Joan Didion 'Slouching Towards Bethlehem' (1968)

So I picked this up in some second-hand book store in York this afternoon for £1. It's a collection of essays and articles about California in the late '60s, most of which appeared originally in the Saturday Evening Post. I knew nothing about Didion, or the book, but figured a buncha journalism on this topic was unlikely to disappoint me entirely. Having Googled it, turns out 'Slouching' is kind of a big deal, and Didion has done a heap of stuff I'm now gonna try to track down. She even called one collection of essays (on Manson, Black Panthers, the acid scene etc) 'The White Album', which is pretty cool.

The revolutionary literary school of 'New Journalism' coincided with an era of US history (eary 60s - mid 70s) with which I have an enduring fascination, and this means that I have the luxury of the period having been documented in vivid, fast-paced, personal prose by many great, unconventional newspaper people, notably Tom Wolff, Norman Mailer, Micheal Herr, Hunter S Thompson, Lester Bangs and, apparently, Joan Didion. Occasionally blurring fact and fiction, and frequently pushing journalistic boundaries to place themselves at the centre of the story, these writers have provided me with a vast library of first-person reportage from the front-line of history. They take you right into the heart of darkness.

So I'm happy to have stumbled across Joan Didion. She seems like the sorta writer pseudo-intellectual types would be overheard debating at a dinner party during a late 70s Woody Allen movie . For what it's worth, her stuff is pretty 'Fear & Loathing', there's a palpable sense of End Times doom and dread underscoring most of these articles. Hunter, though, I can find exhausting - he drags you along on his rampages whether you like it or not. Reading a Hunter S Thompson novel is like being kidnapped. Didion is much cooler. She's funny, too, exceptionally dry, allowing absurd statements from her bizarre cast late 60s archetypes just hang in the air;

" 'I remember I wanted to be a veterinarian once,' Debbie says. 'But now I'm more or less working in the vein of being an artist or a model or a cosmetologist. Or something.' "

Anybody with an interest in this era should totally check out Didion's work. I can only assume a general cultural misogyny has been responsible for me not discovering her earlier, because she appears to be very much the equal of her male peers. I'll be sure to write about her again when I get the chance to enjoy more of her work.