The White Album

Joan Didion’s title essay The White Album recounts personal and cultural experiences through her life during the 1960s. Born in Sacramento and later majoring in English at Berkeley, a majority of her life and literary works are based off of California , including “The White Album”. Each of the fifteen segments in this essay are narratives that focus on her emotional life and incidents she was involved with as a reporter at the time. Some of which include Manson’s gang murders, a recording session of the Doors, interviews with Huey Newton and Eldridge Cleaver, and student uprisings at San Francisco State. Each becomes a metaphor for her own life, a comparison to the chaos and breakdowns culturally and personally. The first sentence reads one of her most well-known lines, “We tell ourselves stories in order to live”, which becomes a central theme throughout the essay. She explores why she could not tell herself the stories that she needed to survive and why she could not coherently put together those images she had experienced. The essay’s format, a collage, resembles the breakdown of coherence that Didion experiences culturally and personally. Though the majority of the essay focuses on the tension and paranoia during that decade, she ends on a hopeful note in the possibility of escaping and moving on to a different time period. Parts of this essay were first published in Didion’s “Points West” column in The Saturday Evening Post in the late 1960’s for an American’s abroad   audience. In fact, her work was widely read, but much of her literary work, including “The White Album” was possibly  written more for herself than for anyone else. In the final sentence of the essay she writes, “…but writing has not yet helped me to see what it means”. Her purpose in expressing her personal and cultural truths was accomplished through her narrative. The meaning behind the memories in each segment becomes more clear as the essay progresses.

“Helter Skelter” The rise and fall of Hollywood in the 1960s. (songmango.com)