A review by somethingarosie
The White Album by Joan Didion

3.0

I really wanted to love this, but unfortunately ~middling~ is the word.

There are so many great sentences and quotes in this collection of essays, but it lost me in parts.

 Didion tends to jump around a lot, as a result the essays can be difficult to follow. She goes off on tangents, into minute detail about specific events or people…and I just lost interest, on more than one occasion. Perhaps this is as much a reflection of me as it is the book.

I was born in 1999 in Ireland; American life in the 60’s and 70’s is not something I am hugely familiar with, naturally. I expected to learn more about this time period from The White Album, I was looking forward to it!

My main issue with the book is that Didion just sort of…plops you in the middle of situations, people and events of that time, without much context or explaining who they were; hence my regular confusion. I ended up having to google who’s-who quite a bit. This coupled with her random deviations in significant detail….I was bamboozled. I found the parts I did understand very interesting, though. Especially the Sharon Tate passage; she is my Roman Empire.  Having prior knowledge about her helped me appreciate and understanding Didion’s portrayal.

It’s a shame, I really wanted to love this. If I were a bit more clued into certain cultural moments in America during the time, perhaps this would have been more my style. I looked forward to learning more about the 60’s & 70’s, I was not prepared for the fact I would need to approach the book with a certain level of knowledge already in my repertoire.

All that said, there were parts I found really interesting. Here are some of the essays I enjoyed:

• The White Album (yes, the collection starts out well)
• The Women’s Movement
• Doris Lessing 
• Georgia O’ Keeffe

Perhaps The White Album is a body of work I will grasp more comprehensible if I were to reread it. Though, I’m not sure I’d go to the bother.

3💫