The Bookshelf

Slouching Towards Bethlehem by Joan Didion

This collection of essays is absolutely essential for anyone California dreaming or wishing that Vanity Fair had more female essayists.  Once I took the Proust Questionnaire and I scored closest (97%) to Joan Didion.  I was floored, I’ve considered this woman a role model since I found out who she was, to be told that her and I think alike was the truest of compliments.

Published in 1968, this collection is taken primarily from The Saturday Evening Post,  American Scholar and The New York Times Magazine.  It chronicles much of her life in California in the 1960’s with some of the best prose written at the time, in my opinion  I’ve never been to California, but I don’t want to go until I can experience her California. She has a love from where she is from, and an entire book about it as well.  Her passion and, ironically, her ambivalence about Sacramento is stunning.  She narrates a world that, in modern times, has become iconic; California in the 1960’s means something to those of us that study history or watch Mad Men.  Reading these essays without the glare of a reminiscing eye makes them all the more interesting, and in terms of the Counter Culture, much more troubling.   

While a majority of the book focuses on the Counter Culture in the Haight, the most poignant are found in Part II, Personals, as she accomplishes all that I’ve ever wanted to do.  

 I have always wanted to be a writer, whatever that means, but it was something I never did.  Luckily, I live in a time when I can write whatever I please on this blog.  Perhaps 30 people read what I write, perhaps less?  What does it matter, as long as I’m able to write. 

One of my favorite passages from, On Keeping a Notebook:

What kind of magpie keeps this notebook? "He was born the night the Titanic went down." That seems a nice enough line, and I even recall who said it, but is it not really a better line in life than it could ever be in fiction?

But of course that is exactly it: not that I should ever use the line, but that I should remember the woman who said it and the afternoon I heard it. We were on her terrace by the sea, and we were finishing the wine left from lunch, trying to get what sun there was, a California winter sun. The woman whose husband was born the night the Titanic went down wanted to rent her house, wanted to go back to her children in Paris. I remember wishing that I could afford the house, which cost $1,000 a month. "Someday you will," she said lazily. "Someday it all comes." There in the sun on her terrace it seemed easy to believe in someday, but later I had a low-grade afternoon hangover and ran over a black snake on the way to the supermarket and was flooded with inexplicable fear when I heard the checkout clerk explaining to the man ahead of me why she was finally divorcing her husband. "He left me no choice," she said over and over as she then punched the register. "He has a little seven-month-old baby by her, he left me no choice." I would like to believe that my dread then was for the human condition, but of course it was for me, because I wanted a baby and did not then have one and because I wanted to own the house that cost $1,000 a month to rent and because I had a hangover.

I would like to be friends with Joan.

Joan has met her fair share of hardships, her husband and daughter both died within a year of one another, chronicled beautifully in the memoir, The Year of Magical Thinking.  Yet, all the while, she tells us a story.  Perhaps it’s her story, or perhaps it belongs to someone else.  Regardless, she doesn’t stop.  I admire her, disagree with her, feel indifferent toward her and most importantly read her.  Please, become acquainted.  

Selections from Slouching Towards Bethlehem:

One Keeping a Notebook

On Morality