An essay collection capturing the fraying of late-1960s and 1970s California — the Manson murders, the Black Panthers, the Doors, shopping malls, and Didion's own migraines and breakdowns — as a portrait of a society coming apart.
Books mentioned in The White Album (25)
The Golden Notebook by Doris Lessing: “Call the writer Anna Gould or call her Doris Lessing, The Golden Notebook is the diary of a writer in shock.”
From Here to Eternity by James Jones: “the Schofield we all know from James Jones's From Here to Eternity, the Schofield that is Home of the 25th 'Tropic Lightning' Infantry Division”
Birds of America by Mary McCarthy: “I felt very like the heroine of Mary McCarthy's Birds of America, the one who located America's moral decline in the disappearance of the first course.”
Seduction and Betrayal by Elizabeth Hardwick: “I had left California equipped with two 'good' suits, a box of unanswered mail, Elizabeth Hardwick's Seduction and Betrayal, Edmund Wilson's To the Finland Station, six Judy Blume books and my eleven-year-old daughter.”
In a Station of the Metro by Ezra Pound: “The words, a line from Ezra Pound's 'In a Station of the Metro,' were these: Petals on a wet black bough.”
One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez: “The opening line of One Hundred Years of Solitude, by the Colombian novelist Gabriel Garcia Marquez.”
Soul on Ice by Eldridge Cleaver: “the three of us—Eldridge Cleaver, his parole officer and I—mainly discussed the commercial prospects of Soul on Ice, which, it happened, was being published that day.”
Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert A. Heinlein: “a piece of Scientology literature beneath a drawer lining, a copy of Stranger in a Strange Land stuck deep on a closet shelf”
Ben-Hur by Lew Wallace: “Novarro's career as a silent film actor until he was shown, at some point during the night of the murder, a photograph of his host as Ben-Hur.”
To the Finland Station by Edmund Wilson: “Elizabeth Hardwick's Seduction and Betrayal, Edmund Wilsons To the Finland Station, six Judy Blume books and my eleven-year-old daughter.”
Encyclopaedia Britannica: “he 'had read both the dictionary and the phone book from cover to cover by the time he was five, and a whole set of the Encyclopaedia Britannica before he was ten.'”
Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad: “I remember my real joy at discovering for the first time how language worked, at discovering, for example, that the central line of Heart of Darkness was a postscript.”
Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert: “Madame Bovary told us more about bourgeois life than several generations of Marxists have, but there does not seem much doubt that Flaubert saw it as an artistic problem.”
The Thorn Birds by Colleen McCullough: “the sale of The Thorn Birds to paper for one-million-nine.”
The Death and Life of Bishop Pike by William Stringfellow and Anthony Towne: “I read a biography of him by William Stringfellow and Anthony Towne, The Death and Life of Bishop Pike, an adoring but instructive volume”
The Last Tycoon by F. Scott Fitzgerald: “'YOU CAN TAKE Hollywood for granted like I did,' Cecilia Brady tells the reader in The Last Tycoon, 'or you can dismiss it with the contempt we reserve for what we don't understand.'”
Virginia Woolf by Quentin Bell: “Quentin Bell's Virginia Woolf was an approved event this winter, as were the Chinese acrobats, the recent visits to Los Angeles of Bianca Jagger”
Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies by Reyner Banham: “Reyner Banham observed in an extraordinary chapter about the freeways in his 1971 Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies, 'the freeways become a special way of being alive'”
As I See It by J. Paul Getty: “In his posthumous book, As I See It, he advises us that he never wanted 'one of those concrete-bunker-type structures that are the fad among museum architects.'”
Briefing for a Descent into Hell by Doris Lessing: “much of the time Briefing for a Descent into Hell read like a selective case study from an R. D. Laing casebook”
Children of Violence by Doris Lessing: “Not until the end of the five-volume Children of Violence series did one sense a weakening of that compulsion to remember”
The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald: “'Tom and Gatsby, Daisy and Jordan and I, were all Westerners,' as Nick Carraway said, 'and perhaps we possessed some deficiency in common which made us subtly unadaptable to Eastern life.'”
The Company She Keeps by Mary McCarthy: “The narrator of Mary McCarthy's The Company She Keeps could be seen as 'enslaved because she persists in looking for her identity in a man.'”
The Group by Mary McCarthy: “Similarly, Miss McCarthy's The Group could serve to illustrate 'what happens to women who have been educated at first-rate women's colleges'”
Wonderland by Joyce Carol Oates: “a woman from Detroit who told me that the Joyce Carol Oates novel with which she identified most closely was Wonderland.”
Books that mention The White Album (1)
Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin: “Marx reads Joan Didion's White Album in a waiting room and later pretends to have left it there”