🎧 History of Ideas: Joan Didion

Episode summary: For the last episode in our summer season on the great twentieth-century essays and essayists, David discusses Joan Didion’s ‘The White Album’ (1979), her haunting, impressionistic account of the fracturing of America in the late 1960s. From Jim Morrison to the Manson murders, Didion offers a series of snapshots of a society coming apart in ways no one seemed to understand. But what was true, what was imagined, and where did the real sickness lie?More on Joan Didion from the LRB archive:Thomas Powers on Didion and California:’The thing that California taught her to fear most was snakes, especially rattlesnakes…This gets close to Didion’s core anxiety: watching for something that could be anywhere, was easily overlooked, could kill you or a child playing in the garden – just like that.’Mary-Kay Wilmers on Didion and memory:’Reassurance is something Didion doesn’t need. She is talking to herself, weighing up the past, going over old stories, keeping herself company. Staging herself.’Martin Amis on Didion’s…