I read one of the pieces from this, ‘At the Dam’, on my MA course. It didn’t make a huge impact on me at the time, but enough to keep Didion’s name in my mind, and eventually to stir up enough interest for me to get this.

It’s a set of personal essays covering various events around the end of the sixties and the early seventies. It struck me, reading this, she’s kind of a gonzo journalist, or at least gonzo-adjacent, in that the often puts herself in the narrative. Which is good and proper in my humble opinion. Not as intense as HST, but still.

There’s a lot of good, interesting stuff here, including one piece that involves her hanging out with The Doors, waiting for Jim Morrison to arrive. It’s not much about music, though, and I don’t know why she chose to call it The White Album.

One minor annoyance about at least this edition is, although the front matter credits the various publications the pieces originally appeared in (Life, The New York Review of Books, etc), it doesn’t tell us which piece appeared where.

But that doesn’t detract from the pieces themselves.