“WE TELL OURSELVES STORIES in order to live” (Didion 11). Joan Didion famously starts her collection of essays, The White Album, with this haunting line. Its effect on the reader is extremely evocative because it is universally applicable. The stories we tell ourselves are for both fantastical, and also mundane reasons: We do this to cope with the complex and incomprehensible events that unfold in the world around us. Instead of searching for straightforward answers to make sense of our surroundings, which Didion expresses the dangers of in her works, we tell stories in order to convey the good, mediocre, and difficult aspects of the human experience. In both The White Album, Didion effectively dissects the complexities of American life and communicates the emotional emptiness, spiritual confusion, and societal upheavals of the 1960s and 1970s in order to convey that despite the chaos of the world, life adapts and goes on just as before.
Joan Didion was born on December 5, 1934, in Sacramento, California, as the daughter of Frank Reese and Eduene Didion. As a child, Didion followed her Army Air Corps father to military bases in Colorado and then to Michigan. Eventually, the family settled in California. Didion’s father was a heavy drinker and gambler who was hospitalized for depression while she was attending the University of California, Berkely. In Where I Was From, a collection of essays combining journalism, memoir writing, and historical writing, Didion writes that her mother was fiercely right-wing in her politics and loved the expression, “what difference does it make?” In the novel, in which she refers to her mother as “the pure strain,” Didion’s childhood atmosphere informs the gloominess that characterizes Didion’s writing.
As a senior at Berkeley in the early 1950s, she won a writing competition and earned an internship at Vogue magazine. This was Didion’s introduction to the writing scene of New York City, and shortly after, she began to simultaneously write on occasion for the National Review and the Saturday Evening Post. During this period, she wrote her first novel Run, River. In 1964, she married aspiring writer John Gregory Dunne, and they later adopted their daughter, Quintana Roo Dunne. The couple moved to Los Angeles, California, providing Didion with ample opportunities for writing in the personal mode. Los Angeles society became the source of influence for her novels Slouching Towards Bethlehem and Play It As It Lays.
With the start of the 1970s came Didion’s introduction to writing screenplays and the world of Hollywood (which she critiques and scrutinizes in Play It As It Lays). The White Album, arguably her most famous work, was published in 1979, by which time she had won a national reputation as an intensely acute social observer and prose stylist. Yet, in spite of her great triumphs, she was also plagued with great tragedies. In the winter of 2003, Didion’s husband dropped dead at her feet while sitting at the dinner table. Less than two years later, her daughter died from a fatal illness at the age of 39. This series of unfortunate occurrences confirmed Didon’s worldview as she had spent her entire life “in expectation of, and preparation for, just such events” (Lacy). In response to the feelings of grief, Didion entered a period of self-reflection in which she composed two emotionally jarring novels, The Year of Magical Thinking and Blue Nights, before she passed away on December 23, 2021.
The White Album, named after one of the quintessential Beatles albums from the 1960s, seems like a collection of incoherent essays written from deep within Didion’s psyche. However, upon closer examination, the messages and motifs of the myriad of essays are quite similar in more than just style and rhetoric. The introductory essay, “The White Album," centers extensively on major American political and social events, which results in a portrait of her spiritual confusion, interwoven with major historical events.
The essay starts with the most famous line from Didion’s works, “We tell ourselves stories in order to live” (The White Album 11). This powerful line perfectly encapsulates the motives of Didion’s writing: she constantly explores her difficulty coping with a changing society and probes why certain components of society remained untouched by the wave of political and social change that was apparent in the 1960s. Throughout the passage, she utilizes anaphora by repeating “we” statements. These repetitions solidify and strengthen the overall thesis made by Didion, that this superficial narrative told to help cope with change applies to all of us. The use of "we" versus "I" adds a component of togetherness and relatability to the piece and appeals to the pathos of the reader by causing them to self-reflect and feel motivated by the message of moving on, despite the chaos in American society. The White Album is about meaning, or more precisely, the impossibility of finding meaning. Didion starts the essay off with a descriptive image of a naked woman who is about to commit suicide. She uses powerful metaphors such as “[w]e look for the sermon in the suicide” and “the social or moral lesson in the murder of five” (11) to make sense of things that seem so incomprehensible. The phrase “[we] look for the "sermon in the suicide," illustrates the desperation to find morality or justification for sudden changes in our narrative. Later in the passage, Didion begins to “doubt the premises of all the stories I had ever told myself, a common condition but one I found troubling” (11). Didion explains that stories and manifested narratives are ways we, as a changing society, cope with the uncertainty that comes with change, and sometimes, those stories are contradicted by the world around us. These paradoxes lead us to wonder and doubt the line between reality and fiction. The White Album explores the realization that sometimes events happen in our lives and the world around us for no clear reason.
The mention of the “murder of five” is a reference to the Manson murder case, which was the subject and underlying influence of many of Didion's social commentaries made in her collection of essays. The Manson Murders were a series of murders perpetrated by members of the Manson Family during August 8–10, 1969, in Los Angeles, California. In The White Album, the Manson murders, which Didion often refers to as “Cielo Drive murders,” are used as the fulfillment of paranoia, the climax.“The White Album” is divided into 15 sections, and the Manson murders are included in section 10. This section can be divided into two parts; one where Didion depicts society’s turmoil in Los Angeles as a whole, and the second, where she describes the community’s reaction to these heinous local events. Didion writes that society at this time was fascinated by “this mystical flirtation with the idea of ‘sin’ - this sense that it was possible to go ‘too far, and that many people were doing it - was very much with us in Los Angeles in 1968 and 1969” (The White Album 41). The constituents of Los Angeles were aware of this “complex social situation” (Colombo) and were concerned about it. “There were odd things going around town. There were rumors. There were stories” (41).
Los Angeles society could concoct stories and imagine what had happened, but people were unable to talk about it. “Everything was unmentionable but nothing was unimaginable” (41), as if they were all waiting for something terrible to happen. The expectancy of tragedy is a reflection of Didion’s upbringing and is prevalent in her writing. The distinction between what can and cannot be said reoccurs later in the essay when Didion recalls her meeting with Kasabian. “In fact, we never talked about ‘the case’, and referred to its central events only as ‘Cielo Drive’” (43). The inability to call the murders for what they are indicates the “particular juxtaposition of the spoken and the unspeakable” (44). The murders and every other societal crime that took place contributed to the anxiety of the 1960s and allowed Didion to “participate in the paranoia of the time” (12).
In “The White Album”, Didion searches for a connection between her, as well as her community’s, growing anxiety and these violent events in an attempt to make sense of her feelings and the changing world around her. She was hoping to understand whether her anxiety was provoked by the atmosphere in Los Angeles, or if her paranoia was influencing such events as the Manson Murders. In “The White Album,” Didion’s paranoic tendencies fulfill themselves long before the Manson Murders. In particular, her delusions seem to be fueled by her mental and physical health problems. During the time she was writing The White Album, Didion was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis and suffered numerous nervous breakdowns. Didion’s essay deals with a period of uncertainty and the resulting anxiety that correlates to her inability to understand her relationship with the chaos around her.
The Manson Murder case seemed to be the most disturbing incident of her life thus far, and Didion becomes particularly anxious that she could be the next target of murderers. After all, she lived near Cielo Drive, a “senseless-killing neighborhood” (15) characterized by a “sinistral inertia” (15) that Didion could not figure out. The dangerous events of the outside world are paralleled in Didion's inner world so that “the boundary between that and outer world is blurred” until it is hard to decipher where one ends and the other begins. She links the randomness of the killings around Los Angeles to her illness, which – like the killers – strikes randomly. “In a few lines of dialogue in a neurologist’s office in Beverly Hills, the improbably had become the probably, the norm: things which happened only to other people could in fact happen to me” (47). Didion’s increased paranoia, as a result of the faltering narratives she has created for herself, becomes more evident as the essay continues. She includes a psychiatric report of a woman, who the reader later learns is Didion herself, who alienated herself from the surrounding world and loses touch with reality. She juxtaposes her mental state with the social condition of Los Angeles and Didion writes, “by way of comment I offer that an attack of vertigo and nausea does not now seem to be an inappropriate response to the summer of 1968” (15).
During the time Didion was writing The White Album, the United States had seen its fair share of tragedies, including the assassination of John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King Jr, Robert Kennedy, and the Mai Lai massacre. Didion comments, “certain of these images did not fit into any narrative I knew” (13). She had never witnessed any such events. The present was defying the past, thus making cognition of current events difficult for Didion. In her attempt to compensate for what she considers a lack of logic behind the political and social events around her, she tries to forge some connections between the coincidences in her life and somewhat creates a narrative that provides a sense of comfort; a way to keep herself going as the world changes. An example of this is when she buys a new silk dress the day John F. Kennedy is assassinated and years later, she ruins it by accidentally spilling a glass of wine on it (The White Album 44). The dress represents the narrative of comfort Didion creates, and when it is ruined in the future, Didion comes to the realization that these notions of comfort are senseless. She ascertains that such connections are weak, but “in this light, all connections were equally meaningful and equally senseless [...] I believe this to be an authentically senseless chain of correspondence, but in the jingle-jangle morning of that summer, it made as much sense as anything else did” (44-45). She acknowledges that this recollection, which she writes about a decade later in “The White Album,” is a senseless chain of correspondence, and that narrative seems to comfort her as if she has found a facade of reason in these events.
With Didion’s inability to understand the historical occurrences around her, she becomes increasingly disoriented and this is represented through her wristwatch. Didion’s watch is the one item that makes sense-- it is constant, and always tells time. It is “a parable, either of [Didion’s] life as a reporter during this period or of the period itself” (35-36). The watch stands not only for Didion’s disorientation during the 1960s but also for her perception of the sixties. She believes that people seemed to have lost track of time, and themselves, during this period and require some sort of guidance. The missing watch is “a symbol of her life, and we might even be able to see it as an emblem of the period as it is characterized”. The catastrophic result of her disorientation is that she has lost the ability to fulfill her duty as a writer: to tell a story. She asks herself, how can she tell a story when the one she tells herself is constantly refuted and dispelled by everyday occurrences? All she knows is “what [she sees]: flash pictures in variable sequence, images with no ‘meaning’ beyond their temporary arrangement, not a movie but a cutting-room experience (12-13). This reflects how Didion’s paranoia has had a direct influence on her writing because it prevents the narratives, the stories, from representing the essence of the time period. She “surrenders to the absence of a bigger picture” (Colombo) which represents a disconnect between the facts and the desired narrative Didion has created.
Joan Didion was a journalist who explored the correlation between culture and chaos. Didion condemns American society and its progressive facade, which attempts to conceal our outdated belief system. Her denunciation caused me to doubt how exactly America matches up to the narrative that is perpetuated by popular culture. I relate to the feeling of confusion and the impact societal disorder has on someone who has become comfortable with the narratives and ideas we have regarding American society. My privileged life in America is a result of my grandparents' vision of the American Dream when they emigrated from India in the 1970s. However, recent political, racial, and social tensions, which have been exacerbated by COVID-19, lead me to question if the American Dream today is just that- a dream. Didion’s exposé of the false reality related to the American experiment caused me to “doubt the premises of all the stories I had ever told myself” (The White Album 11). It caused me to worry, to realize, and look for answers. “We tell ourselves stories in order to live” (11), in order to cope, and in order to “keep on playing” in a changed America.