The White Album

The essay’s famous opening sentence—“We tell ourselves stories in order to live” (8)—announces one of the essay collection’s main themes: Storytelling. The example of the “naked woman on the ledge outside the window on the sixteenth floor” (8) indicates that creating a story isn’t necessarily objective or straightforward: “We interpret what we see, select the most workable of the multiple choices” (8). The story depends on the storyteller—it’s personal, and Didion, as the narrator of these essays, has begun to “doubt the premises of all the stories” (8). Her suspicions about narratives contribute to her fractured, whimsical style. She jumps around to focus on peculiar details. At times, she’s detached. She consumes the violent current events of the world from idyllic Hawaii. In other places, she’s intimate, like when she includes a report on her psychiatric history.

In keeping with the ethos of New Journalism, Didion is the key figure in the essays. She’s the main character, and her elusive style and ironic tone make her something of a puzzle or an enigma. It’s difficult to determine when she’s sincere, flippant, or a little bit of both. She’ll mention a name, like Janis Joplin, David Hockney, Robert Kennedy, Evelyn Waugh, or Ezra Pound, but not explain who they are. She alludes to them but doesn’t focus on them, and the cursory style adds to the book’s free-for-all, dizzying environment.

Didion zeroes in on the Ferguson brothers and why they killed Novarro. Violence grabs her attention, and the motif of violence and danger furthers the confusion. She lives in a large house, where the mixture of cultural celebrities and menacing strangers visit, creating commotion and adding to the narrative’s fragmented style. However, the disorderly situation doesn’t faze Didion: “It was hard to surprise me in those years” (16). Having abandoned her faith in a coherent narrative, Didion receives her strange environment with aplomb.

Didion’s visit with The Doors connects to the motif of violence. Jim Morrison says the band is “about revolt, disorder, chaos” (19). This section illustrates the breakdown in narratives too, because Morrison’s provocative statement conflicts with what Didion witnesses in the recording studio. She juxtaposes Morrison’s incendiary words with the humdrum reality of making music. Didion shows off her peculiar, whimsical style when she focuses on Morrison lighting a match. She uses imagery to describe how Morrison lights the match and brings it to the fly of his pants, but she doesn’t explain the importance of this gesture, leaving it open to interpretation.

With her depiction of Huey Newton, Didion introduces another theme: The Hazy Distinction Among Media, Reality, and Consumerism. Although she describes Newton’s situation, she doesn’t see him as a person but as “an alchemy of issues, for an issue is what Huey Newton had by then become” (23). She notes that Newton’s statements have “the ring of being a ‘quotation,’ a ‘pronouncement’ to be employed when the need arose” (27). Newton is a media product for people to consume. Newton’s trial ties into the theme of Storytelling. Didion wants to see his story as “a classic instance of a historical outsider confronting the established order at its most petty and impenetrable level” (29), yet Newton’s health insurance undercuts her narrative. He’s part of the system and has access to the order. Health insurance represents Newton’s lack of marginalization.

Didion’s visit with Eldridge Cleaver and her trip to San Francisco State University further the theme of The Hazy Distinction Among Media, Reality, and Consumerism. Didion characterizes Cleaver as more concerned about his book’s sales and its first printing than the reality of social justice. Didion then compares the unrest at the school to a “wishful fantasy” and “a musical comedy about college life” (34). It’s as if they, too, are unwittingly creating a spectacle for consumption.

The list of things Didion packs for traveling takes the essay away from spectacle and showcases her idiosyncratic and selectively intimate style. Didion withholds the names of her daughter and husband yet shares details about everything she packs when she travels. The absence of the watch circles back to her distrust of narratives. Like a story, time organizes things—it creates coherence. Didion realizes that she needs a watch, so she’s not stubbornly set against some kind of order. Then again, her ability to get the time from external sources—the car radio, her husband, the motel desk—suggests some opposition to having to carry a timepiece and an openness to the world.

The parts on Linda Kasabian bolster the narrative’s whimsical, irreverent style in her inclusion of irrelevant details: Kasabian’s lawyer doesn’t talk about the case but about the population of India. Didion buys Kasabian a nice dress for the trial, which links back to the theme of The Hazy Distinction Among Media, Reality, and Consumerism because it’s as if Didion must ensure that Kasabian’s clothes turn her into a respectable product for the media and its consumers.

Returning to the woman on the ledge, Didion admits, “I was interested only in the picture of her in my mind” (39). The statement reinforces Didion’s commitment to her personal and peculiar views. She’s not interested in detailed analysis or grand meanings. Her goal is to capture and record, in words, the images as she sees them. Conversely, Didion yields somewhat to traditional storytelling by sharing what happens to Morrison, Cleaver, and the others. Nevertheless, the elusiveness of meaning triumphs: Didion ends her essay by stating that she sometimes thinks about sharing a godparent responsibility with Roman Polanski but confesses that she doesn’t understand what this means.