The title essay stays with a great line: “We tell ourselves stories in order to live.” It’s long but it shows why she went nuts at one point in the 70s. The world was an absolute mess. I’m sure it’s going to get worse than that soon enough. This essay really made me think about what she said about how each of us are supposed to develop a script for ourselves and keep to it. I’ve never been quite good at that myself.

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In “James Pike, American,” Didion refers to San Francisco as “a city dedicated to the illusion that all human endeavor tends mystically west…” I think now LA is even more so. This was 1974 when this was written, although about the 60s. 

Bishop Pike was quite a character apparently… “Here was a man who moved through life believing that he was entitled to forget it and start over, to shed women when they became difficult and allegiances when they became tedious and simply move on, dismissing those who quibbled as petty and ‘judgmental’ and generally threatened by his superior and more dynamic view of human possibility.”

This is an interesting sentence to read in 2026, when it seems social media, AI, and the general state of society seem to necessitate such an attitude. Never clean up after yourself or take responsibility or even acknowledge any mistakes or misgivings. Just move onto another Discord server, start new social accounts, and take on a slightly different persona out of convenience If anything, this is a prime example of how many religious leaders are overcompensating for major personal failings.  It’s all patently absurd. Didion calls his attitude “moral frontiersmanship” and I rather like that term because it’s fitting.

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“Holy Water” is interesting because it’s literally about how California gets their water. She writes, “As it happens my own reverence for water has always taken the form of this constant meditation upon where the water is, of an obsessive interest not in the politics of water but in the waterworks themselves…”

She continues, “I know the data on water projects I will never see.” I mean, water is kinda useful. And it’s nuts to realize how much has to go on that’s manmade to keep things copacetic out there.

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I love this bit from ‘Good Citizens’: “Politics are not widely considered a legitimate sort of amusement in Hollywood, where the borrowed rhetoric by which political ideas are reduced to choices between the good (equality is good) and the bad (genocide is bad) tends to make even the most casual political small talk resemble a really.” Kind of no different now as it was in 1970 as I see it. This bit also: “… the public life of liberal Hollywood comprises a kind of dictatorship of good intentions, a social contract in which actual and irreconcilable disagreement is as taboo as failure or bad teeth, a climate devoid of irony.” Which itself is ironic.

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From “The Women’s Movement.” This whole essay is fascinating, but I love this quip: “Ask anyone committed to Marxist analysis how many angels on the head of a pin, and you will be asked in return to never mind the angels, tell me who controls the production of pins.” Immediately after: “To those of us who remain committed mainly to the exploration of moral distinctions and ambiguities, the feminist analysis may have seemed a particularly narrow and cracked determinism.” As it seems most movements become… it all becomes trivialized and eventually things don’t change all that much!

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I’m not well acquainted with the work of Doris Lessing, but it sounds fascinating from Joan’s eponymous essay. I love Didion’s parenthetical remark: “The fancy that extraterrestrial life is by definition of a higher order than our own is one that soothes and children, and many writers.” Sadly, myself included, and while not potentially unfounded, it’s quite baseless.

I like the idea of writing not a story but a novel that is exclusively made up of ideas. Didion calls Briefing for a Descent into Hell (which somehow includes a protagonist who is actually from Venus) “… not a novel about the play of ideas in the lives of certain characters but a novel in which the characters exist only as markers in the presentation of an idea.” To reject ‘writing well’ actually sounds like a worthwhile endeavor. 

Didion does not speak highly of Lessing’s work generally, yet she doesn’t seem to hold it against her: “…the impulse to final solutions has been not only Mrs. Lessing’s dilemma but the guiding delusion of her time. It is not an impulse I hold high, but there is something finally very moving about her tenacity.” Well, my tenacity is about all I have at this point. 

I think Didion may be selling Lessing short. It sounds like Lessing just needed a better editor! Of course when it comes to ‘final solutions’ these days we’re all about curing symptoms not causes. We’ve fallen even further in 50 years.

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I really like the Georgia O’Keefe quote that begins the eponymous essay: “Where I was born and where and how I have lived is unimportant… It is what I have done with where I have been that should be of interest.” She said this in a book published at 90. And she’s right. Also “Style is character” is a common assumption we take far too much for granted!

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From “In the Islands,” this passage spells out why I’m so attracted to Joan Didion’s writing: “…you are getting a woman who for some time has felt radically separated from most of the ideas that seem to interest other people. You are getting a woman who somewhere along the line misplaced whatever faith she ever had in the social contract, in the whole grand pattern of human endeavor.” 

Sounds like someone I know. Except it takes a darker turn here, as she becomes fixated on “only the stuff of bad dreams.” Yeah, I see how our world could go wrong about thirteen different ways and none where things actually get generally better. (I don’t even want to go into some of the nightmare scenarios I’ve discussed with Emily in recent months.) But I’m not quite to this extreme, at least not yet.

She also writes, “I have trouble maintaining the basic notion that keeping promises matters in a world where everything I was taught seems beside the point.” (And she adds that the point grows more obscure with time.) I might add, most is either clever little lies we’re told to keep us complacent or only the beginning of a much deeper, darker horror dressed up in some aspect of the status quo. 

This essay covers a few years of journal entries and one in particular from 1975 made me think about situations that “reduce life to a short story” and when we go to certain familiar places on vacation to “expand life into a novel.” I’ve never thought in that way before. (In fact, the idea of doing much traveling – domestically, never mind abroad – is no longer appealing to me at all! But I now better understand the general appeal of it.)

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From “On the Road,” not to be confused with Kerouac. It’s one of her book press tours she’s describing (her fourth book but the first she’d properly toured). She even brought her daughter, then 11. It’s very interesting. I most love the bit about New York opinions, and this part could’ve been written about today: 

“I lost track of information. I was blitzed by opinion. I began to see opinions arcing in the air, intersecting flight patterns. The eastern shuttle was cleared for landing and so was lapidary bleakness. John Leonard and joy were converging vectors…” (I need to look up both what lapidary means and the John Leonard and joy reference.) “I began to see the country itself as a projection on air, a kind of hologram, an invisible grid of image and opinion and electronic impulse.” This was 1977.

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“At the Dam” is about the Hoover Dam. Apparently, that visit to the famous American landmark left quite an impression on Joan. And somewhat absurdly it reminds me how I used to find so many ways not to curse as a child. “Hoover dam” was one of my silly replacements. Then the horrors of junior high school led me to start swearing like a sailor, and I’ve cursed relentlessly since. Anyway, Joan’s fixation with waterworks is so endearingly peculiar. The conclusion is startling:

“I walked across the marble star map that traces a sidereal revolution of the equinox and foxes forever, the Reclamation man had told me, for all time and for all people who can read the stars, the date the dam was dedicated. I had not thought much of it when he said it, but I thought of it then, with the wind whining and the sun dropping behind a mesa with the finality of a sunset in space. Of course that was the image I had seen always, seen it without quite realizing what I saw, a dynamo finally free of man, splendid at last in its absolute isolation, transmitting power and releasing water to a world where no one is.”

That’s beautiful, haunting, and likely to happen if social decay continues at this rate.