Slouching Towards Bethlehem: Essays by Joan Didion

Dec 05, 2014 Julie Christine rated it really liked it

Shelves: bio-autobio-memoir, social-political-commentary, shorts, read-2015

My mother was a freshman in college when I was a freshman in high school. Married at seventeen, her 1960s and 70s were spent as a young wife and mother of four. It wasn't until she divorced at thirty-six, the same year Ronald Reagan ushered in the folly of trickle-down economics and the prison-industrial complex, that she discovered "the sixties". She majored in English and one day brought home, as a reading assignment, a copy of Slouching Towards Bethlehem. I recall the cover: gun-metal gray wi My mother was a freshman in college when I was a freshman in high school. Married at seventeen, her 1960s and 70s were spent as a young wife and mother of four. It wasn't until she divorced at thirty-six, the same year Ronald Reagan ushered in the folly of trickle-down economics and the prison-industrial complex, that she discovered "the sixties". She majored in English and one day brought home, as a reading assignment, a copy of Slouching Towards Bethlehem. I recall the cover: gun-metal gray with white lettering. I recall her clutching the book as though it were a lifeline, a rope to a past she never had. I felt the book must be some passageway to adulthood, some essentialness of feminism that both intrigued and bored me. I recall loving the title--the evocation of the Bible that seemed almost sacrilegious to me, a child of a conservative Christian family. Slouching . . . Bethlehem . . . nothing but trouble can come from such a book.

I wonder what my mother must have thought of this collection of essays about people, places, lifestyles so radically different than anything in her experience, yet which were happening simultaneous to her sheltered life. While her days were filled with Sesame Street, Tang, laundry, cutting crusts from bread for fussy her elementary school-kids' lunches, Joan Didion was writing of the counterculture of Haight-Ashbury, where runaways were drugged and traded as sex toys, used up and strung out by nineteen; of Howard Hughes buying up blocks of Las Vegas like she bought boxes of Cheerios; of Joan Baez, wispy, earnest, and reclusive in the Monterey County Courthouse, trying to save her Institute for the Study of Non-Violence from the squares who worried that the hippies would drive down their property values.

Did my mother dream California dreams? Did she wish for a New York interlude, to be young and in love, with a view of the Brooklyn Bridge, such as Joan Didion had in 1960s? Did she yearn for the warm waves of the Pacific curling on the sands of Hawaii? Such freedom young Didion had, such time to feel angst, to observe others, to write, clear-eyed and fiercely about her time and place in a world where people filled their voids with drug, sex, and rock-n-roll.

I imagine my mother reading about a gathering of earnest young activists and intellectuals "reluctant about gathering up their books and magazines and records, about finding their car keys and ending the day, and by the time they are ready to leave Joan Baez is eating potato salad with her fingers from a bowl in the refrigerator, and everyone stays to share it, just a little while longer where it is warm" and wishing she were in their midst, instead of pushing a shopping cart down the aisles of Pak-n-Save, filling it with boxes of Kraft Mac-n-Cheese and Hamburger Helper.

This collection of twenty essays, originally published in a variety of magazines, chronicles Didion's internal and external worlds at a singular time in modern American history. Her cool, unsentimental observations have come to exemplify California during the mid 60s and 70s, her unwavering voice carrying the mantle of feminism—here is a writer, a woman, unafraid to admit how very angry and afraid she really is. Or unafraid to admit a lifelong crush on the manufactured, wooden John Wayne, a caricature of the American man.

Perhaps it is this voice my mother held onto so tightly, searching in Didion's words for the key to self-expression, independence, and experimentation—all the things my mother missed as she moved straight from childhood to motherhood. Perhaps she longed to belong to Didion's California where

". . . time past is not believed to have any bearing on time present or future, out in the golden land where every day the world is born anew."

Oh, don't we all?
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Aug 23, 2015 Darwin8u rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: 2015

"The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;"
- The Second Coming, Yeats

description

“I know something about dread myself, and appreciate the elaborate systems with which some people fill the void, appreciate all the opiates of the people, whether they are as accessible as alcohol and heroin and promiscuity or as hard to come by as faith in God or History.”
― Joan Didion, Slouching Towards Bethlehem

I'm sure at some point Joan Didion will disappoint. I'm positive the ho ...more

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Aug 09, 2012 Cheryl rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: non-fiction, mesmerizing, narrative-nonfic, literary-essays, america, fav-authors

"To have that sense of one's intrinsic worth which constitutes self-respect is potentially to have everything: the ability to discriminate, to love and to remain indifferent. To lack it is to be locked within oneself, paradoxically incapable of either love or indifference."

Somehow, I usually read Didion on a blue night, when it's so bright outside that I open my curtains to search for the moon; instead, what greets me is a pale hue of blue sky. When I read Blue Nights, I had a similar experien
"To have that sense of one's intrinsic worth which constitutes self-respect is potentially to have everything: the ability to discriminate, to love and to remain indifferent. To lack it is to be locked within oneself, paradoxically incapable of either love or indifference."

Somehow, I usually read Didion on a blue night, when it's so bright outside that I open my curtains to search for the moon; instead, what greets me is a pale hue of blue sky. When I read Blue Nights, I had a similar experience. These are the kind of nights that reminds a reader of what she is, of what she is not: "We flatter ourselves by thinking this compulsion to please others an attractive trait: a gist for imaginative empathy, evidence of our willingness to give." Oh how I would love to teach Didion's "On Self-Respect," if only to garner the provocative perspective of a generation not yet born when she experienced and wrote this collection.

People debate the essay form often; some think it is simply nonfiction, some are not even sure about the distinction between nonfiction, narrative nonfiction, memoir, and the personal essay. The art of nonfiction is intrinsically disconcerting and perhaps intentional in its derived eclecticism. Still, it is beautiful. Thank goodness we have modern essayists like Leslie Jamison to remind us of the form, an essayist who in my opinion, resembles Didion in style and concept. Any debate of the essay as an art form, should be silenced by Didion's slouching. Why did I take so long to read this, I asked myself as I palmed my forehead, for I drooled through each page, not even noticing when it was time to clear my desk for office hours with students.

These essays illuminate the America of the 1960s that will never exist again, and yet it is the America of today - the odd juxtaposition confuses, I know. Didion has managed to illustrate a landscape of hurt and pain, of music and money, of politics, drugs, rehabilitation, and gain. This is New York, this is California, this is a slouch towards Bethlehem. I was moved by her memoirs Blue Nights and The Year of Magical Thinking; however, with this book, I was inspired by not only the stories and the essay form, but also by the art of the craft of narrative nonfiction in some of her pieces, this art that places a writer within the center of observation, and yet silences her persona.

The impulse to write things down is a peculiarly compulsive one, inexplicable to those who do not share it, useful only accidentally, only secondarily, in the way that any compulsion tries to justify itself.

Didion was a compulsive notetaker and eavesdropper. Because of this, we get stories about: the Los Angeles Santa Ana, a party in Beverly Hills, a story of Sacramento, a "hallucinatory" view of New York, a riff "on morality," a behind-the-scenes look at a Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions, an intense look at acid, alcohol, promiscuity, and all of the hurt that evolves with flashing. Some things we see, we know we'll never see again.

I loved reading "Goodbye to All That," Didion's meditation on New York City, a place she loved and loathed, the city wherein she lost herself. Yet my favorite essay was "Where the Kissing Never Stops," an essay which allowed me to view myself, to think about those intrinsic values placed aside for work; after all, isn't this the beauty of the personal essay, that it teaches us something about ourselves? I found oneness with Joan Beaz, the artist, humanitarian, renegade, and recluse; the woman whose life Didion explores in this piece. Perhaps this is one of those essay collections that leaves each of us with something of ourselves:

The roles assigned to her are various, but variations on a single theme. She is the Madonna of the disaffected. She is the pawn of the protest movement. She is the unhappy analysand. She is the singer who would not train her voice, the rebel who drives the Jaguar too fast, the Rima who hides with the birds and the deer. Above all, she is the girl who 'feels' things, who has hung on to the freshness and pain of adolescence, the girl ever wounded, ever young.
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Aug 31, 2017 Jenny (Reading Envy) rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Recommended to Jenny (Reading Envy) by: Ellen Gilchrist in The Writing Life

Shelves: audiobook, own, creative-non-fiction, read2017, essays

This is Joan's first essay collection, and the focus is largely on California, in the 1960s, with a few exceptions. I love her ability to write about people and to connect them to specific places. It feels like a time capsule about a place that doesn't exist the same way anymore, at least not completely. Even the Santa Ana winds may have changed.

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Feb 19, 2014 orsodimondo rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: americana, reportage

BEI TEMPI ADDIO
Nonostante in un capitolo (questo libro raccoglie articoli usciti su riviste) dal titolo Non riesco a togliermi quel mostro dalla testa, la signora Didion esprima opinioni tranchant su Kubrick, Antonioni, Visconti, Bergman, dimostrando per la prima e unica volta che perfino lei può sbagliare, prendere cantonate e dire bestialità, ho amato questo libro e amo profondamente questa meravigliosa scrittrice, sentimento costruito su una breve intensa conoscenza (incontrata per la prima v ...more

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Sep 02, 2007 Quinn Slobodian rated it liked it · review of another edition

I realize what is disturbing about these essays and what leaves the acrid aftertaste on the leftist tongue about Didion. And I don't think it has much to do with her relatively measured take on the drug-addled Haight-Ashbury scene. For better, but admittedly and sadly often for worse, the radical leftist imagination has been characterized by a willingness and a desire to leap out of our skin into the skin of others, to experience a jump of radical empathy in which the concerns of "they" become t ...more

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Mar 20, 2013 David rated it really liked it

Shelves: essays-theory

Joan Didion is an insightful and skeptical thinker, an astute ironist, and a beautiful prose stylist: Slouching Towards Bethlehem exemplifies her craft. While all of her essays are exemplary in form, some fall by the wayside of memory, and even only a week removed from my first foray in Didion, only a few remain with me with any moving power. Slouching Towards Bethlehem skirts the two worlds of my known (intimacy) and my unknown (distance): what it means to be a twentysomething, a skeptic, a thi Joan Didion is an insightful and skeptical thinker, an astute ironist, and a beautiful prose stylist: Slouching Towards Bethlehem exemplifies her craft. While all of her essays are exemplary in form, some fall by the wayside of memory, and even only a week removed from my first foray in Didion, only a few remain with me with any moving power. Slouching Towards Bethlehem skirts the two worlds of my known (intimacy) and my unknown (distance): what it means to be a twentysomething, a skeptic, a thinker, an observational outsider-insider, a reader, and the world of the 1960s: the vestigial mirage of the American dream, and the fairy-dust optimism particular to California (and to drug-addicts).

I had held off reading Didion for a while, because more than I knew about her writing, I knew about her celebrity. The Joan Didion of 2013: the sheepish-looking neuresthenic of the upper-upper crust, with silver tableware and imported china, damask upholstery on ormulu footed furniture, does not invite sympathy nor empathy. She has become her own horror, a self-damaging neuralgia grown completely inward into herself. But the Didion of Slouching Towards Bethlehem (and, I hope, The White Album which I plan to read sometime soon) is a different sort of woman: one which balances the Janus faces of reflection: inward as well as outward. Much of this collection is a reflection on external, cultural phenomena: a murder case in Southern California, the alluring celebrity of John Wayne, the apotheosis of marriage in Las Vegas, the drugs and counterculture of San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury, and she develops a personal narrative about it: how she is affected by these phenomena, and what it meant to be exposed to them. Her essays have a literary flair, which court Fitzgerald-esque lyricism and Hemingway-an precision, exactness: her essays are thoroughly American, of an American rhythm and tempo, with a focus on the corroding core of the "American dream."

A particularly resonant essay, "Goodbye to All That" describes Didion's eight-year sojourn in New York City, when she was twenty up through twenty-eight.

one of the mixed blessings of being twenty and twenty-one and even twenty-three is the conviction that nothing like this, all evidence to the contrary notwithstanding, has ever happened before.

As a twenty-three year old (recently initiated, adieu, twenty-two) I understand the conviction that what one feels, one is the first to feel, perhaps the only one ever to feel: all emotions feel unique, curried with the salt of freedom. If young childhood is the realm of dominant solipsism, young adult hood is the era of narcissism, egoism. It is necessary, I think, to go through this deeply narcissistic phase: we must, at sometime, be the true heroes of our life stories: alone and valiant like Odysseus. At twenty-something, the consequences of our actions are minor, we are yet-formed, yet-completed, we are free to fall and free to rise, but still free to be forgiven. In this period of our lives we must design and build a genuine ego, to replace the mask of entitlement and privilege of youth. Everything which is new is new only by our point of reference: ourselves, and impossible to conceive the true universality of it in the present. Literature, history, makes us feel often that we are not alone, that what we are feeling is rooted in something which is universal, eternal: but we still believe that we have a unique strain, an undiscovered permutation of the human condition.

Didion's essays On Self-Respect, On Morality, On Keeping a Notebook reveal the narcissistic compulsions of young adulthood: an age wherein we pen (figuratively and sometimes literally for the diary-inclined) the narrative of out life-stories, and also develop the character which we will assume. What draws people to literature, to story-telling, to TV and movies, is our desperate need for linearity in life. We understand the beginning-middle-end mentality, the rhythm of narratives is very comforting to us. We are a profoundly moralizing species, and narratives help us find meaning, even if it is artificial, created, posed: it comforts us to think that every action has an equal and opposite re-action, we are comforted by the abstract concept of justice, and the practice of it when it is in our favor. Didion acknowledges this compulsion:

I know something about dread myself, and appreciate the elaborate systems with which some people fill the void, appreciate all the opiates of the people, whether they are as accessible as alcohol and heroin and promiscuity or as hard to come by as faith in God or History.

As humans, we need some escape, or if not escape overtly, some structure which guards us from the brutal chaos of reality. We conceive of ourselves heroes, we are heroically justified, our self-respect buds, we become a solitary wanderer, discoverer, thinker, inventor: we measure ourselves by our potential, not necessarily by our accomplishments.

To have that sense of one's intrinsic worth which constitutes self-respect is potentially to have everything: the ability to discriminate, to love and to remain indifferent. To lack it is to be locked within oneself, paradoxically incapable of either love or indifference.

Self-respect, according to Didion, is a "moral nerve" - those with self-respect "have the courage of their mistakes. They know the price of things." It is in the golden era of our lives, our twenties, when we are forced to pay for things: our material needs with money, and our mistakes with our self-respect. There is not currency so valuable as self-respect, and no wealth which is harder to regain when it has been lost.

I was moved, was empathetic, to what Didion has to say about her life, particularly her more personal essays. Her descent into neurotic inwardness is perhaps the extreme condition of her reflexive mastery in her earlier essays and works: for it is this aspect which shines. She is coolly self-aware at the age of thirty-two, where she has become a prisoner of her own privilege and self-communion in her later years.

I think we are well-advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not. Otherwise they turn up unannounced and surprise us, come hammering on the mind's door at 4 a.m. of a bad night and demand to know who deserted them, who betrayed them, who is going to make amends. 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.

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Dec 25, 2011 Hadrian rated it liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: biography-memoir, essays, society-culture-anthropology-etc, nonfiction

In reading the essays in Slouching Towards Bethlehem, I feel a vague sense of unease. Within each essay, there is some revelation of anxiety or untruth. Within every person, there is a moment of quiet desperation. Within a the placid calm of a country marriage, there is a murder. Within each city, there lie feelings of lost hope and disillusionment. Within each person, there is some quiet desperation. In reading these essays, some rough beast has come 'round at last.

Didion's style is taut, but ...more

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Feb 21, 2015 El rated it it was amazing

Shelves: permanent-collection, 20th-centurylit-late, cultural-studies-and-other, put-it-in-your-journal

I don't mean to be super fangirl about this collection, because a lot of the essays were fine but didn't blow my socks off. However, the ones that I really liked? I really fucking liked. And I know that a couple of months from now, probably even a few years from now, even with my shitty-shit memory, I will look back at this collection and think happy thoughts because of the essays that made my little Grinch heart explode into brightly flavored fireworks of flowers and sunshine and unicorns.

I don I don't mean to be super fangirl about this collection, because a lot of the essays were fine but didn't blow my socks off. However, the ones that I really liked? I really fucking liked. And I know that a couple of months from now, probably even a few years from now, even with my shitty-shit memory, I will look back at this collection and think happy thoughts because of the essays that made my little Grinch heart explode into brightly flavored fireworks of flowers and sunshine and unicorns.

I don't mean to be dismissive about the essays that I thought were merely fine, but that's probably how it will come across. Let's just lay out here: I don't care that much about California. I know people who live there, one of my brothers used to live there, that's all great, they're good people. But when I think about places I have an active interest in visiting, California isn't high on that list. Even when a lovely person like Joan Didion writes about California, it doesn't make me want to hop on a plane and head there. So those essays didn't do so much for me, much like her other collection, Where I Was From, didn't do so much for me. I blame all of this not on Didion or her writing, but the entire state of California. Because, duh.

That's right, California, I'm throwing shade your way.

There's that one, Slouching Towards Bethlehem, for which this collection is named, that was really powerful. Didion spent time with the hippies of the original Sixties in Haight-Ashbury, and okay. That was a really decent essay. But that was more about Haight-Ashbury and counter-culture than it was about California.

But the other ones that were amazing and did funny things to my heart were the ones that were even more personal, personal to Didion and to who Didion is as a person. Most of the entire second section, Personals, made me nod out of familiarity. I knew exactly what she was talking about. On Keeping a Notebook, an essay every notebook-keeper should read; On Self-Respect; On Morality; On Going Home. And in the final section, Seven Places of the Mind (such a great section title), the final essay, Goodbye to All That hit me in all the feels. ALL THE FEELS, guys.

I want to curl up with this book and re-read all my favorites over and over again. But right now I can't even.

So five glowing stars for the ones I liked the most and I'll just pretend the other ones that felt lackluster in comparison were from that other essay collection of hers that I gave two stars.

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May 23, 2016 Lynne King rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: 2016-books-to-be-read

This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here.

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Apr 17, 2017 Vanessa rated it liked it

3.5 stars.
The writing exemplifies the sentiments and mood of the counter culture of the 60's, Didion does indeed capture it exceptionally well. Dry and sharply delivered and filled with references and dissections of social issues she is definitely the voice of a generation albeit it comes across a little dated now. I wish I could say I liked this collection as a whole, not all essays resonated with me and left me underwhelmed more often than not, I had high hopes for this so maybe my expectatio ...more

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Jan 07, 2012 Matt rated it liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: social-crit, america-f-k-yeah, historyonics-american, ladies-night

I loved the sheer beauty and rigor and power of the sentences. I'd never read anything by her before but I'd heard great things. I picked this up for 50 cents on a lark and found it to be ideal subway reading.

I don't say this lightly, mind- I spend a lot of time reading on subway ( ars is pretty longa and vita is DEFINITELY brevis ) and having a book that meshes well with the overal mise en scene is key. It might be that Didion seems to be uniquely fascinated with urban landscapes and t ...more

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Aug 15, 2007 Diane rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: gorgeous-prose, essays

Joan Didion, where have you been all my life? My husband has been trying to get me to read her books for years, and I see now how blindly stupid I've been in not reading her sooner.

Most of the essays in "Slouching Towards Bethlethem" are wondrous; there were only a few that didn't amaze me. (The piece on the Haight-Ashbury district, for example, dragged on way too long and wasn't as interesting as it would have been when it first appeared in 1967. Similarly, the 1964 piece on Hollywood was so e Joan Didion, where have you been all my life? My husband has been trying to get me to read her books for years, and I see now how blindly stupid I've been in not reading her sooner.

Most of the essays in "Slouching Towards Bethlethem" are wondrous; there were only a few that didn't amaze me. (The piece on the Haight-Ashbury district, for example, dragged on way too long and wasn't as interesting as it would have been when it first appeared in 1967. Similarly, the 1964 piece on Hollywood was so enmeshed in the present that it doesn't seem relevant some 40 years later.)

But the rest of the book awed me. My favorite essays were "John Wayne: A Love Song," "On Self-Respect," "On Keeping a Notebook," "On Going Home" and "Goodbye to All That."

Joan Didion's writing moved me the most when she got personal. The story of celebrating her daughter's first birthday was bittersweet, knowing that in real life, Didion's only daughter died young from septic shock. And yet, I treasured that moment of Joan gazing at her baby in her crib, hoping for the best for her.

I can't finish this review unless I mention the author's preface, which I confess I've read and reread several times to fully appreciate it. One night I read a paragraph of it to my husband, who said, "That's my favorite paragraph of hers." Here is a section of it:

"I am bad at interviewing people. I avoid situations in which I have to talk to anyone's press agent... I do not like to make telephone calls, and would not like to count the mornings I have sat on some Best Western motel bed somewhere and tried to force myself to put through a call to the assistant district attorney. My only advantage as a reporter is that I am so physically small, so tempermentally unobtrusive, and so neurotically inarticulate that people tend to forget that my presence runs counter to their best interests. And it always does. That is one last thing to remember: writers are always selling somebody out."

I could pull a great quote from every one of the essays in this book, but that would ruin the fun of you discovering it for yourself.

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Dec 28, 2013 Julie Ehlers rated it really liked it

Shelves: california, essay-collections

I decided to get my Joan Didion on this summer in preparation for the biography that comes out next month, and Slouching Towards Bethlehem, her first essay collection, seemed like a good place to start. It's true that some of these essays are hopelessly dated, kind of like those true-crime articles that appear in Vanity Fair that no one's going to care about in five months, let alone fifty years (although the majority of these particular essays were published in The Saturday Evening Post). But o ...more

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Feb 18, 2015 Hunter Murphy rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

This is the book that made me fall in love with Joan Didion. Her prose is like a razor. What style she has. Her essays in this collection prove that it's not what you write but how you write it. Of course, I appreciated her subject matter too and her eye for a good story, and the way she cut through social issues, as she did the hippie myths of Haight-Ashbury during the 1960s in San Francisco.

One of my favorites is one called, "On Keeping a Notebook," where the great Didion talks about writing ( ...more

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Jul 19, 2011 James Smith rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

I have sort of read Joan Didion backwards, beginning with her masterful memoir, The Year of Magical Thinking, and now working my way back to Slouching Towards Bethlehem--one of those books that casts a long shadow over contemporary nonfiction. I picked up this book as a companion for a recent trip back to Los Angeles, both because Didion is one of those rare creatures who is a "native" of California, but also because California figures prominently in these essays. But I became so absorbed in the I have sort of read Joan Didion backwards, beginning with her masterful memoir, The Year of Magical Thinking, and now working my way back to Slouching Towards Bethlehem--one of those books that casts a long shadow over contemporary nonfiction. I picked up this book as a companion for a recent trip back to Los Angeles, both because Didion is one of those rare creatures who is a "native" of California, but also because California figures prominently in these essays. But I became so absorbed in the book I didn't sleep on my redeye flight and finished it while taxiing at LAX.

As I understand it, Didion was sometimes mistaken for a reactionary conservative because of her unflinching depiction of the Haight-Ashbury district in the summer of '67 (the title essay in this volume). This is clearly to misread her. Indeed, Didion cringes at her own inability to capture the essence of the summer of love in that essay, but she also laments misreading:

I suppose almost everyone who writes is afflicted some of the time by the suspicion that nobody out there is listening, but it seemed to me then (perhaps because the piece was important to me) that I had never gotten a feedback so universally beside the point.

This is part of the allure of this volume: it is both a collection of stellar nonfiction writing as well as reflexive commentary on the vocation and task of writing. Hence the more confessional, autobiographical moments of the book (on keeping a notebook, on going home, on leaving New York). Even these are packed with suggestive nuance. (For example, in commenting on the faith a young communist in Watts who seems driven by dread, Didion confesses: "I know something about dread myself, and appreciate the elaborate systems with which some people manage to fill the void, appreciate all the opiates of the people, whether they are as accessible as alcohol and heroine or as hard to come by as faith in God or History.")

In these pieces from the 60s, Didion is both a powerful stylist and a crisp observer. Her writing couples bravura and insight as few can. In fact, in this sense she often reminded me of Norman Mailer (imagine Norman Mailer with a vagina!). There are paragraphs in here (especially in "Some Dreamers of the Golden Dream") that left me almost breathless from their energy--a virtuoso performance that captures both a zeitgest and a geography in 3 pages of fire. But there are crystallized one-liners that nail reality to the wall (of Joan Baez she says, "until she found Carmel, she did not really come from anywhere").

California is a quarry for Didion precisely because California is where Americanism goes to die--though it goes there thinking it will achieve eternal life. Didion often frames this in terms of the "dream": the American dream, the dream of the Gold Rush, the buttoned-down dreamers in the Valley or the turned-on dreamers in the Haight. So the spiral of a disaffected marriage in southern California becomes "the revelation that the dream was teaching the dreamers how to live"--and kill and die. Or in a remarkable piece on John Wayne, a younger Didion confesses: "when John Wayne rode through my childhood, and perhaps through yours, he determined forever the shape of certain of our dreams." Or she sees Howard Hughes as a projection of our dreams:

That we have made a hero of Howard Hughes tells us something interesting about ourselves, something only dimly remembered, tells us that the secret point of money and power in America is neither the things that money can buy nor power for power's sake [...], but absolute personal freedom, mobility, privacy. [...] He is the last private man, the dream we no longer admit.

I suppose the line on Didion as a reactionary or a 'conservative' of sorts stems from a kind of memory or quasi-nostalgia that sometimes comes to the surface in this collection. For example, she recalls the scene of John Wayne's "discovery" by director John Ford: "There, a meeting with John Ford, one of the several directors who were to sense that into this perfect mold might be poured the inarticulate longings of a nation wondering at just what pass the trail had been lost." The same sense of loss and errancy gets a kind of imprimatur on her reflections on the history of Sacramento, her home town--a town founded on a curious mixture of hope and history, that things started downhill pretty much just after the "Eureka" moment of discovery:

Such a view of history casts a certain melancholia over those who participate in it; my own childhood was suffused with the conviction that we had long outlived our finest hour. In fact that is what I want to tell you about: what it is like to come from a place like Sacramento. If I could make you understand that, I could make you understand California and perhaps something else besides, for Sacramento is California, and California is a place in which a boom mentality and a sense of Chekhovian loss meet in uneasy suspension; in which the mind is troubled by some buried by ineradicable suspicion that things had better work here, because here, beneath that immense bleached sky, is where we run out of continent.

The lament/memory/nostalgia is most famously expressed in the opening of "Slouching Toward Bethlehem" where Didion observes "children who were never taught and would never now learn the games that had held the society together." This opening gambit is completed by the end of the essay when she concludes:

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. Maybe we had stopped believing it ourselves, maybe we were having a failure of nerve about the game. Maybe there were just too few people around to do the telling. These were children who grew up cut loose from the web of cousins and great-aunts and family doctors and lifelong neighbors who had traditionally suggested and enforced the society's values. They are children who have moved around a lot, San Jose, Chula Vista, here. 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.

[It is a straight line, I think, from this observation to the stinging satire of Shteyngart's Super Sad True Love Story.]

So Didion regularly looks back, laments something lost, wonders whether we've taken some wrong turns. For those who think any glance back amounts to some kind of ideology (this assumption itself being ideological), this is enough for Didion to qualify as a reactionary. But is all memory nostalgia? And could our memory sometimes be right? Certainly Didion is no Whig; and only whiggish ideals of progress consider historical laments as false de jure. But some of us just refuse such simplicities. Perhaps Didion is a Burkean we need now more than ever.
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Jul 31, 2013 Rosana rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: non-fiction, audio-books, 2013, bookish-s13-challenge

“...I think we are well-advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not. Otherwise they turn up unannounced and surprise us, come hammering on the mind's door at 4 a.m. of a bad night and demand to know who deserted them, who betrayed them, who is going to make amends. 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 “...I think we are well-advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not. Otherwise they turn up unannounced and surprise us, come hammering on the mind's door at 4 a.m. of a bad night and demand to know who deserted them, who betrayed them, who is going to make amends. 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.”

I loved these essays. I could go on quoting Didion on and on, there are just too many great passages, great insights from her.

The truth is that I am full of envy. I envy Joan Didion’s facility with words. In a vernacular that is erudite without being stuffy, poetic without being overly romantic, extremely precise and sharp, she distill her thoughts skilfully.

I actually listen to it in audio format, and I know I am going to listen to one or another essay when I need something short to amuse me. But I am also going to buy the book because I want to highlight some passages, and because I want to give my own cadence to her voice. Diane Keaton narrated the version I listened and I did enjoy her voice. She sounded youthful, and made Didion’s monologues less cultured or intellectual than I perceive Didion to be. Which, surprisingly, I felt worked well. It gave Didion’s thoughts a new layer, more accessible and amicable.

This collection is said to capture the essence of 1960’s America, and I think it does. We have John Wayne, Joan Baez, San Francisco and hippies… yet, the personal essays will stay with me longer: self-respect, immorality and the power of going home are obviously more material to me than historical commentary on America.

I don’t know what I will read next, because it will be such a letdown after this book. I feel I am coming down from a high, and right now all I wanted is more of Didion’s words. Like a junkie I may just start from the beginning again. Someone please help me!

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Aug 28, 2008 Patrick O'Neil rated it it was ok · review of another edition

Everyone I know who reads a lot or considers themselves writers has told me to read Joan Didion. I always cringe and go the other way when too many people tell me to do the same thing. I’m not sure where, or when, this resistance to Didion started. But it has somehow manifested itself in my psyche.

During my first semester at Antioch University, Rob Roberge, in one of his brilliant seminars, made a few comical references to her. Not her writing, but of Didion, or more precisely the cult of Didio ...more

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Aug 17, 2013 Bloodorange rated it it was amazing

Shelves: us, non-fiction, year-of-reading-women-2015

At thirty three or four, Didion of Slouching Towards Bethlehem is still a girl. I recognize the signs. (Some people capable of voicing their thoughts on subjects such as "Self-Respect" and "Morality" are born middle-aged; others, possibly due to their specific upbringing, remain questioning, uncertain, young.)

Her parents relocated multiple times during her childhood (her father was in the military), which left her feeling a perpetual outsider.

Her voice is that of a well-mannered young woman, qui At thirty three or four, Didion of Slouching Towards Bethlehem is still a girl. I recognize the signs. (Some people capable of voicing their thoughts on subjects such as "Self-Respect" and "Morality" are born middle-aged; others, possibly due to their specific upbringing, remain questioning, uncertain, young.)

Her parents relocated multiple times during her childhood (her father was in the military), which left her feeling a perpetual outsider.

Her voice is that of a well-mannered young woman, quiet and perceptive, living next to other people, but never being of them. Even when - I guess - she might be feeling some distaste - be it for the murderers, child abusers, or the very rich and divorced from 'real life', it is subdued, neutral, to be inferred, shown-not-told:

one of [Greek shipping heiresses] taught me a significant lesson (a lesson I could have learned from F. Scott Fitzgerald, but perhaps we all must meet the very rich for ourselves) by asking, when I arrived to interview her in her orchid-filled sitting room on the second day of a paralyzing New York blizzard, whether it was snowing outside. (On Keeping a Notebook)

She is sensitive and perceptive in a way which makes me want to buy her a drink:

Barbara is on what is called the woman's trip to the exclusion of almost everything else. When she and Tom and Max and Sharon need money, Barbara will take a part-time job, modeling or teaching kindergarten, but she dislikes earning more than ten or twenty dollars a week. Most of the time she keeps house and bakes. "Doing something that shows your love that way," she says, "is just about the most beautiful thing I know." Whenever I hear about the woman's trip, which is often, I think a lot about nothin'-says-lovin'-like-something-from-the-oven and the Feminine Mystique and how it is possible for people to be the unconscious instruments of values they would strenuously reject on a conscious level, but I do not mention this to Barbara. (Slouching Towards Bethlehem)

She is a neurotic; she weeps in Chinese laundries and wakes at night; she escapes to Hawaii; she is Elizabeth Wurtzel's patron saint and older sister - but she is old enough to be self-aware:

It was once suggested to me that, as an antidote to crying, I put my head in a paper bag. As it happens, there is a sound physiological reason, something to do with oxygen, for doing exactly that, but the psychological effect alone is incalculable: it is difficult in the extreme to continue fancying oneself Cathy in "Wuthering Heights" with one's head in a Food Fair bag.

Didion's understanding of situations and people is an instrument of unusually wide range; she understands the big picture (I read her description of post-war Hawaii - "Letter from Paradise" - with bated breath), but she can also convey her perceptions of individuals in amusing, nearly picture-book-like neat phrases, which one may confuse for innocence:

Mr. Scott says that he will be glad to get Alcatraz off his hands, but the charge of a fortress island could not be something a man gives up without ambivalent thoughts. (Rock of Ages)

On the whole, I wanted to give the book four stars, but then it ended with a sublime (and girly, and whiney) "Goodbye to All That" - so underhanded! So manipulative! Such writing! - and decided to give it 4.5. ...more

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Nov 28, 2015 Nate D rated it liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: 60s-re-de-construction, essays, read-in-2016

It should come as no surprise that this collection of Joan Didion's essays and journalism from the the mid sixties leading up to her publication of Play It As It Lays is thoroughly good, cynical, and perceptive. She writes about societal malaise and the ominous leisure landscapes of California all quite wonderfully, in particular. Though it does leave me wanting to grab more of her fiction soon, as well.

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Jun 17, 2016 Edward rated it liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: audiobooks, biography-and-memoir, commentary-and-essay, nonfiction, 2016

Hey, yeah. The 1960s? Happy times, heavy times. These are the opening lines to the 1972 cartoon movie Fritz the Cat - a movie I was drawn to decades later when I discovered it in my late teens. For me it was a window to a more exciting time, an era narrowly missed, a world that was only just waking up, when to be young meant to live freely and love easily, and to seize the day and change the world required no more than to step outside one's own front door.

Well, that's how I saw it at the time, ...more

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Dec 18, 2008 Eric rated it liked it

Shelves: essays, bagatelle

I find very attractive the skeptical, reflexively ironic persona that comes through in these essays, as well as the unshockable sang-froid of her prose rhythm--but to call the book a classic, or a "stylistic masterpiece" as the back cover does, seems a bit much. None of these essays, singly, is anything I could cherish. If I encountered any of them in a magazine I would think "she's a good writer" and move on. There's nothing--at least for intellectual pith--that compares with Richard Rodriguez' ...more

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Jan 12, 2014 Aric Cushing added it · review of another edition

Incredible. The nonfiction piece 'Dreamers of the Golden Dream' I have read over and over through the years. An incredible depiction of California desert life, and the 'true crime' murder of a dentist. I cannot do it justice here because I am writing quickly, but this POSITIVELY is a MUST READ, if not just for the first nonfiction piece in this voluminous collection. (This entire book is also in the collection "We Tell Ourselves Stories in Order to Live", which is all of Didion's work.)

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Jun 23, 2014 Jesse rated it really liked it

Shelves: american-lit, 1960-s, women-writers, essays-and-interviews

The wry and casual elegance of Didion's prose style remains quite special despite the endless attempts at imitation in the decades that have followed; she also has that rare talent of being able to make you think you're reading something lightweight, even disposable and then at the last minute flooring you by unleashing an unexpected torrent of significance and resonance.

But as lovely and thoroughly enjoyable as these essays were, I will always be grateful for a disclosure Didion makes in the co ...more

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Sep 17, 2013 Diane S ☔ rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Hard to believe but this is the first Joan Didion book I have ever read. In this book, a series of essays, Didion takes on the sixties and the many different components that makes this time period so memorable. Her wide range of subject matter is amazing, from a courtroom and a trial. to Las Vegas weddings, from Haight-Ashbury to John Wayne and much more. Her writing is so clear and concise, basically I loved it. This is my first, but not my last Didion.

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Mar 23, 2008 Ryan Chapman rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Recommended to Ryan by: Megan

Shelves: nonfiction, essays

This woman writes like I think. When I'm at my most lucid and firing all of my synapses. The essay "Slouching Toward Bethlehem" was as great as I'd heard. "On Self-Respect" was shattering in its clarity--Didion doesn't write about things, the writes them wholly. And the last piece, "Goodbye to All That," about living in NYC, was beautiful at parts. I just hope I don't drown in myself the way she did and have to move.

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Sep 21, 2016 Stephanie Sun rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: dead-tree, yummy-broccoli, desert-island, late-to-the-party

"...California is a place in which a boom mentality and a sense of Chekhovian loss meet in uneasy suspension; in which the mind is troubled by some buried but ineradicable suspicion that things had better work here, because here, beneath that immense bleached sky, is where we run out of continent."

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Sep 15, 2010 Emily added it

Shelves: read-in-2010

Back in May, in an Essay Mondays post, I kicked myself for waiting so long acquaint myself with the wonders of Joan Didion's writing. After that post I lost no time in acquiring Slouching Towards Bethlehem, a classic collection of her early investigative reporting and personal examinations published in magazines from the early to late 1960s; and having now read it, my admiration for Didion has only increased.

The bulk of the collection consists of mood pieces featuring the California and Nevada ...more

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Dec 09, 2011 Paul Haspel rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: california, ethnography

Slowly, gradually, almost imperceptibly, the twenty essays of Slouching Towards Bethlehem develop Joan Didion’s dominant impression regarding life in late-20th-century America generally and 1960’s California specifically; and that dominant impression is grim indeed.

The California of Didion’s essays is a place where a mild climate and a picturesque landscape conceal a social mindset of fear and intolerance, as when a Salinas matron in “Where the Kissing Never Stops” challenges the very existence Slowly, gradually, almost imperceptibly, the twenty essays of Slouching Towards Bethlehem develop Joan Didion’s dominant impression regarding life in late-20th-century America generally and 1960’s California specifically; and that dominant impression is grim indeed.

The California of Didion’s essays is a place where a mild climate and a picturesque landscape conceal a social mindset of fear and intolerance, as when a Salinas matron in “Where the Kissing Never Stops” challenges the very existence of Joan Baez’s Institute for the Study of Nonviolence by saying, “We wonder what kind of people would go to a school like this….Why they aren’t out working and making money” (p. 42). “Some Dreamers of the Golden Dream” tells the story of a socially ambitious San Bernardino woman who entered into an unhappy marriage, drifted into an affair with a socially prominent attorney, and was eventually convicted of murdering her husband for insurance money; in characteristically flowing prose, Didion describes the San Bernardino setting of the essay as “not the coastal California of the subtropical twilights and the soft westerlies off the Pacific but a harsher California, haunted by the Mojave just beyond the mountains, devastated by the hot dry Santa Ana wind that comes down through the passes at 100 miles an hour and whines through the eucalyptus windbreaks and works on the nerves” (p. 3).

Celebrity culture is also a core subject of Slouching Towards Bethlehem. John Wayne: A Love Song” situates Wayne’s legendary status as Western-film icon against his final battle with cancer: “[W]hen John Wayne rode through my childhood, and perhaps through yours, he determined forever the shape of certain of our dreams. It did not seem possible that such a man could fall ill, could carry within him that most inexplicable and ungovernable of diseases. The rumor struck some obscure anxiety, threw our very childhoods into question” (p. 30). “7000 Romaine, Los Angeles 38,” named for the location of Howard Hughes’s “communications center,” moves to a consideration of the reasons for the contemporary fascination with Hughes’s famed reclusiveness: “That we have made a hero of Howard Hughes…tells us that the secret point of money and power in America is neither the things that money can buy nor power for power’s sake…but absolute personal freedom, mobility, privacy” (p. 71).

And the title essay, a tough-minded examination of the hippie drug culture of San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury neighborhood, begins with a direct reference to Yeats’s “The Second Coming,” the poem that inspired the book’s title (“And what rough beast, its hour come round at last/Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?”), and offers Didion’s most direct evocation of the book’s themes:

”The center was not holding. It was a country of bankruptcy notices and public-auction announcements and commonplace reports of casual killings and misplaced children and abandoned homes and vandals who misspelled even the four-letter words they scrawled. It was a country in which families routinely disappeared, trailing bad checks and repossession papers….It was the United States of America in the cold late spring of 1967, and the market was steady and the G.N.P. high and a great many articulate people seemed to have a sense of high social purpose and it might have been a spring of brave hopes and national promise, but it was not, and more and more people had the uneasy apprehension that it was not.” (pp. 84-85)

Moving from San Bernardino to Salinas, from Los Angeles to Santa Barbara to San Francisco and Alcatraz, from Hollywood to Watts, from Death Valley to the Central Valley, most of the essays in Slouching Towards Bethlehem focus in a similar way on California as landscape of alienation, where the bright sun shines down on desperate people. It is not a happy message, but Didion communicates it exceedingly well, and captures poignantly the tense and fearful mood of late-1960’s America.
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Dec 05, 2010 Lisa rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

When I was feeding my mother's cat over Thanksgiving I liberated this from her shelves, an ancient copy that one of my best friends (who is still one of my best friends) gave me in high school -- it's inscribed "Lovely Lisa Meter Maid, where would I be w/o you?" and has as a bookmark a postcard I wrote to another high school friend but never sent, thick with all sorts of stupid private jokes and code words. Since today is Joan Didion's birthday and since I don't have the attention span for anyth ...more

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