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Slouching Towards Bethlehem

Joan Didion

4.19 · Rating details · 50,922 ratings · 4,336 reviews

The first nonfiction work by one of the most distinctive prose stylists of our era, Slouching Towards Bethlehem remains, forty years after its first publication, the essential portrait of America— particularly California—in the sixties. It focuses on such subjects as John Wayne and Howard Hughes, growing up a girl in California, ruminating on the nature of good and evil in ...more

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Paperback, 238 pages

Published October 28th 2008 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux (first published 1968)

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Dec 05, 2014 Julie rated it really liked it

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

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 drugs, 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 that have come to exemplify California during the mid 60s and 70s, her unwavering voice carrying the mantle of feminism, unafraid to admit how very angry and afraid she really is. Unabashedly admitting a lifelong crush on John Wayne, a manufactured, wooden 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? ...more

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Oct 20, 2019 Jeffrey Keeten rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: san-francisco, nonfiction, hollywood, memoirs, 1960-s, california

”My only advantage as a reporter is that I am so physically small, so temperamentally 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.”

One of the cornerstones of friendship is developing some level of trust. It might be possible to be friends with Joan Didion, but the very thing that makes her a wonderful dinner compan ...more

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Mar 05, 2015 Michael rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: recs, 2015

First published in 1968, Slouching Towards Bethlehem considers what happens when the center cannot hold and things fall apart: the three-part collection's twenty essays confront the onset of an age of cynicism in American political and social life. The first part contains pieces specific to California, the second personal essays, the third portraits of places significant to both Didion and America at the end of the 1960s. Didion's prose sprawls with meticulous detail, and is tinted with the jour ...more

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Nov 17, 2017 Bill Kerwin rated it it was amazing

Shelves: essays, 20th-c-amer

Days after Manson died, I kept thinking about him, how he and his Family had summoned the darkness at the heart of the Summer of Love. I remembered how surprised we all were, that the drugs and the smiles and the flowers had come to this, but then I thought, no, not all of us. Joan Didion would have understood; Joan Didion would not have been surprised.

Slouching Toward Bethlehem, a collection of magazine essays and Didion’s second book, is about many things, but mostly it is about ‘60’s Californ
Days after Manson died, I kept thinking about him, how he and his Family had summoned the darkness at the heart of the Summer of Love. I remembered how surprised we all were, that the drugs and the smiles and the flowers had come to this, but then I thought, no, not all of us. Joan Didion would have understood; Joan Didion would not have been surprised.

Slouching Toward Bethlehem, a collection of magazine essays and Didion’s second book, is about many things, but mostly it is about ‘60’s California. In its first section “Life Styles in the Golden Land”—slightly longer than half the book--every piece but one is set in California: a San Bernadino Valley murder, profiles of California icons (John Wayne, Joan Baez, Howard Hughes), characteristic California political institutions (the Communist splinter group the CPUSA, the now defunct liberal think tank the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions), and the California nexus of the Hippie Explosion, San Franciso’s Haight-Ashbury district during the Summer of Love. (Even the short piece not set in California, “Marrying Absurd,” about the Las Vegas wedding industry, is about California and its culture too.)

But the California connection does not stop there. Didion was a product of the Sacramento Valley, the descendant of settlers who—before the Gold Rush—crossed the plains in a covered wagon (Joan’s great-great-great grandmother travelled with the Donner party, but, unlike the Donners, her family avoided the fatal short cut and instead followed the old Oregon Trail.) Thirty additional pages of Bethlehem, some of the most personal of the book, describe her California and how it has shaped her character and her perspective.. She recognizes that, even for a Native Daughter like herself, the oldest of California traditions are too recent to constitute roots, that the culture of the ‘60’s Golden Land is always changing: from orange groves to real estate to aerospace (and, later, to high tech and beyond). In her title essay, Didion lays bare the predispositions of the lost freeway children who inhabit the Haight in the late '60's: aimless, disconnected from culture, lacking the principles that might help them fashion a viable alternative, they are people for whom any hypnogogic amusement, any superficial enlightment, even a dark savior, will do.

You can learn much about the ‘60’s from this book, but its real pleasure lies in its elegant, sinewy prose. If there is a single clumsy sentence in this book, I failed to find it (and I am one of those irritating fellows who looks). Here is just a taste, from “Some Dreamers of the Golden Dream,” a description of the San Bernardino Valley:

This is the California where it is easy to Dial-A-Devotion, but hard to buy a book. This is the country in which a belief in the literal interpretation of Genesis has slipped imperceptibly into a belief in the literal interpretation of Double Indemnity, the country of the teased hair and the Capris and the girls for whom all life's promise comes down to a waltz-length white wedding dress and the birth of a Kimberly or a Sherry or a Debbi and a Tijuana divorce and return to hairdressers' school. “We were just crazy kids” they say without regret, and look to the future. The future always looks good in the golden land, because no one remembers the past. Here is where the hot wind blows and the old ways do not seem relevant, where the divorce rate is double the national average and where one person in every thirty-eight lives in a trailer.

Here is the last stop for all those who come from somewhere else, for all those who drifted away from the cold and the past and the old ways. Here is where they are trying to find a new life style, trying to find it in the only places they know to look: the movies and the newspapers.

...more

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Jul 01, 2018 Kevin Kelsey rated it really liked it

Shelves: read-2018, favorites, read-it-again

Just unbelievably good. I'm not the right person to write about Joan Didion, but my God, she is real and she can write. ...more

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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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Apr 08, 2019 Justin Tate rated it really liked it · review of another edition

First published in 1968 to wide popularity, this collection of essays and journalism is a time capsule to the 1960s, for better and for worse, and mostly relating to the experience from a California perspective. There's no question to its significance. When it was published, I suspect readers were thrilled to have someone finally describe life in blunt terms. Reading it today, I found its strengths still lie in the authentic, slice-of-life style. Since I didn't live through the '60s, it felt ref ...more

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

Shelves: fav-authors, literary-essays, mesmerizing, non-fiction

"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 experi
"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.
...more

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Mar 07, 2022 leah rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: non-fiction, own, essay-collections

like with any didion work, she always approaches her subjects with such precision and purpose. every language choice is intentional, every sentence is so eloquent, every detail is meticulously written. she perfectly captures the essence of 1960s california and its cultural politics, somehow making me nostalgic for a place and time i never even experienced. i haven’t read much else on the subject, but i can’t imagine anyone writing about california as well as joan didion.

my fave essays were: ‘so ...more

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May 13, 2020 J.L. Sutton rated it really liked it · review of another edition

"I went to San Francisco because I had not been able to work in some months, had been paralyzed by the conviction that writing was an irrelevant act, that the world as I had understood it no longer existed. If I was to work again at all, it would be necessary for me to come to terms with disorder."

On Joan Didion's Slouching Towards Bethlehem | Book Marks

On Joan Didion's Slouching Towards Bethlehem | Book Marks

Slouching Towards Bethlehem is Joan Didion's seminal essay collection detailing life in Northern California, most notably the 1960s counter culture. The title essay contrasts Didion's impressions of S ...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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Dec 27, 2021 Elyse Walters rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: audiobook

Audiobook….(6 hours and 53 minutes long)….
…..read by Diane Keaton (‘outstanding’ as the voice narrator)
“Slouching Towards Bethlehem” was first published in 1968.

It was very engaging listening to Diane Keaton read sentences …with her wonderful enunciation choices……
yet reading these essays and articles would allow more time to pause-linger-and digest Joan Didion’s prose deeper…..(I’m sure of it)…
But….
still laidback from a recent Hawaiian vacation…
…soaking in our warm pool while rain ‘poured’ heav ...more

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Jan 15, 2021 Steven Godin rated it it was amazing

Shelves: essays, america-canada, non-fiction, history, favourites

I remember being really impressed with Didion's novel 'Play It as It Lays' a couple of years back, and reading her nonfiction for the first time I was equally; if not more so, impressed with this seminal collection of essays, of which I didn't know that quite a lot of them had previously been published as magazine articles. Didion is certainly a powerful stylist, as she looks on like a surveyor at the shifting scene of American life in the Golden State during a time of social upheaval in the sec ...more

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

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.

...more

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Nov 03, 2018 Glenn Sumi rated it really liked it

Shelves: non-fiction, contemp-classics

I read this essay collection – Joan Didion’s first – earlier this year, but of course I had been hearing about it for decades. It and other Didion books like The White Album are famous in a way that few such collections are. And you can easily see why. The best of these pieces open up the possibilities of the essay form, and they show off an enquiring, questing, rigorous mind.

I’ll never forget the book’s opening essay, “Some Dreamers Of The Golden Dream,” which on the surface seems like an acco I read this essay collection – Joan Didion’s first – earlier this year, but of course I had been hearing about it for decades. It and other Didion books like The White Album are famous in a way that few such collections are. And you can easily see why. The best of these pieces open up the possibilities of the essay form, and they show off an enquiring, questing, rigorous mind.

I’ll never forget the book’s opening essay, “Some Dreamers Of The Golden Dream,” which on the surface seems like an account of a real-life case of adultery and murder in San Bernardino County. Didion pays attention to scenes you wouldn’t get in an ordinary true crime account: the era, the place, the noir movies everyone must have watched. There’s one remarkable passage where she walks you – or, more likely, drives you – through a neighbourhood, listing all the store names and slogans, and the details accrue and tell you as much about the milieu and atmosphere in which the crime will take place as any CSI report.

Other memorable essays include an affectionate, nostalgic profile of an aging John Wayne; a piece on Carmel, CA neighbours protesting a school for nonviolence run by folk icon Joan Baez (oh how Didion quietly captures her sanctimoniousness); and the bold title essay, set in the counterculture scene in San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury neighbourhood which, in a couple dozen pages, got me to understand more about the movement than a dozen movies and novels.

And there’s the lovely, elegiac (and often quoted) essay, “Goodbye To All That,” about Didion’s few years living in Manhattan as a young woman before she moved to California. It will make you think about your own dreams, aspirations and life-changing decisions.

Not all the essays are as remarkable as these. Some feel perfunctory or overly oblique. But what a voice. What a prose stylist. And, if the comments from my female journalist/writer friends are any indication, what a role model.

“We tell each other stories,” to quote Didion, “in order to live.” Although these stories are over 50 years old, they still tell us so much about what it’s like to be alive. ...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.

...more

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Mar 17, 2013 Ahmad Sharabiani rated it really liked it

Shelves: 20th-century, writing, history, classics, short-stories, essay, non-fiction, memoir, united-states

Slouching Towards Bethlehem: Essays, Joan Didion

Slouching Towards Bethlehem is a 1968 collection of essays by Joan Didion that mainly describes her experiences in California during the 1960's.

One critic describes the essay as "a devastating depiction of the aimless lives of the disaffected and incoherent young," with Didion positioned as "a cool observer but not a hardhearted one." Another scholar writes that the essay’s form mirrors its content; the fragmented structure resonates with the essa ...more

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Jun 04, 2021 Joe Valdez rated it it was ok · review of another edition

Shelves: non-fiction, california

The Year of Women--in which I'm devoting 2021 to reading female authors only--continues with Joan Didion and Slouching Toward Bethlehem: Essays. Published in 1968, the book is a compilation of pieces commissioned mostly by the Saturday Evening Post in the 1960s, ranging from exposés on John Wayne or Michael Laski (founder of the Communist Party USA) to essays on herself to the title piece, which documents runaways in Haight-Ashbury in 1967.

"Slouching Toward Bethlehem" is a wonderfully grimy lon ...more

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

Shelves: america-fuck-yeah, historyonics-american, social-crit, femmes

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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Sep 06, 2021 Lee rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Who was I when I first read this and liked it yet managed to forget almost everything about it? (An apt consideration here, as anyone who's read this will know.)

'AS IT HAPPENS I am in Death Valley, in a room at the Enterprise Motel and Trailer Park, and it is July, and it is hot. In fact it is 119F. I cannot seem to make the air conditioner work, but there is a small refrigerator, and I can wrap ice cubes in a towel and hold them against the small of my back. With the help of the ice cubes I hav Who was I when I first read this and liked it yet managed to forget almost everything about it? (An apt consideration here, as anyone who's read this will know.)

'AS IT HAPPENS I am in Death Valley, in a room at the Enterprise Motel and Trailer Park, and it is July, and it is hot. In fact it is 119F. I cannot seem to make the air conditioner work, but there is a small refrigerator, and I can wrap ice cubes in a towel and hold them against the small of my back. With the help of the ice cubes I have been trying to think, because The American Scholar asked me to, in some abstract way about “morality,” a word I distrust more every day, but my mind veers inflexibly toward the particular.

Here are some particulars. At midnight last night, on the road in from Las Vegas to Death Valley Junction, a car hit a shoulder and turned over. The driver, very young and apparently drunk, was killed instantly. His girl was found alive but bleeding internally, deep in shock. I talked this afternoon to the nurse who had driven the girl to the nearest doctor, 185 miles across the floor of the Valley and three ranges of lethal mountain road. The nurse explained that her husband, a talc miner, had stayed on the highway with the boy’s body until the coroner could get over the mountains from Bishop, at dawn today. “You can’t just leave a body on the highway,” she said. “It’s immoral.”

It was one instance in which I did not distrust the word, because she meant something quite specific. She meant that if a body is left alone for even a few minutes on the desert, the coyotes close in and eat the flesh. Whether or not a corpse is torn apart by coyotes may seem only a sentimental consideration, but of course it is more: one of the promises we make to one another is that we will try to retrieve our casualties, try not to abandon our dead to the coyotes. If we have been taught to keep our promises—if, in the simplest terms, our upbringing is good enough—we stay with the body, or have bad dreams.' ...more

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

Shelves: essays, gorgeous-prose

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.

...more

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Apr 16, 2022 emma marked it as to-read · review of another edition

Shelves: non-ya, can-t-wait-to-read, tbr-owned, literary-fiction, owned

the best you can look is if you're carrying a copy of this book around as you browse at an indie bookstore ...more

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Feb 04, 2022 Lorna rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: non-fiction, california, essays-short-stories-novellas, joan-didion

Slouching Towards Bethlehem: Essays was a searing collection of essays by Joan Didion, most previously published in various magazines in 1965, 1966, and 1967, and taking place in California. In the Preface Ms. Didion shares how hard it is for her to interview people and to meet her deadlines. She describes her success as a reporter thus:

"My only advantage as a reporter is that I am so physically small, so temperamentally unobtrusive, and so neurotically inarticulate that people tend to forget
...more

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Feb 21, 2015 El rated it it was amazing

Shelves: cultural-studies-and-other, 20th-centurylit-late, permanent-collection, 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.

...more

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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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Jul 12, 2020 Monica rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: soc-sci-politics, pub_1960s, classics, wh_fem_nonfic, essays, female-author-nonfic, random-adds, kindle_nonfiction

Fascinating time capsule of the 60s. I enjoyed the lens on Sacramento. (view spoiler) Fascinating time capsule of the 60s. I enjoyed the lens on Sacramento. (view spoiler)

While I can appreciate the excellent and interesting writing of Didion, perhaps this is one to read in small doses instead of straight through. Some of the rhythms and pacing of the essays began to feel similar even when the subjects were not. In the end, this was good but not as good as I had anticipated. I still recommend it, just read a few essays at a time.

3.5 Stars rounded up

Read on kindle ...more

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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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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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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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Sep 25, 2018 Michael Perkins rated it really liked it · review of another edition

From the book....

“I am still committed to the idea that the ability to think for one’s self depends upon one’s mastery of the language.”

===========

Didion's greatest two-word sentence.....

https://www.thecut.com/2021/12/joan-d...

==================

My family moved from a small town in New Hampshire to the SF Bay Area when I was age 7. There was no “Silicon Valley” then. If Didion were writing about California today, I am sure a new volume would include her unique take on the land of tech. Since my ...more

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About Joan Didion

Joan Didion

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Joan Didion was born in California and lived in New York City. She was best known for her novels and her literary journalism.

Her novels and essays explore the disintegration of American morals and cultural chaos, where the overriding theme is individual and social fragmentation. A sense of anxiety or dread permeates much of her work.

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“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.” — 847 likes

“...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.” — 334 likes

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