We forget the loves and the betrayals alike, forget what we whispered and what we screamed, forget who we were. We forget all too soon the things we thought we could never forget. I especially loved “On Keeping a Notebook,” where Didion writes:

It’s not a think piece or a hot take, but it makes you think.ĭidion includes herself in her journalistic pieces, but she also writes straight-up personal essays, several of which are in this collection. She observes them, makes notes, comments. Didion writes, “We were seeing the desperate attempt of a handful of pathetically unequipped children to create a community in a social vacuum.” Didion neither glorifies nor condemns these children. As Didion describes it, there was no single movement that brought people to the Haight, no revolution in the offing. The title piece, “Slouching Towards Bethlehem” digs into the culture of Haight-Ashbury in the spring of 1967, a place where “the center was not holding.” I especially liked reading a contemporary account of this world because now, almost 50 years later, it’s tempting to apply a clear narrative to a phenomenon that didn’t make much sense even to those in the midst of it. The Baez essay discusses celebrity and image and aging, and much that Didion says about Baez could apply to any number of young female celebrities in the decades since. The journalistic pieces are very much of their time, but Didion explores the time and place in such a way evoke grander themes than those of the here and now (or the there and then). Now, at an age when the wounds begin to heal whether one wants them to or not, Joan Baez never leaves the Carmel Valley. Above all, she is the girl who “feels” things, who has hung on to the freshness and pain of adolescence, the girl ever wounded, ever young. She is the singer who would not train her voice, the rebel who drives the Jaguar too fast, the Rima who hides with the bird and the deer. The roles assigned to her are various, but variations on a single theme.

Joan Baez was a personality before she was entirely a person, and, like anyone to whom that happen, she is in a sense the hapless victim of what others have seen in her, written about her, wanted her to be and not to be. There are journalistic pieces, like the riveting true crime story that opens the collection, “Some Dreamers of the Golden Dream.” There’s a piece on John Wayne and another on Joan Baez, in which Didion observes: The essays in Slouching Towards Bethlehem cover a range of topics and styles. I’d also read The Year of Magical Thinking several years ago, but that’s a lengthy memoir on a difficult and personal theme. Would her essays prove as rich? Or would a collection of writings from the 1960s just feel like a dated artifact?

Before reading this collection, I’d not read many of her essays, “Goodbye to All That” and maybe a few others. When it comes to essays, Joan Didion is among the greats, at least she is by reputation.

Slouching towards bethlehem meaning