Will I love The White Album?

Didion's inability to make sense of America in the fracturing, turbulent mid-century years struck me as spookily familiar.

Many of the essays in this collection are personal, about herself; she was a cool and incisive observer, not a participant. But the pervasive atmosphere of disaffection and alarm she depicts drove many, including me, to take enormous risks for ill-conceived reasons.

She profiles one dreamer who found it shockingly easy to abdicate responsibility for making delusional choices: Linda Kasabian, who joined the murderous Manson Family, conned by its leader's charisma, and his promises of love and some vague idyllic future, into… show more.

This book remains the pinnacle of memoirs, in my opinion.

Didion’s ability to weave biting social commentary with vivid, unforgettable anecdotes continues to inspire me. I’m grateful to my creative nonfiction professor, Michael Hofmann, for assigning this book. Her language is rich, precise, and full of wit, and it kept me hanging on every word until the very end.

Didion’s 1979 collection of essays, including the essay highlighted in the book’s title, offers a candid, first-person, “I was there” account of counterculture Los Angeles, featuring a diverse cast of characters: industry players, Black Panthers, rock stars (she has a thing for Doors’ frontman Jim Morrison), and mass murderers (Charles Manson and one of his acolytes, Linda Kasabian, whom Didion befriended). Didion expertly mixes and matches personal experience and keen observation; The White Album is The New Journalism (embraced by Tom Wolfe and Hunter Thompson as well) par excellence, a style and form well suited for a new counterculture America.