I was hesitant to write this book review for several reasons.
I am not an American.
I don’t live in California and I’ve never been there.
I was not born in the 60s.
And I am not a writing expert.
I am not in a position to comment on people, events, counterculture, and other prominent issues mentioned in the book nor criticize this book’s writing technicalities.
But I could share one thing for sure…
How this book made me feel while and after reading it.
The first time I heard about Joan Didion, I was watching a video lesson on writing. The coach showed her favorite books and one of the books was Joan Didion’s Slouching Towards Bethlehem. Curious, I took note of the author, and when her book, The White Album, was on Kindle Deals, being the frugal bookworm that I am, I grabbed the opportunity to buy it. In my mind I said, finally, I could read her after many months of waiting.😅
Going back to Joan Didion, I learned that she was an American writer and journalist who was one of the trailblazers of New Journalism characterized by using first-person narrative, immersive reporting, literary techniques, and subjectivity. She started her career in the 1950s after she won an essay contest sponsored by Vogue magazine.
Throughout her career, her essays appeared in major magazines such as Esquire, The New York Review of Books, and The New Yorker.
Some of her major achievements were the National Book Award for Nonfiction in 2005 and being a finalist for both the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Pulitzer Prize for The Year of Magical Thinking.
She received the National Humanities Medal from President Barack Obama in 2013.
Book Description
New York Times An “elegant” mosaic of trenchant observations on the late sixties and seventies from the author of Slouching Towards Bethlehem (The New Yorker). In this landmark essay collection, Joan Didion brilliantly interweaves her own “bad dreams” with those of a nation confronting the dark underside of 1960s counterculture. From a jailhouse visit to Black Panther Party cofounder Huey Newton to witnessing First Lady of California Nancy Reagan pretend to pick flowers for the benefit of news cameras, Didion captures the paranoia and absurdity of the era with her signature blend of irony and insight. She takes readers to the “giddily splendid” Getty Museum in Los Angeles, the cool mountains of Bogotá, and the Jordanian Desert, where Bishop James Pike went to walk in Jesus’s footsteps—and died not far from his rented Ford Cortina. She anatomizes the culture of shopping malls—“toy garden cities in which no one lives but everyone consumes”—and exposes the contradictions and compromises of the women’s movement. In the iconic title essay, she documents her uneasy state of mind during the years leading up to and following the Manson murders—a terrifying crime that, in her memory, surprised no one. Written in “a voice like no other in contemporary journalism,” The White Album is a masterpiece of literary reportage and a fearless work of autobiography by the National Book Award–winning author of The Year of Magical Thinking (The New York Times Book Review). Its power to electrify and inform remains undiminished nearly forty years after it was first published.
Source: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/35075917-the-white-album
Discussion Questions
- Why do you think the author chose the title of the book?
- What are the key themes of the books and how are they reflected in the essays?
- Analyze the significance of the first essay.
- Which essay is your favorite and why?
- What can you say about Joan Didion's writing style?
- Share a line or a quote that left a lasting impression. What meaning do you find it?
- Who needs this book in their life?
- How did you feel immediately after reading the book?
- Did your feelings towards the book change as you read it?
- How did the author structure the book, and did it help you understand the book more?
Quotes
What I Loved The Most
- The book intrigued me so much that I researched the momentous events, famous people, and culture in the late 1960s to early 1970s and perused them to get more context about what Joan Didion shared in her essays. Fortunately, we can check them through Google and YouTube. Before reading, to feel the vibe of this era, I even listened to The Beatles’ The White Album, from which the book’s title was derived, and other songs by The Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan, Judy Collins, Eagles, and The Doors. I was transported to an era of social revolution, political turbulence, and artistic freedom. One highlight of the book happened on August 9, 1969, when, according to the book, time stood still in Los Angeles after the news of the murder of the actress, Sharon Tate, together with four other people. The horror pervaded the city and the sense of not being safe terrorized the residents.
- As I jumped from one essay to another, Didion's voice and writing style unfolded, revealing her admirable characteristics as a person and writer. Her sharp observations about her surroundings amazed me as she noticed even subtle details such as the number of knobs in a mixing board in a recording studio, what was inside the paper bag owned by a musician, and the type of flowers that she saw outside the radio station on one snowy evening. I think the specificity of these details shapes Didion’s unique voice.
- The book made me realize this – despite the decades that separate us from the 1960s, there are commonalities between the things that happened during that time and the things that are happening now – social upheavals, political issues, and creative explorations. The differences are the means of doing things (technology is more advanced now) and some social conventions such as how people display their emotions and how society perceives celebrities. Didion showed me how to look at these events and understand their impact on my life, encouraging me to evaluate every piece of information and to choose which ones to take and which to throw away. In essence, the book teaches you how to think.
- The book is a journey inside the mind of Didion or into the mechanism of the nervous system or into people’s thoughts and demeanors or through the processes of massive infrastructures or around big wide spaces. Through her words, you can hear the conversations among musicians in the studio, see the blue Pacific Ocean through the Royal Hawaiin Hotel room, smell the perfume or cologne at a Jaycee convention, feel the heaviness of her luggage when she went on a book tour with her daughter, and even taste the Colombian version of Coca-Cola. Unlike a novel that contains only one general story, The White Album takes you to different times and spaces with different people from different backgrounds. The book brings you to a memorable reading experience – intriguing, poignant, and filled with sentimental curiosity.
What I Loved The Least
- Who loves challenges? In terms of reading, I do love challenges, but I can’t deny it’s uncomfortable. Reading Didion is intimidating but I still pushed it through. She inspired me to think but sometimes I glazed over difficult parts that I wasn’t familiar with, especially those with layered meaning and intricate sentence structures that were difficult to follow at times. The White Album can push you out of your comfort zone.
Summing-Up
⭐⭐⭐⭐💫
Reading Joan Didion is intimidating for me as I was not born in the 1960s, I don’t live in California and I’ve never visited it, and I’m not a writing expert. But there is one thing that I held on to that helped me navigate through the book — my emotions. My guiding question was “How does this make me feel?”
I first learned about Joan Didion from an author who admires her. Didion is an American writer and journalist who was one of the pioneers of New Journalism that emerged in the 1960s and 1970s. New Journalism is marked by using a narrative voice, immersive reporting, literary techniques, and personal viewpoints. Her accolades include the National Book Award for Nonfiction in 2005 and being a finalist for both the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Pulitzer Prize for The Year of Magical Thinking. She was recognized by Former President Barack Obama who presented her with the National Humanities Medal in 2013.
Her book, The White Album, was published in 1979. Recorded in the book are the memorable events, popular people, and counterculture in the late 60s to early 70s. Every essay brings a reader on a different journey – into the mind of the author, through the nerve fibers of the central nervous system, through the processes of the Hoover Dam, or a tour of The Getty. The reading experience is filled with intrigue, poignancy, and sentimental curiosity.
For me, the book also teaches you how to think. Even though the 60s is more than six decades ago, the commonalities between then and now are noticeable. There are still social upheavals, political turmoils, and other struggles of people, and I think the difference is these days the effects of these issues are amplified by technology, especially the Internet. Above all, Didion showed how to observe these things and glean insights into the human condition and seemingly mundane subjects such as books, water, and Coca-Cola.
The White Album can challenge you to get out of your comfort zone when it comes to reading. The complex sentences layered with her perceptions about the subject can be tricky, which sometimes made me lose track of what I was reading. Nevertheless, the book is still a great read.
If you are looking for a unique, thought-provoking read, give this book a read.
Further Information
https://www.joandidion.org/
Book Information:
The White Album by Joan Didion
First Published on January 1, 1979,
Published on May 9, 2017 by Open Road Media; Kindle Edition
224 pages (eBook)