Juergen teller joan didion the white album

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Didion spends time with lifeguards and an orchid breeder, and she describes her communal Malibu neighborhood near a highway. In 2009, Didion was awarded an honorary Doctor of Letters degree by Harvard University. When I actually slowed down to experience and enjoy what I was reading, moments ripe for analysis just jumped out at me. Seven years later, she died.

Her work often comments on social disorder. Her novels include Democracy (1984) and The Last Thing He Wanted (1996). Didion was born in California and lived a large part of life on the West Coast, so she was acutely familiar with its nuances and narratives. We live entirely, especially if we are writers, 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.

Or at least we do for a while.

In 1981 she received the American Book Award in nonfiction, and was nominated for a National Book Critics Circle Prize in nonfiction for The White Album. I watched Robert Kennedy’s funeral on a verandah at the Royal Hawaiian Hotel in Honolulu, and also the first reports from My Lai. I reread all of George Orwell on the Royal Hawaiian Beach, and I also read, in the papers that came one day late from the mainland, the story of Betty Lansdown Fouquet, a 26-year-old woman with faded blond hair who put her five-year-old daughter out to die on the center divider of Interstate 5 some miles south of the last Bakersfield exit.

Didion begins with a now-famous declaration: “We tell ourselves stories in order to live” (8). Later, she returns to Hawaii, visiting a graveyard for soldiers killed in the Vietnam War and documenting Schofield Barracks, an army base that James Jones featured in his World War II-era novel From Here to Eternity (1951).

I was meant to know the plot, but all I knew was what I saw: flash pictures in variable sequence, images with no “meaning” beyond their temporary arrangement, not a movie but a cutting-room experience. Vaguely guessing at what my professor wanted to hear, I wrote up some analytical response that focused on Didion’s word choice, barely skimming beyond the first few sentences.

During those five years I appeared, on the face of it, a competent enough member of some community or another, a signer of contracts and Air Travel cards, a citizen: I wrote a couple of times a month for one magazine or another, published two books, worked on several motion pictures; participated in the paranoia of the time, in the raising of a small child, and in the entertainment of large numbers of people passing through my house; made gingham curtains for spare bedrooms, remembered to ask agents if any reduction of points would be pari passu with the financing studio, put lentils to soak on Saturday night for lentil soup on Sunday, made quarterly F.I.C.A.

I suppose this period began around 1966 and continued until 1971. Once in a while I even answered letters addressed to me, not exactly upon receipt but eventually, particularly if the letters had come from strangers. In “Holy Water,” Didion visits the California State Water Project’s control center and shows how water moves throughout the state.

I read the first paragraph, more concerned about checking the class off my to-do list than anything. The only problem was that my entire education, everything I had ever been told or had told myself, insisted that the production was never meant to be improvised: I was supposed to have a script, and had mislaid it.

Serving primarily as framing for the rest of the stories, the first three pages discuss the imposition of a narrative line through one’s life.

To avoid divorce, Didion, her husband, and her daughter spend time in Honolulu. Through Didion, I learned that while telling oneself stories is essential to life, experience and reflection for its own sake is equally, even occasionally more, important in order to keep those stories alive.