The White Album
By Joan Didion
Categories: Biographies & Memoirs
Joan Didion's 1979 essay collection looks at California and the United States in the late 1960s and 1970s, a time she remembers through her own bad dreams and those of a nation. In the title essay she records her uneasy state of mind in the years around the Manson murders. Other pieces take her to a jailhouse visit with Black Panther cofounder Huey Newton, to the new Getty Museum and to the shopping malls of the era, and she weighs the contradictions of the women's movement.