The White Album

The essays in The White Album reflect the American literary movement known as New Journalism. Didion was a journalist, and the essays document events associated with real figures—like Huey Newton, a revolutionary who co-founded the Black Panther Party and was accused of killing a police officer—and institutions—for example, the California Department of Transportation, which created diamond lanes to encourage carpools and bus ridership. As a New Journalist, Didion merges nonfiction with fiction and its literary devices, like dialogue and narrative voice. Like a novel told in the first person, Didion’s essays feature an “I.” She’s the narrator, and the essays spotlight her nuanced, whimsical, and often ironic voice. Didion documents her talks with people in the California Department of Transportation and gives her perceptions of Huey Newton and the Black Panthers. The role of the objective, impartial journalist doesn’t apply to New Journalism. The journalist tends to become a character with specific opinions and traits, and Didion creates a character who likes shopping malls, deals with migraines, visits Hawaii, and is weary of feminism and the meaning of social justice movements.

As New Journalism took root in the 1960s and 1970s, many of its practitioners wrote about similar topics. Like Didion, Tom Wolfe—who’s credited with bringing New Journalism into the spotlight—and Hunter S. Thompson focused on the fraught intersection between counterculture, media, activism, and wealth. In “Good Citizens” (one of this book’s essays in Part 2) Didion critiques celebrity activism, as Wolfe did in his 1970 essay “Radical Chic: That Party at Lenny’s.” Similarly, in Hell’s Angels (1967), Thompson commented on how the media influenced people’s impression of the notorious biker gang, and in “Notes Toward a Dreampolitik” (another essay in Part 2), Didion discusses her view of biker groups through “the classic exploitation bike movie” (89). Another topic to which Didion’s essays continually point is violence in the US. She mentions the deadly Vietnam War and the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy, Charles Manson, and a pair of murderous brothers. Truman Capote too noticed America’s violent side, and he used New Journalism to turn the murder of a Kansas family into novel-like nonfiction in his book In Cold Blood (1966).

In The White Album essays, Didion doesn’t present herself as a New Journalist. Such a specific label counters the elusive and mysterious character that she develops for herself throughout the collection. In “Politics and Joan Didion’s ‘Let Me Tell You What I Mean’” journalist Jessica Ferri calls Didion “a militant nonjoiner” (The Los Angeles Times, 21 Jan. 2021). Instead of explicitly attaching herself to a preexisting literary context, Didion creates her own in these essays. She cites English novelist Evelyn Waugh, who—like her, cast a caustic eye on the wealthy, powerful, and “delusional.” In addition, she’s drawn to writing she associates with specific places: “Kilimanjaro belongs to Ernest Hemingway. Oxford, Mississippi, belongs to William Faulkner.” She adds, “[A] a great deal of Honolulu itself has always belonged for me to James Jones” (130). In The White Album, Didion bonds herself to the sprawling West Coast state of California.

While Didion expresses positive associations with male writers, she doesn’t think highly of feminist writers, so the essays in The White Album clash with the feminist literary context. In the Part 3 essay “The Women’s Movement,” Didion critiques the sweeping, heavy-handed rhetoric of feminist writers like Shulamith Firestone and Ti-Grace Atkinson. Didion claims that such authors perpetuate “the impression of women too ‘sensitive’ for the difficulties of adult life” (102). Didion sees herself as “committed mainly to the exploration of moral distinctions and ambiguities” (99). She separates herself from the feminist movement because she considers its literature reductive.