It’s the late 1960’s and a young Joan Didion, a graduate of Berkeley and fresh from 8 years of living in and writing about New York City, is back in her native California, not the Sacramento Valley of her youth but the hippie, drug-infested, burn-it-all-down Haight Ashbury of San Francisco.  It’s the summer of the flower children and the year that I graduated college,  and the scene in California is about as far from my experience of those years as the Moon appeared to be before 1969.

Most of these essays first appeared in The Saturday Evening Post, an ironic coupling which Didion embraced because they didn’t shorten, edit, or dictate her subject matter.  The rest were published first in Holiday, Vogue, the New York Times Magazine, and the American Scholar reflecting the hey-day of America’s magazine culture.

There are three sections of the book, one focused on California, one a series of reflections on her self, and the final a group of essays about her personal life as a child and then adult in California. The essays are brilliant—a luminous example of how the English language can be used to communicate, describing settings and locations, people, action, mood.  In one essay, Didion describes her technique of ‘just observing’.  She attributes the success of this method to her small stature, her unobtrusive temperament, and her ‘neurotic inarticulateness.’  And a superb observer and reporter she is.  In essays about diverse topics from a wife who murders her husband, to time spent on the movie set with John Wayne, to a self-styled Marxist-Stalinist in San Francisco, to Joan Baez and her Institute for the Study of Non-Violence in Carmel, Didion grabs the reader’s attention, puts the story together in brilliant language, and draws some vital interpretations from the material.

It was surprising, and, ironically, just a little bit reassuring, to read about how dismal America was in the late ’60’s with drugs, violence, urban disorder and riot, and the widening gap between adults and their teen aged children.  Reading these essays felt in many ways like reading today’s newspapers as America continues to struggle to define who and what we are.  Through all of this, Didion wields the personal essay as a means of exploring who she is in the face of these events and these people, from murderers to movie actors.  This is how she describes her work in an essay entitled ‘On Keeping a Notebook’:  “But our notebooks give us away, for however dutifully we record what we see around us, the common denominator of all we see is always, transparently, shamelessly, the implacable ‘I’.  We are not talking here about the kind of notebook that is patently for public consumption, a structural conceit for binding together a series of graceful pensees; we are talking about something private, about bits of the mind’s string too short to use, an indiscriminate and erratic assemblage with meaning only for its maker.”

Through these essays runs the thread of personal dread and anxiety that result from, what she refers to as, atomization—the loss of community and commitment to others and a focus on one’s self.  It’s the expression of Robert Putnam’s ‘Bowling Alone’ written large. This atomization described by her in 1967 is what we’re living through in an extreme way in trump’s America of today.

Didion died last year at the age of 87.  She maintained her observational skills, her precise and vivid writing, and her personal take on world events right up until her last new work published in 2011.  After that, a collection of uncollected essay renewed the world’s attention to her in ‘Let Me Tell You What I Mean: A New Collection of Essays’ , published in 2021.  There are two quite wonderful reviews of this book which provide excellent overviews of her work as well—one by my friend and Pulitzer Prize winning journalist, Thomas Powers can be found in the November 3, 2022 London Review of Books: https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v44/n21/thomas-powers/fire-or-earthquake while the other, by Nathan Heller is in The New Yorker of February 1, 2022 https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/02/01/what-we-get-wrong-about-joan-didion .  Both of them provide excellent insights into Didion’s life and work.

I urge you to read her and revel in this master of the English language and a critical observer of the world stage.  She will be missed.