May 14

May 14 Slouching Towards Bethlehem

Author: Joan Didion
Publisher: FSG (first published 1968)
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Note: Content and trigger warnings are provided for those who need them at the bottom of this page. If you don’t need them and don’t want to risk spoilers, don’t scroll past the full review.

Cover Description

The first nonfiction work by one of the most distinctive prose stylists of our era, Joan Didion's Slouching Towards Bethlehem remains, decades after its first publication, the essential portrait of America—particularly California—in the sixties.

It focuses on such subjects as John Wayne and Howard Hughes, growing up a girl in California, ruminating on the nature of good and evil in a Death Valley motel room, and, especially, the essence of San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury, the heart of the counterculture.

TL;DR Review

Slouching Towards Bethlehem is a really interesting look at early Joan Didion. She’s already good, but there are some gems here that hint at the master she’ll turn out to be.

For you if: You are a fan of Didion and want to see her evolution.

Full Review

“However long we postpone it, we eventually lie down alone in that notoriously uncomfortable bed, the one we make ourselves. Whether or not we sleep in it depends, of course, on whether or not we respect ourselves.”

This was my third Joan Didion, which I read along with a formal reading group with the Center for Fiction, but it’s Didion’s first published book. The course was set up that way on purpose, because next we’re reading The Year of Magical Thinking, and the teacher wanted us to be able to admire the juxtaposition of her early work and her later work.

There were some essays I loved and others that felt like they flew in one side of my brain and out the other, and then of course her incredible sentences, images, and structure throughout. My favorite essays were those in the “Personals” section, including “On Keeping a Notebook,” “On Self-Respect,” and “On Morality.” But I also really loved the final essay, which is called “Goodbye to All That” and is about how she fell in and then out of New York City in her 20s.

One of the most noteworthy things about Didion’s essays in general, IMO, is her ability to stick the landing — and by that I actually mean she doesn’t “stick” it at all, but they ring out. There’s never a tidy summation of her point; the endings actually take you by surprise, at first seeming like just another sharp image among the many others she employs. That makes you go back and think, why did she leave me with that one? And there’s a lot to be discovered in asking yourself that question.

I’m very very much looking forward to The Year of Magical Thinking!