Live and Learn

by Joan Didion

This comprehensive edition brings together for the first time three seminal collections by legendary essayist and journalist Joan Didion: Slouching toward Bethlehem, White Album and Sentimental Journeys. Prefaced with a new introduction by Joan Didion. Live and Learn comprises three of the personal essay collections that established Joan Didion as a major figure in the modern canon - arranged in chronological order so that readers can appreciate not only the qualities of the essays per se, but also their evolution over time. It also includes a new introduction by Joan Didion herself. The stylistic masterpiece Slouching Towards Bethlehem (1968) has become a modern classic, capturing the mood of 1960s America and especially the center of its counterculture, California. The cornerstone essay, an extraordinary report on San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury, sets the agenda for the rest of this book - depicting and America where, in some way or another, things are falling apart and "the center cannot hold". The White Album (1979) is a syncopated, swirling mosaic of the 60s and 70s, covering people and artifacts from the Black Panthers and the Manson family to John Paul Getty's museum. Sentimental Journeys (1992) shifts its perspective slightly to take in Vietnamese refugee camps in Hong Kong, the Reagan campaign trail, and the inequities of Los Angeles real estate. An important collection, Live and Learn is the perfect one-stop primer on Joan Didion, and an essential reference for readers old and new. It confirms the power of this uniquely unbiased, moving writer, and showcases her artful yet simple prose.

Genres: Nonfiction, Essays

Paperback

First published May 17, 2005

About the author

Joan Didion was an American writer and journalist. She is considered one of the pioneers of New Journalism along with Gay Talese, Hunter S. Thompson, and Tom Wolfe.
Didion's career began in the 1950s after she won an essay contest sponsored by Vogue magazine. Over the course of her career, Didion wrote essays for many magazines, including The Saturday Evening Post, Life, Esquire, The New York Review of Books and The New Yorker. Her writing during the 1960s through the late 1970s engaged audiences in the realities of the counterculture of the 1960s, the Hollywood lifestyle, and the history and culture of California. Didion's political writing in the 1980s and 1990s often concentrated on the subtext of political rhetoric and the United States's foreign policy in Latin America. In 1991, she wrote the earliest mainstream media article to suggest the Central Park Five had been wrongfully convicted. In 2005, Didion won the National Book Award for Nonfiction and was a finalist for both the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Pulitzer Prize for The Year of Magical Thinking, a memoir of the year following the death of her husband, writer John Gregory Dunne. She later adapted the book into a play that premiered on Broadway in 2007. In 2013, she was awarded the National Humanities Medal by president Barack Obama. Didion was profiled in the Netflix documentary The Center Will Not Hold, directed by her nephew Griffin Dunne, in 2017.

Reviews

[alice belle · Rating 3 out of 5]

As this is an omnibus, my individual rating breakdowns are as follows:

'Slouching Towards Bethlehem' - 5 ⭐️

'The White Album' - 3.5 ⭐️

'After Henry' - 2.5 ⭐️

~

The edition of my copy has a superlative on the front cover from author Donna Tartt describing Didion's style as "tough, beautiful, surgically precise" for which I can't even muster a more accurate review.

Even in her less invigorating essay subjects, I found a readerly meditation and joy in the way that such topics were described.

Didion has a lot to answer for; I think that the effects of her skill have been grappled with by essayists in the years since. The careful but never tedious balance between the personal, the universal, the compassionate and the objective observer all manage deft employment. For this I will treaure as a reader, and hunger for as a writer.

~

The combining of these three particular volumes seems to me somewhat incongruous in terms of subject matter, but I suspect that the evolution of a writer was the intended goal of the grouping.

[Kate Murdoch · Rating 4 out of 5]

Joan Didion's prose is at once witty, insightful, funny and acerbic. I could relate to so many of her essays and Slouching Towards Bethlehem took me right into the chaos and mindset of 1960's San Francisco. There were thoughts about class division, war, politics and many other issues spanning decades. I feel enriched by reading it. The only reason I have given this four stars rather than five is because the last third was more of a chore with essays about firefighting, LA politics and New York crime cases that didn't interest me as much. Recommended.

[Sasha · Rating 4 out of 5]

My first introduction to Joan Didion happened to be disastruous one - "The year of magical thinking" was read in one insomniac night and didn't sitt well with me around 4 a.m. so conlusion was to stay away from her,no matter what they say.
Luckily,I was given her collection of essays published in her younger days (1960s) and it was called "Live and learn" in UK. This time around I find her interesting,perceptive and even inspiring - the way she notices "small things" around her,her musings about movies,US society and people around her in general are excellent.In fact I even started to think this is the way I would liked to write had I stay in journalism.
Very good.

[Juliano · Rating 5 out of 5]

“That was the year […] when I was discovering that not all of the promises would be kept, that some things are in fact irrevocable and that it counted after all, every evasion and every procrastination, every mistake, every word, all of it.” Joan Didion’s Live and Learn is an omnibus bringing together three of her most significant works, the essay collections Slouching Towards Bethlehem, The White Album, and After Henry (aka Sentimental Journeys) — I received it as a gift from a dear friend some seven / eight years ago, and read it, as often happens, just when I most needed it. Slouching Towards Bethlehem, with its famous declaration that “The centre was not holding”, explores California in the 60s: the apocalyptic weather, the crime permeating through the city’s social settings, the counter-culture it was famous for. Take Joan Baez, who “did not want, then or ever, to entertain; she wanted to move people, to establish with them some communion of emotion.” Didion writes so beautifully about writing and writers, like in her essay ‘On Keeping a Notebook’, where “Keepers of private notebooks are a different breed altogether, lonely and resistant rearrangers of things, anxious malcontents, children afflicted apparently at birth with some presentiment of loss.” Above all Joan here is a documentarian, presenting and preserving a specific vision of life bound to the world and time of its writing: “time past is not believed to have any bearing upon time present or future, out in the golden land where every day the world is born anew.”

Meanwhile, Didion opens The White Album with that famous line — “We tell ourselves stories in order to live” — before exploring California + its paranoia in the wake of the Manson murders. “In my neighbourhood in California we did not bless the door that opened wide to stranger as to kin.” Written over ten years between 1968 - 1978, the titular first essay ends not only with startling senselessness and disorder, but also with the revelation of a diagnosis of multiple sclerosis, “another story without a narrative”. In between, the Santa Anas, winds and fires, the Manson murders and Linda Kasabian waiting to testify, the trial of Huey P. Newton, “missionaries of apocalyptic sex”, the reflection that “nothing in my mind was in the script as I remembered it.” Elsewhere, Didion reflects sideways on ideas of individualism and how “It is easy to forget that the only natural force over which we have any control out here is water, and that only recently.” There’s a variety of themes in these essays, from migraine to Georgia O’Keefe, from the women’s movement to Hollywood as place. The collection ends with ‘Quiet Days in Malibu’, in which the fires force Didion and her family to retreat from their home, and in which the chaos of the collection seems to quietly culminate. In this collection “The circle seemed intact” and everything, including havoc, has some meaning.

The later Joan Didion starts to emerge in 1992’s After Henry, originally published in the UK as Sentimental Journeys. Though Didion explores a range of themes (Vietnamese refugee camps in Hong Kong, the Reagan White House, and the sentimentality inherent in New York), she seems ever more inwardly focused, “the sacrificial star of my own exposure dream.” The certainty with which she writes (“when the fire comes”, not if) is played off against her wavering faith: “At forty I still wanted to write, and nothing that had happened in the years between made me any more certain that I could.” Writing of her late editor Henry, she observes that “the editor […] was the person who gave the writer the idea of himself, the idea of herself, the image of self that enabled the writer to sit down alone and do it.” Patricia Campbell Hearst is featured in an essay; in another, a critique of current political campaigns; elsewhere, essays on her recurring preoccupations, LA crime and the fires. Didion closes the book with an exploration on “The imposition of a sentimental, or false, narrative on the disparate and often random experience that constitutes the life of a city”, completing a personal shift from West Coast to East Coast.

[Stephen Coates · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is a combination of three of her previously-published books: Slouching Towards Bethlehem (1968), The White Album (1979) and After Henry (1992), each a collection of her writings of the late 1960s, 1970s and 1980s, themselves first published in one or another magazine for which she was writing. The topics are primarily of events as dramatic as the murders by the Charles Manson gang and as mundane yet revealing as her explanation of California’s water management system. There’s one on drive through weddings in Nevada, the kidnapping and subsequent life of Patty Hearst, the drug-related murder of film producer Roy Radin, the ‘big five’ who essentially own Hawaii and reflections on not being accepted into Phi Beta Kappa. Combined with her fine writing style, her ability to use a specific event as a springboard to observe and reflect societal connections, conflicts and events that are only, on the surface, related to the event in question make these essays and enjoyable read decades after the events described.

[Majella Whelan · Rating 2 out of 5]

Quite a good writer? I suppose factual writing is generally less aesthetic than fiction. But I felt like I had to really plod through many of these stories. It all became a bit monotonous at times. Maybe it was my response to the whole California thing. It seemed...vapid (with the exception of the Santa Ana),but I'm not sure whether it was the content or the prose, or both.