Joan Didion is the Shakespeare of things that don't quite add up. Situations where what's being said and what's being done are at odds and places where the postcard picture hides ugly, painful truths. Her non-fiction is the opposite of easy reading: the sentences uncurl slowly, and sometimes you don't quite know where she's taking a paragraph or a page until the last few words, when suddenly everything stabs into focus. And given the length of this book (1122 pages), the time-span it covers (for...

We look for the sermon in the suicide, for the social or moral lesson in the murder of five.We interpret what we see, select the most workable of the multiple choices. We live entirely... by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images, by the 'ideas' with which we have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria — which is our actual experience.― Joan DidionHaving just finished Political Fictions, I have now killed this 1122 pg collection of Joan Didion's nonfiction (Slouching Tow...

This big fat collection clocks in at over 1100 pages and comprises the seven books of Didion's nonfiction that appeared between 1968 and 2003. These areSlouching Towards BethlehemThe White AlbumSalvadorMiamiAfter HenryPolitical FictionsWhere I Was FromWhat can I add to what's already been said about Joan Didion's writing? The standard review cliches come to mind - spare, taut, elegant, polished, not a word out of place. All true. And yet, I admire these pieces, but I don't love them. There's a c...

My soulmate is a 74 year old woman.

I am almost done with this tome of non-fiction from one of my favorite writers. Before this book, I had only read The Year of Magical Thinking (which I *loved*) but Didion had always held a certain fascination for me because I had the hugest crush on Ed O'Brien of Radiohead for the longest time and he said Joan Didion was his favorite writer and his dream woman. So of course I set about finding out who this lady was, and whether she was worthy of this praise. :) The crush has long since faded (t...

This now twelve-year-old volume from the Everyman's Library is a kind of summa of Joan Didion's nonfiction writing, gathering eight of her prior collections including Slouching Toward Bethlehem, The White Album, and After Henry and covering such topics as Ronald Reagan's then-new mansion, the "aqueous suspension of personality" obtainable in covered shopping malls, and the exploits of politicians as disparate as Jesse Jackson and Newt Gingrich. At over eleven hundred pages, hardbound, it's a rea...

Joan Joan Joan! God the woman can write! Some of her essays get a little tiresome as she tries to shock, but you have to remember she was writing them back in the '70s.

Joan Didion earns respect as one of the important writers of our time. I hadn't read a lot of her work, more fiction than nonfiction, as it turned out, and so I dived into We Tell Ourselves Stories in Order to Live because we read artistry in order to read well. This huge book contains all of Didion's nonfiction up to 2003. Her last 3 books appeared after this publication. I had read only Slouching Towards Bethlehem before and am still besotted with it, think it the most impressive of the works

Incredible. The nonfiction piece 'Dreamers of the Golden Dream' I have read over and over through the years. An incredible depiction of California desert life, and the 'true crime' murder of a dentist. I cannot do it justice here because I am writing quickly, but this POSITIVELY is a MUST READ, if not just for the first nonfiction piece in this voluminous collection.

JOAN DIDION (1934-2021)This morning a real writer, a poet who wrote prose, died. I hope peacefully so, and not by herself, though lord knows. I would go to her funeral if it wasn’t so far away. Never met her in person, seen her on the page, on screen. I am a fan: who feels like a student of her work. She is someone whose advice I diligently follow. She elucidated an identifiable tone, a lens to perceive with. I, too, have typed up Hemingway’s sentences. I bought a mass market paperback of Conrad...

First, a disclaimer: having read Slouching Towards Bethlehem, The White Album, and Where I Was From before, I skipped those sections of the anthology and read the parts I hadn't seen before.Joan Didion is a first-class writer and journalist, so much so that even reading today about the behind-the-scenes intrigues of a 25-year-old Los Angeles mayoral race remains gripping.Her best journalistic virtue is not that she gets the scoop that nobody else gets, but that she reports the interesting things...

By way of commentary, I can do no better than to direct everyone to this piece from The New Yorker, "Out of Bethlehem: The Radicalization of Joan Didion" by Louis Menand. Ostensibly a review of Tracy Daugherty’s "The Last Love Song" (St. Martin’s), a biography of Joan Didion, this article is really an overview of Didion's career and the evolution of her world view. http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/201...The only thing I would like to add is this quote from John Leonard in his introduction to th...

We Tell Ourselves Stories in Order to Live is a collection of Didion's nonfiction work, including Slouching Towards Bethlehem, The White Album, Salvador, Miami, After Henry, Political Fictions, and Where I Was From, stopping in 2003 before the deaths of her husband and daughter. I got bogged down in the more historical and political essay collections and took a long break after Miami but picked it back up and finished reading. Slouching Towards Bethlehem and The White Album are stellar, with Di

This is the last book to have rocked my world. Before this I'd only read "The White Album" and upon beginning this book I felt the same thrill that I felt discovering some of my other favorite authors, people like Harry Crews or Dennis Cooper. Didion is quite unlike the writers I tend towards. She's much more a child of the New Yorker reading, grad school attending, fans of Saul Bellow and more recently David Foster Wallace set, if that makes sense to anyone besides myself. People consider her s...

This is the most amazingly clear writing that I've ever read. Didion writes what she observes, clearly and precisely. She doesn't use judgmental words, but since she writes so clearly about her subjects, we can get an idea of what she thinks about said subjects.I'm not yet finished with this collection, but will tell you that as a younger baby boomer, reading "Slouching Toward Bethlehem" gave me a better, nonglamorous picture of the sixties than anything else I've ever read. As an aspiring write...

Ah, where to begin when it comes to Didion. I adore her. Plus, when she was younger she was totally smokin'! I sh*t you not. Go google some photos of the broad. Hottttttt! And intelligence. I'm a bigger sucker for intelligence. I've read a few of the books in this collection on their own, but once this collected essay edition came out I peed my pants. All of this Didion in one place? It's like a dream come true for me.

Just read another great essay, written in the 70's, on the development of shopping malls as pictures both of American ingenuity and the aimlessness of modern consumer culture (from The White Album). Her nonfiction continues to impress me.

This book was a wonderful book to start 2022 with. Joan Didion is a sense of place, a raised eyebrow, a matter of fact. There are seven books here in one. Not all books or essays of hers are created equal but her essays on California, on politics, on herself and her family are all a delight. I giggled at her wry humor, I cried at her gutting use of metaphor, I Google'd madly -- trying to gain updated information about her absurdly well-researched points on topics ranging from Central American po...

Joan Didion is simply the supreme essayist of American literature. Updike and Vidal, to name two others, were great; Didion is the best. This 'Didion Bible', as I've taken to calling it, comprises 7 books that, taken as a whole, are a glittering testament to this woman's courage, wit, empathy, and exquisite writing talent. Included here is "Political Fictions" which contains the most clear-eyed writing about US politics that I have ever come across. We may not see its like again. #sad.

Probably as much Didion as anyone needs to own. Doesn't include "Year of Magical Thinking," which is cool by me. Since "Play It as It Lays" stands in my mind as one of the more obnoxious books I've ever read, I'm always a little askance of Didion. But the first 2/3 of this is pretty live. Though this might be a purely idiosyncratic choice, the tales of decrepit Californian rurality got me where I lived (pun!), and I really liked her distaste for hippies. But "Political Fictions" is one of the mo...

I love and hate Joan Didion. Love her sentences, but often can't quite put my finger on the point.

Lucid, brave writing from a "reporter of life" who has never hesitated to tackle the toughest stories - even her own.

I hate to call this book a slog, but my god. At 1100+ pages and dense topics to cover, it took me a very, very long time to finish this anthology. Didion is massively important to the American canon. I am rather ashamed I never read her before. That being said, while I would implore everyone to read her, I would caution against reading this. We Tell Ourselves Stories in Order to Live contains 7 of her books. While each one is an interesting compilation of articles, reading them all together over...

I read Play It as It Lays as a younger woman and really liked it. Joan Didion seems to be newly-admired by a certain cool segment of a younger population. She is very cool that is for sure. Cold. The famous scene where she talks to the kindergartner in Haight-Ashbury who has been given LSD. And that is just one of the most obvious examples. Are we just supposed to admire the random beauty of the words. I just kept telling myself reassuringly "You are smart enough to get this." How did she evoke

Joan Didion has a marvelous way with words. She allows the perfect turn of phrase to make her sentences drip with whatever feeling she wants to convey.I had never heard of Joan Didion. I suppose I missed the boat on that one. Not that Didion is out of style, but the point is I never heard of her in her prime. This is a book that I took out on a whim. Sometimes I walk through the aisles of the Library and pick out books that look really interesting to me. Occasionally, I get lucky and find some r...

Joan Didion's writing is so good, I find myself reading about things I wouldn't think I would care about in the least-say, for instance, the Operations Control Center for the California State Water Project (in an essay titled Holy Water) and think, "Wow. That's completely fascinating."There are way too many stand-out quotes in this collection, but here's an example:"I think we are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not....

It's kind of odd to review this as if it's just one book of Didion essays. It's actually seven books. And I enjoyed some of them so much more than others, which is not Didion's fault—her writing is always superlative—it's just that some of the subjects she writes about aren't my thing. "Salvador," for example was really hard to finish. The stand-outs (surprising no one) are "Slouching Towards Bethlethem" and "The White Album," with honorable mention going to "Where I Was From." "Political Fictio...

I found this title looking at the Dutch selection by Joost de Vries. It looks like a magnificent multibook.https://lccn.loc.gov/2006041043 lccn http://www.loc.gov/catdir/enhancement... description http://catdir.loc.gov/catdir/enhancem... toc http://catdir.loc.gov/catdir/enhancem... biblio https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/bo... bookpage publisher Worldcat gives some online loan:https://archive.org/details/isbn_9780... https://openlibrary.org/books/OL15626...

Great writing makes great reading. Thanks, Joan. So candid, raw, real. Didion rises from every page, challenging your assumptions—hers, too. Leonard’s introduction is spectacular writing, not to be missed. My only gripe with the book, the actual book, is the lack of dates & original publication notes for each piece, which would have been immensely helpful in placing each work in context. Conversely, the timeline at the front of the book was very helpful. This is a beautiful edition to grace any

The type is way too small but I struggled through because she is such an excellent writer! I wish I had read every single one of these when they were first published. Loved her take on LA and NYC. Loved her take on politics and El Salvador. All if it rings so exactly true. Every page I would just shake my head at her insight. I definitely need the large print version. I learned way too much about Miami - yikes.