The White Album

The White Album is the title essay of a 1979 collection by the American writer Joan Didion, a fragmented work of literary non-fiction that looks back on the unravelling of the late 1960s in Los Angeles. The essay is prescribed for HSC English Extension 1 in the elective Confessional Worlds.

Joan Didion (born 1934 in Sacramento, California) became one of the defining voices of American literary non-fiction, a central figure of the New Journalism who turned the reportorial essay into an instrument of the self. The White Album is the title essay of her 1979 collection, and it looks back on the years 1966 to 1971 - the period in which, as she puts it, she "began to doubt the premises of all the stories I had ever told myself". Those years were both a personal crisis, including the psychiatric episode she reproduces in the essay, and a cultural one: the violent unravelling of the American 1960s in Los Angeles, the city where the decade's promises had been loudest.

The essay braids the two disintegrations together. Its materials are drawn from the counterculture and its collapse - a stalled recording session with The Doors, meetings in prison with Linda Kasabian as she waited to testify in the Manson trial, an interview with the Black Panther Huey Newton, the murders on Cielo Drive in August 1969. Around these Didion sets the wreckage of her own coherence: the mislaid sense of a life's plot, and the clinical report that diagnosed her "personality in process of deterioration".

Nothing is arranged to build to a climax. The essay is written as a sequence of numbered and unnumbered fragments that refuse to resolve into a story, because the loss of story is precisely its subject - a confessional essay about the impossibility of the confession it seems to be making.

The essay opens with its argument rather than its story. "We tell ourselves stories in order to live" is not a celebration of storytelling but the first move in its interrogation: the plural "we" folds writer and reader into one compulsion, and the paragraph diagnoses that compulsion - "We look for the sermon in the suicide, for the social or moral lesson in the murder of five" - before naming the method itself, "the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images", ideas used to "freeze the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience". Then comes the short coda that deflates the whole law: "Or at least we do for a while."

Didion's most radical confessional move is to hand her disclosure to an institution. The essay quotes her own psychiatric report - "a personality in process of deterioration with abundant signs of failing defenses" - so that the most intimate revelation arrives in bureaucratic language, diagnosed and constructed by others. Her only reply is deadpan litotes: "an attack of vertigo and nausea does not now seem to me an inappropriate response to the summer of 1968", relocating the sickness from the psyche to history.

Private breakdown and cultural disintegration are braided until they confess each other. The self is figured cinematically - "I was supposed to have a script, and had mislaid it", experience arriving as "flash pictures in variable sequence ... not a movie but a cutting-room experience" - while the city gathers dread around the house on Franklin Avenue. When the Cielo Drive murders come, the essay's flattest sentence is its truest disclosure, "I remember that no one was surprised", and the era's turning point is delivered in two clipped sentences: "The tension broke that day. The paranoia was fulfilled."

The culture's apocalyptic mood is read as symptom. "I recall a time when the dogs barked every night and the moon was always full" folds fact into permanent omen; "Everything was unmentionable but nothing was unimaginable" measures a community able to imagine any horror yet unable to speak it; The Doors are "missionaries of apocalyptic sex". Against her own lost narrative Didion sets Linda Kasabian's serene faith in pattern - "Everything was to teach me something" - the exact consolation the essay can no longer accept.

And the confession refuses its promised catharsis. The Kasabian material closes as one more story without a narrative, and the essay ends not on insight but on the flat admission that writing "has not yet helped me to see what it means" - the unresolved dignified as a truer response than a manufactured meaning.

• Consider the Lobster
• Sand Talk
• The Hare with Amber Eyes
• The Big Short
• Life on Mars
• The Tenant of Wildfell Hall
• Memento
• All HSC English resources