The White Album

This collection of essays recounts what took place on the long morning after the 1960s, when everyone was coming down from their particular bad trip. Didion observes the dramas that explode as America goes into collective detox: the mother abandoning her five-year-old daughter on the central reservation of Interstate 5; Huey Newton and the Black Panthers preaching from their cells; students, in unconscious parody, simulating the disaffection of the 1960s. Didion hangs out with the Doors, parties with Janis Joplin, shops with the Manson clan, dines with Polanski and Sharon Tate, and goes to biker movies, "because there on the screen was some news I was not getting from the 'New York Times'". Joan Didion has also written "Sentimental Journeys" and "Slouching Towards Bethlehem".