras, and how this time period shook her ideas of narrative to the core. Didion says she "began to doubt the premises of all the stories I had ever told myself."
Didion does what the father of the essay, Michael de Montaigne, prescribed: she enters a conversation—many, actually—and willingly offers her own life in all of its vulnerability to her readers for our own observation. And she does this with gripping tone and language. I think Montaigne would agree that hers is the kind of conversation one does not walk away from.
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