Book Review: The White Album, by Joan Didion (1979)

Joan Didion with her Corvette on a paperback cover of The White Album, first released in 1979.

Joan Didion’s 1979 essay collection The White Album starts with a bang. “We tell ourselves stories in order to live,” Didion writes. That’s become probably Didion’s most famous quotation, one that you can find in every corner of the internet. It’s perhaps a simple statement, but no one before Didion had said it so bluntly. 

Joan Didion has many obsessions. Shopping malls, orchids, the Santa Ana winds, traffic, dams. We learn about many of these obsessions in The White Album. The book’s centerpiece is the title essay, a 35-page sprawl through the tense paranoia that was California in the late 1960’s. Didion encounters strange people at her door, Didion encounters the Doors at a recording session. Didion meets Huey Newton and Eldridge Cleaver, and sees campus unrest at San Francisco State College.

Didion writes about the Charles Manson murders, and the shockwaves they sent through the Hollywood community: “Many people I know in Los Angeles believe that the Sixties ended abruptly on August 9, 1969, ended at the exact moment when word of the murders on Cielo Drive traveled like brushfire through the community, and in a sense this is true. The tension broke that day. The paranoia was fulfilled.” (p.47) I think Didion makes an excellent point here. In many ways, the hippie dream of the 1960’s ended with the violent apocalyptic visions of Charles Manson. 

The essay “Holy Water” details Didion’s fascinations with water and dams, a subject that is quite obviously still near and dear to the hearts of Californians today, forty-two years after Didion’s essay was written. Didion visits the Operations Control Center for the California State Water Project, where water flow for many areas is controlled. 

“Many Mansions” details the travails of the California Governor’s Mansion. The original mansion, built in 1877, housed the state’s governors from 1903 until 1967. Then Ronald Reagan’s friends and benefactors built a giant new house in the suburb of Carmichael. This house wasn’t finished when Reagan left office, and at the time Didion wrote her essay, the house was gathering dust as then-Governor Jerry Brown refused to live in it. (The state eventually sold the house in 1982.) Didion contrasts the styles of the two houses, much preferring the old Second Empire-Italianate mansion in downtown Sacramento. (It helps that Didion was friends with Earl Warren’s daughter, so she occasionally visited the house.) In the kitchen of that old mansion is a pastry marble, and we get to see some of Didion’s snobbery when she takes a public tour of the mansion and no one knows what a pastry marble is used for! Shock! Horror! Didion writes, “It occurred to me that we had finally evolved a society in which knowledge of a pastry marble, like a taste for stairs and closed doors, could be construed as ‘elitist.’” (p.72) Well, knowledge of a pastry marble doesn’t necessarily make you elitist, but if you have one in your house, it’s definitely a luxury item. 

I’m not going to say anything about Didion’s controversial 1972 essay “The Women’s Movement.” Suffice it to say, Didion was not running to the barricades with Gloria Steinem. You can read it and judge for yourself. 

The White Album is an excellent collection, and I enjoyed it more than Slouching Towards Bethlehem. Didion’s voice seems more developed by the time she wrote The White Album, so even the shortest pieces in the book still capture the reader’s interest and contain great writing. 

Throughout The White Album we learn more about Joan Didion. She gets migraines. She was obsessed with shopping malls for a time: “I recall staying late in my pale-blue office on the twentieth floor of the Graybar Building to memorize David D. Bohannon’s parking ratios.” (p.182) She’s haunted by the image of the Hoover Dam: “Since the afternoon in 1967 when I first saw Hoover Dam, its image has never been entirely absent from my inner eye.” (p.198) She writes of moving to Malibu: “I had not before 1971 and will probably not again live in a place with a Chevrolet named after it.” (p.209) Well, not unless she moves to Bel Air. 

Joan Didion is something of an enigma, a contradiction. She writes so much about her own fragility: she is incapacitated by migraines, she tells us how she doesn’t have a watch with her when she’s traveling for an assignment, which keeps her constantly calling down to the front desk to ask them the time. When she’s called the front desk too many times, she calls her husband at home to ask him the time. She is afraid of driving her rental car over the Carquinez Bridge spanning the San Francisco Bay. (Didion incorrectly spells it “Carquinas,” a misspelling that persists in the 2009 edition of The White Album.) She gives us more than a page from her own psychiatric report. 

And yet, for all this talk of fragility, I can’t help but feel that Joan Didion must be a very strong person to have made a living as a freelance writer for the last sixty years. I wonder if she isn’t hiding her strength behind her fragility.