As in her very first essay she reveals her opinion that the whole world is made up of stories, and that we must pick the appropriate facts to make sense out of the confusion of life, she sees everywhere about her different narrative stories which are sometimes completely contradictory with each other; the Marxist revolutionary rhetoric of the Black Panthers, the 50's 'Nuclear' sensibilities of the Jaycee club, the apocalyptic nihilism of Jim Morrison, to the religious fervor of James Pike, first Bishop of California. All intelligent males I know would most likely like her, if they could be bothered to read more female authors. The White Album is organized into five sections. Friends and acquaintances and strangers spoke of her with a sort of ineloquent awe as if their own descriptions could never match her lucid prose or mental acuity. Didion's The White Album gives a collection of events from shopping malls, to the Manson Murders, the women's movement, migraines, all the way to describing her perspective and what life was like in America post-60s. “The White Album,” first published in 1979, is perhaps the single work most closely associated with Didion, and 2018 marks the fiftieth anniversary of many of the events she describes: the Manson murders, the rise of the Black Panthers and Huey Newton’s arrest, the student takeover of San Francisco State College, and the writer’s own breakdown. Welcome back. Or maybe ‘like’ is the wrong word, as it’s a word that does not suit Didion at all. A fine example of juxtaposing public cultural events with personal experiences, a kind of journalism Didion practically invented (and Hunter Thompson took over the top). The central passage is one in which she observes of her generation that it was the last to identify with adults. The era that predicted the mobilization of discord for the rest of the centur. I didn't love the book at first, but after a couple of essays, Didion's quiet style started to grow on me. The second part, “California Republic,” consists of seven shorter essays. I didn’t love these essays until about the midpoint, “The Women’s Movement”, a devastatingly good piece about the watering-down of feminism in mid-century America, about the heartbreaking shift of a vitally important revolutionary movement as it lost touch with its ideological base and became ever more a vehicle appropriated by a leisure class, its goals moving away from seeking the possibility for an individual to create their own unique destiny unfettered by traditional obstacles and bias, and moving toward something like a seeking of the possibility for the mere prolongation of adolescence, a fear of growing up- more a form of escapism than a new form of liberation. The murder trial cast a cloud of fear over Hollywood that seemed to propel many of Didion's insights. He brought self-indulgence to its pinnacle; in short, he failed to grow more spectacularly than almost anyone else of his generation. ©2020 eNotes.com, Inc. All Rights Reserved. As I was making my way through this one it once more occurred to me (I had thought it again during the reading of Slouching Towards Bethlehem) that it’s rather unfair that Joan Didion will perhaps be mostly remembered as a High-Priestess-of-Grieving (on account of The Year of Magical Thinking) instead of the Cool-Bitch-Chic author she was for the larger part of her writing career. Log in here. everything you need to sharpen your knowledge of The White Album. I am not the society in microcosm. She quotes a film producer: "How can anyone protest a book that has withstood the critical test of time since last October?" In the third part, “Women,” Didion praises Georgia O’Keeffe but attacks Doris Lessing for her “torrent of fiction that increasingly seems conceived in a stubborn rage against the very idea of fiction.” In “The Women’s Movement” (1972), Didion takes on a bigger target by claiming that American feminism is essentially a kind of Marxism mixed oddly with New England transcendentalism, that feminist criticism fails because fiction is “in most ways hostile to ideology,” and that many feminists seem averse to “adult sexual life itself” and would prefer “to stay forever children.”. If you’re trying to represent everything evenly, then the fourth section and the second section are the longest in terms of numbers of stories. Please enter your username or email address. ― Joan Didion, The White Album: Essays. The title of the book comes from its first essay, "The White Album", which was chosen as one of the 10 most important essays since 1950 by Publishers Weekly. "How she feels" has become, for the time being, how it is. She is gifted in stirring up a sense of significance between unrelated spheres of activity, in the same way we connect life events in memory with the coincidence of hearing a song from the Beatles or Dylan at the time. Joan Didion’s The White Album was first published in 1979 and can be considered a follow-up to her Slouching Towards Bethlehem published 11 years earlier. I only own this book in audio form but would like to use the quote in a paper that needs exact citing. Her essays bring back thoughts and memories of my own experiences growing up in the 60s and 70s. The book is composed of selected pieces of her essays and articles published at that time, and examines the themes of the American Dream, Celebrity, and the chaos of the Sixties in general. . The White Album Summary & Study Guide includes comprehensive information and analysis to It includes, among other bizarre artifacts and personalities, reportage on the dark journeys and impulses of the Manson family, a visit to a Black Panther Party press conference, the story of John Paul Getty's museum, a meditation on the romance of water in an arid landscape, and reflections on the swirl and confusion that marked this era.
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