Thirty years have passed since Joan Didion composed The White Album, her book of essays about the unsettling thrills and shadows of 1970’s LA, and by now the book’s title might as well refer to the hair color of its many personalities. Didion herself is seventy-five, and the era she wrote about has been eclipsed by the roaring nineties and disaster crazed ‘aughts.
But much of her insight remains relevant, writes Josh-Garrett Davis. In his essay “California Über Alles” written for The Faster Times, he deems The White Album “almost a book of Genesis for the period of American history” he’s lived through. As Garrett-Davis reflects on his own bildungsroman in California, he comes to see Didion’s book as the creation story of a post-60’s world, a world fraught with uncertainty, detachment, and moral ambiguity.
