by Joan Didion
“Style is character.”
— Joan Didion, The White Album
Synopsis
A collection of essays written during a period when the cultural narratives of America seemed to be breaking apart. Didion examines politics, celebrity, California, crime, memory, and her own experiences with a detached clarity that somehow makes the chaos feel even more immediate.
Themes
- Style and Character — what we make reveals who we are.
- Fragmentation — the breakdown of coherent narratives, both personal and societal.
- Memory and Perception — the stories we tell ourselves about what happened.
- Alienation — feeling disconnected from the assumptions and institutions around us.
Selected Lines
“He talked, running the words together because he had said them so many times before, about ‘the American capitalistic-materialistic system’ and ‘so-called free enterprise’ and ‘the fight for the liberation of black people throughout the world.’”
“…that his gravestone in the Protestant Cemetery in Jaffa might as well have read only JAMES PIKE, AMERICAN.”
“Where I was born and where and how I have lived is unimportant,” Georgia O’Keeffe told us. “It is what I have done with where I have been that should be of interest.”
“My daughter was making, that day in Chicago, an entirely unconscious but quite basic assumption about people and the work they do. She was assuming that the glory she saw in the work reflected a glory in its maker, that the painting was the painter as the poem is the poet, that every choice one made alone—every word chose or rejected, every brush stroke laid or not laid down—betrayed one’s character.”
“Style is character.”
In the Islands
“I tell you this not as aimless revelation but because I want you to know, as you read me, precisely who I am and where I am and what is on my mind.”
“Quite often during the past several years I have felt myself a sleepwalker, moving through the world unconscious of the moment’s high issue, oblivious to its data, alert only to the stuff of bad dreams.”
“I have trouble maintaining the basic notion that keeping promises matters in a world where everything I was taught seems beside the point.”
“I still believe that, but I have trouble reconciling salvation with those ignorant armies camped in my mind.”
“I am a thirty-four-year-old woman with long straight hair and an old bikini bathing suit and bad nerves sitting on an island in the middle of the Pacific waiting for a tidal wave that will not come.”
“…however, that I realized what I most disliked about this incident: I disliked it because it had the aspect of a short story, one of those ‘little epiphany’ stories in which the main character glimpses a crisis in a stranger’s life and is moved to see his or her own life in a new light.”
Reflection
Didion’s gift is seeing through narratives without becoming cynical about people. She distrusts tidy explanations, neat endings, and convenient morals. The essays in The White Album often feel like attempts to assemble meaning from fragments, while acknowledging that the fragments may never fit together completely.