The White Album
Joan Didion · 1979
"We tell ourselves stories in order to live." The opening line of the title essay is the most quoted sentence in American nonfiction. Didion chronicled the collapse of the '60s with a cold eye and a prose style that made the chaos feel formal. The New Journalism at its most literary.
The case against
Didion's nerves are the real subject, and the mannerisms calcify here: the brand names, the weary italics, the sentence that ends before committing. Half these pieces are magazine work about malls and orchids that the title essay's brilliance cannot retroactively justify. Her detachment, thrilling at first, starts to feel like a pose held for the photographer.
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