"The shockingly simple realization that lies at the heart of Didion is that what we say often travesties what we mean. Didion is a very good listener, and, at their best, her essays tear apart the assumptions of time and place: the 1960s, the 70s, American foreign policy, American electoral politics, the weakness of fashion and the Christian Right, and of small-town daydreams. . . . Loss has been her subject — the loss of innocence, of illusions, of a better time — and her argument is that, in storytelling, we make barriers to keep out the loss." — Daniel Swift
Related Material
- Discussion Questions by members of Sages, Satirists, and New Journalists, 2007
- Discussion Questions by members of Sages, Satirists, and New Journalists, 2011
Historical and Cultural contexts
Literary Relations
- "I" Versus "They": The Textual and Communal Self in Three Female Autobiographical Texts — Joan Didion, Sara Sulkeri, and Annie Dillard
- Hunter Thompson and Joan Didion
- Authorial voice in Didion, Swift, and Wolfe
- London Girls, Hollywood Murders and Tinker Creek Frogs: The Symbolical Grotesque in Wolfe, Didion and Dillard
- "The World is a Monster": Grotesque Wisdom in Dillard, Suleri and Didion
Themes
- Narrative and storytelling
- Storytelling and Mini-narratives
- The Loss of Narrative as Theme in Joan Didion's White Album
- No Narrative or New Narrative in Didion's "The White Album"
- Leave that Freeway Experience Alone
- Didion's Disease
- Self-Absorption: Questions of Subject in The White Album
- The New Feminism
- Human Perception and Finding the Truth
- The Act of Belonging in Didion's Dislocated Era
- Controlling water and life by remote control
- Water
- Joan Didion as Persphone and death as erotic in "The White Album"
- Didion's Contrast of Hollywood Scripts and Political Reality
- California and the artificiality of trying to live in a harsh environment
- "The White Album" as an objection to the California Experience
Techniques
- Sharp Apprehension
- Tracing the Reference in Joan Didion's The White Album
- Personal Anecdotes: From the Personal to the Political
- Joan Didion: Manipulating Desire and What it Means to Have a Real Life
- Journalism, Context, and Technique
- Satiric Description in Didion's "Many Mansions"
- The "Mock Reader" in "In Bogota"
- Subjectivity and Puzzling Incidents in "The White Album"
- Didion's narrative style as a "cutting room experience"
- The scattered and overtly postmodern sensibility of "The White Album"
- "The White Album": historical fiction or journalism?
- Authorial voice in Joan Didion's Nonfiction
- Joan Didion's Reconciling Detachment and Emotion
- Brevity and Lack of Background in Joan Didion's "White Album"
- Breaking up the Flow of Narrative "The White Album"
- Mental disease as a grotesque image
References
Swift, Daniel. "Write me a River [Review of Didion's Where I Was from]." Times Literary Supplement (April 9, 2004): 26.
Last modified 10 September 2007