4.12 AVERAGE

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trisha's review


I don't think this piece is meant to be read just once and for that reason, giving this a rating feels wrong. What I can say, however, is that I will be coming back to this book many many times– Didion's writing has me ensnared.
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My fourth read for #MemoirMarch was Slouching Towards Bethlehem by Joan Didion, who certainly has a way with words! Her distinctive prose is captivating as she shares her observations in this collection of essays focused on people, places and lifestyles during the mid 60s and 70s, mostly after her move from NYC to California.
It's not for everyone, but I enjoyed the scope and beauty of her writing as she paints a sometimes uncomfortable portrait of life in the Golden State.
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This writing is so gorgeous and inspired genuine introspection. Her comments on morality, on journaling, on being young, on change of culture - it seems to me this book will be forever relevant. 

Never read Didion until now... I'd had a vague impression of her as a figure among the rarefied literati of the mid-20th century. Maybe I thought of her as a Gore Vidal-type figure rather than (somewhat) more accurately comparing her work to Tom Wolfe's. Maybe her affiliation with Vogue contributed to my impression. Recently, I've noticed that young people seem to be reading Didion's work. If it is a real phenomenon, this increase in youthful readership of a literary figure whose heyday was half a century ago is interesting enough that I decided to jump on the (possible) bandwagon.

Reading journalism from another era--especially this "New Journalism"-- is always uncomfortable. History has already studied, summarized, and passed judgment on the subject under scrutiny and the reader has the benefit of hindsight. The journalist is always wrong to some degree about the significance and future of the subject at hand and the reader in the future knows that the subject at hand has long since passed into irrelevance. It's difficult to take seriously even the works about 1960s counterculture (like the title piece) because I know how that story ends up. The "it's already happened so why bother caring?" attitude one has while reading old New Journalism intensifies the "things fall apart" theme of the collection. Reading this book does not make one feel good.

In addition to the semi-journalistic pieces are a handful of navel-gazing essays. "On Morality" seemed to handily skirt the topic of morality. I don't know why anyone would have published these essays in a periodical; they are just not interesting and seem more designed to clarify things in the author's mind than to communicate ideas to anyone else.

I did quite enjoy the true crime article "Some Dreamers of the Golden Dream" as well as her pieces about Sacramento, "Going Home" and "Notes from a Native Daughter."

I'll try reading some of Didion's more recent work sometime.
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Expand filter menu Content Warnings
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Some beautiful language and paragraphs.
Some very hitting and bleak look at hippy culture in 60s 
Some essays more difficult to read than others
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