a book
Slouching Towards Bethlehem
Joan Didion · 2008 · 256 pages
Celebrated, iconic, and indispensable, Joan Didion’s first work of nonfiction, Slouching Towards Bethlehem, is considered a watershed moment in American writing. First published in 1968, the collection was critically praised as one of the “best prose written in this country.”
More than perhaps any other book, this collection by one of the most distinctive prose stylists of our era captures the unique time and place of Joan Didion’s focus, exploring subjects such as John Wayne and Howard Hughes, growing up in California and the nature of good and evil in a Death Valley motel room, and, especially, the essence of San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury, the heart of the counterculture. As Joyce Carol Oates remarked: “[Didion] has been an articulate witness to the most stubborn and intractable truths of our time, a memorable voice, partly eulogistic, partly despairing; always in control.”
More than perhaps any other book, this collection by one of the most distinctive prose stylists of our era captures the unique time and place of Joan Didion’s focus, exploring subjects such as John Wayne and Howard Hughes, growing up in California and the nature of good and evil in a Death Valley motel room, and, especially, the essence of San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury, the heart of the counterculture. As Joyce Carol Oates remarked: “[Didion] has been an articulate witness to the most stubborn and intractable truths of our time, a memorable voice, partly eulogistic, partly despairing; always in control.”
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Liz Lambert
“I love Slouching Towards Bethlehem so much.”↗
Carrie Brownstein
“A seminal book of essays. A meditation on the mythologies of the West and on America itself. Trenchant, prescient, timeless.”↗
St. Vincent
“Am pretty obsessed with Joan Didion’s Slouching Towards Bethlehem.”↗
Julianne Moore
“My favorite essay in this collection is ‘Goodbye to All That.’ One quote has always resonated with me: ‘I was late to meet someone, but I stopped at Lexington Avenue and bought a peach and stood on the corner eating it and knew that I had come out of the West and reached the mirage.’ As a child, I lived all over the world – we moved a million zillion times – and I never felt completely happy until I was in New York City. Like Didion, I felt that I’d reached the mirage; I’d found a place where anything could happen. And she talks about that: ‘I still believed in possibilities then, still had the sense, so peculiar to New York, that something extraordinary would happen any minute, any day, any month.'”↗
Maggie Gyllenhaal
“I read a lot of Joan Didion when I first graduated from college. Like her, I’m from California and was transplanted to New York. Didion is unflinching, but even though she’s observing us from an intellectual place and writing without embellishment, her observations are so clear and so right-on that they end up having an emotional effect on us.”↗
