There’s an essay about marriage in Las Vegas that I found particularly intriguing: Almost everyone I meet in San Francisco has to go to court at some point in the middle future.
He said maybe we could go next week, or the week after, or anyway sometime before his case comes up. “ We drink some more green tea and talk about going up to Malakoff Diggings in Nevada County because some people are starting a commune there and Max thinks it would be a groove to take acid in the diggings. Didion is intimately involved with these people and runs a personal risk reporting the stories: There’s a 5-year old named Susan who does LSD and is in “High” Kindergarten. There are Jeff and his 15-year old girlfriend Debbie who have run away from home. There are the couple Deadye and Gerry who do not know where Chicago is. Joan hung out and befriended a lot of hippies whose stories give a dark side to the counterculture movement. Here, Didion hung out with acidheads and people who have run away to do drugs (Haight had been famous for that). Much of the book takes place in Haight-Ashbury in 1967.
It is timeless, heartwrenching, and Hemingway crisp. I would say that the work of Joan Didion is not simply “prose”, it is art. The majority of the essays are about Didion’s home state, California. But I was disabused of this notion right after the first essay itself. Initially, I was hesitant to pick up this book because I thought the essays would be dated or as difficult to read as Sontag’s. It consists of some of the best prose written about the contemporary world. Slouching Towards Bethlehem is Joan Didion’s first collection of non-fiction writing.
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