We Tell Ourselves Stories in Order to Live

The White Album by Joan Didion

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The first essay in The White Album by Joan Didion opens with the most famous sentence of her entire body of work, followed by two descriptions of supposedly well-known stories and one unresolved fact.

We tell ourselves stories in order to live. The princess is caged in the consulate. The man with the candy will lead the children into the sea. The naked woman on the ledge outside the window on the sixteenth floor is a victim of accidie, or the naked woman is an exhibitionist, and it would be "interesting" to know which.

The two distorted fairy tales with which Didion begins (a princess in a consulate? children being led away by candy into the sea?) hint at the dark tone of the story she wants to tell—a story about the inability to construct stories. The third example serves as proof: A woman stands naked on the sixteenth floor. Who is she? Why is she there? Should we find the event entertaining, or should we be amusingly alarmed?

After all, “it would be interesting to know which is which”: to know what is the situation the woman is in so we can know how to react. Already in these opening lines, we discover the fundamental truth of the time Didion describes and writes in: facts have lost their meaning. They no longer cohere into a narrative that she—or anyone—can tell.

One of the most important essayists of the twentieth century, Joan Didion’s reputation is somewhat similar to that of Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges. Her (and his) immense and well-deserved reputation can be attributed to many literary achievements—yet without two specific books, their impact might not shine as brightly for us today. In Didion’s case these two works are The White Album, published in 1979, and Slouching Towards Bethlehem, which was published a decade earlier in 1968. Both are compilation of essays and magazine articles Didion published in news outlets previously. Both talk about the Sixties. Not as a time of free love, but as the time when facts no longer made sense.

When I was a child, watching TV all hours of the day, I used to think of the 1960s as the era of flower power—this was how it was presented to me through television and film while growing up in the 1990s, immersed in American media. Didion speaks of an entirely different time: an era of famous yet senseless murder trials, of broken families, of lost children running away from home to join a movement (if it could even be called that) they didn’t understand. We all seek a sense of belonging, but where could one belong in that turbulent period? Where could one find a community in a time of war, paranoia, and powerful drugs; a time of promises for a new dawn of humanity or a new world war, an atomic one, that would hasten that dawn? These places could just as easily leave you more broken and battered than where you started.

Didion’s entire style is tinged with estrangement, transforming ordinary words into something else. Nothing in a Didion piece is what it seems on the surface of it. That is why Didion, more than any other “new journalist” I know, was the perfect writer to elevate the confusion and disorientation of her time to the level of great art.

What happens when stories fall apart? When it is no longer possible to impose a narrative line onto the phantasmagoria that is human experience? This is the great question of The White Album, both the essay and the book.

The year is 1968. Anyone who observed Didion from the outside—indeed, anyone besides Didion herself, even those closest to her—could only see that she led the “normal life” of an American magazine writer and novelist. In the 1960s, she published books, wrote articles for various magazines, worked on films, signed contracts, made and kept promises, raised a child, and so on. She also participated, as she put it, in "the paranoia of the time."

This was an adequate enough performance, as improvisations go. The only problem was that my entire education, everything I had ever been told or had told myself, insisted that the production was never meant to be improvised: I was supposed to have a script, and had mislaid it.

For the writer who worked on scripts for Hollywood and profiled many of the major stars of the time, filmmaking provided the metaphor she needed to diagnose the confusion and disorientation that struck and overwhelmed her. Though it was not in the finished film that she recognized herself and her bewildered experiences, but in the cuts of the editing room. There, more than anywhere else, she found the jumps and stutters of the era.

I was meant to know the plot, but all I knew was what I saw: flash pictures in variable sequence, images with no 'meaning' beyond their temporary arrangement, not a movie but a cutting room experience. In what would probably be the middle of my life I wanted still to believe in the narrative and in the narrative's intelligibility, but to know that one could change the sense with every cut was to begin to perceive the experience as rather more electrical than ethical.

The fragmentation of stories impaired Didion’s ability to live—and certainly what we today call "quality of life." In the summer of 1968, she was diagnosed with vertigo and nausea. A physical and psychiatric evaluation revealed that her condition was more acute than initially thought. She was diagnosed as a personality "in the process of deterioration with abundant signs of failing defenses and increasing inability of the ego to mediate the world of reality and to cope with normal stress." She was also described as emotionally detached from her surroundings, profoundly pessimistic about her life and the world, and as someone who had "alienated herself almost entirely from the world of other human beings."

Writing about the era a decade later, Didion recognized that, just as they arrived, these dark times eventually passed. As both a writer and a woman, she was left to reflect on them—to piece together disparate, unconnected episodes that somehow convey not a narrative (for Didion, 1968 and the Sixties as a whole had none), but a feeling, a theme of unintelligibility. She writes about the murder trials she obsessively followed, the strangers who knocked on her door without seeking anything in particular, or who were deterred by the presence of her husband, the time The Doors waited for their lead singer to arrive at the studio only to ignore him when he did, the riots and protests, the way time means something different to “music people,” and on and on. If the times shape the person, Didion was made to feel vertigo.

Half a century earlier, the Prague writer Franz Kafka both described and lived a similar sense of confusion and unintelligibility. This theme runs through nearly all his literary works: a man wakes up one day to find himself accused of a crime he does not understand, without knowing who accused him; a land surveyor struggles in vain to reach the castle that hired him. This feeling of estrangement from everyday logic appears even in Kafka’s briefest writings. In one literary fragment, less than a page long, a man steps outside in the evening and sees two people running down the street at night. The scene is strange but not fantastical—yet it baffles the observer so completely that he cannot determine whether one runner is chasing the other, whether they are simply running in the same direction, or whether something else entirely is happening.

In my view, Kafka’s confusion and disorientation stemmed primarily from his temperament and personal inclinations, which were then amplified by the new, fast-paced modern life of Central Europe on the eve of World War I. Didion’s confusion is harder to diagnose, and that is, in large part, the point—or rather, the theme—of her brilliant and unsettling essay: We tell ourselves stories in order to live, but what happens when the facts remain undeciphered, overlapping, contradictory, and fragmented? What happens when what I see and experience refuses to coalesce into a story I can tell myself—a story about who I am and what kind of world I live in?

The first times I read The White Album, I felt for the writer and the world that almost broke her. Now, rereading that wonderfully troubling text in a divided country, with an addictive device I carry everywhere with me, in a time where basic human decency doesn't seem so basic anymore, I can’t help but feel for us.