This is an interactive post, with pictures and accessible links, so that you can feel yourself inside the book. Enjoy! :)
PART THREE: WOMEN.
This is the shortest part of “The White Album” - unfortunately - and it focuses on three main parts:
A) Musing about the feminist movement
B) Musing about Doris Lessing
C) Musing about Georgia O’ Keeffe
A) MUSING ABOUT THE FEMINIST MOVEMENT
Guys.
Joan just expressed a thought on her note… pad. I do, however, wonder if she ever used the ‘notes’ app. Let me know if you know the answer.
Anyway, this time, her thoughts go to the feminist movement and it’s second wave, and she wrote about the start of the whole thing. And no shit - she found the whole thing to be very superficial. Don’t shoot the messenger.
Second-wave feminism was a period of feminist activity that began in the early 1960s and lasted roughly two decades, ending with the feminist sex wars in the early 1980s and being replaced by third-wave feminism in the early 1990s. Second-wave feminism built on first-wave feminism and broadened the scope of debate to include a wider range of issues: sexuality, family, domesticity, the workplace, reproductive rights, de facto inequalities, and official legal inequalities.
Origins of Second-Wave feminism with Linda Gordon
Joan talks about the whole thing making women appear to be “too sensible” to coexist with the harshness of a male dominated world, which, in her opinion, separates both genders even more, and therefore, gives men everything they want, women are pink and men are blue. Men are tough and insensitive, and women are delicate little flowers. So no, Joan Didion wasn’t a feminist.
To this day, are we fighting for OUR rights or are we fighting for the rights that men said it was okay for us to have? Are we really discussing subjects like body hair (which is none of anyone’s business either fucking way) and letting the whole point of the feminist movement go to shit? There are countries where it’s really difficult for women to vote or to be part of a political system. Let’s focus on that.
B) MUSING ABOUT DORIS LESSING
Doris Lessing was a British novelist, who wrote one of the best books that I, personally, have ever read in my entire life, “The Golden Notebook”.
She had an undeniable ability to get extremely psychological and social while doing a science fiction novel. She’s truly unlike anything I’ve ever read. Fantaaaastic. And who better to trace a profile of Lessing and her undistinguished brilliance than our friend Joan. What a fucking way of describing someone. It’s perfect. You have to read it if you haven’t already.
C) MUSING ABOUT GEORGIA O’KEEFFE
This one is my absolute favorite. Always has been. Georgia O’Keeffe was one of the most talented painters this world has ever seen. Modern art never looked so special because of her beautiful landscapes and, of course, paintings of flowers.
Harold Stein photographed Georgia O’Keeffe during her 1939 exploration of Maui.
Pineapple Bud, 1939
When I first read Joan Didion’s thoughts on O’Keeffe, it made me want to name my future daughter Georgia and move to Texas immediately. Rereading it now, I want that even more. Joan Didion described Georgia O’Keeffe by using a word that many women want to be defined as, but don’t realize it is inherent to the feminine condition: Strong.
Above all else, strong. Not stubborn, but persistent. There’s no one else that I’d like to say ‘fuck off’ to more, than the guy who once painted above O’Keeffe’s work to show her “how impressionists actually painted trees.” Dudes being dudes.
Georgia is a woman who transcends any art movements, she can’t really be put in a box. What vanguard is she a part of? Bitch, all of them!
'Lake George Reflection’ by Georgia O’ Keeffe
Georgia O’ Keeffe: Great Art Explained
PART FOUR: SEASONS
This part of “The White Album” shows us Didion’s complex ability to tell us personal stories while showcasing her intricate views of the world around her, still managing to surprise us with some fucking cool facts about the places she spent her so called ‘seasons’ on. It feels like a conversation with a friend.
On “In The Islands”, we learn about her love for Honolulu.
Honolulu, 1960s.
Her description of the Royal Hawaiian Hotel is SO accurate and has so many layers that it’s almost a political statement made about the types of guests found at that fancy hotel in Honolulu. Not only that, Joan merges her views of ‘the conservative people’s paradise’ with her own views of herself, reflecting on the actual state she was living her life in at the time.
“I am a thirty four year old woman with long straight hair and an old bikini bathing suit and bad nerves sitting on an island in the middle of the Pacific waiting for a Tidal Wave that will not come”
- Joan Didion
She also navigates James Joyce’s Honolulu, while visiting Schofield Barracks, giving a nod to Joyce’s really famous novel “From Here to Eternity” by revisiting his Honolulu (or not).
On ‘In Hollywood’, she gets into the ‘lame ass’ parts of Hollywood, giving us an inside look on the contractual aspect of making a movie, and showing us that there’s no magic on the billions of entrepreneurs’s heads while making a motion picture.
MGM Studios, 1960s.
It’s a long process, making a movie. One that has to be done carefully in order to get the picture to succeed. And once it’s done, that’s it. It’s so interesting to see how movies, especially ones made by the big studios, movies that shaped us and moved us a lot throughout the years are really ‘just work’ for many of these - you guessed it - white, rich old males. It’s a process as dull as they are, and it happens because they have one single goal: Make meaningful art Make a lot of fucking money.
On ‘In bed’, she explores her intimate and complex relationship with her migraines, which was something passed down to her through generations.
“That no one dies of migraine seems to someone deep in an attack as an ambiguous blessing.”
- Joan Didion
Like the true writer she is (not was), she can turn everything into an emotional, deep experience. You get inside her head, you can almost feel her pain and you sympathize with her suffering as you learn how incapacitating it is to live under her skin when she had migraines. Her one single essay about migraines was so much more interesting than many books I’ve read. It always hits me.
“On the Road” is one of my absolute favorites.
‘Where are we going?’
That was the question Joan was asked the most while going on a very unofficial book tour.
Where are we going as a country? , she was asked by the interviewers.
Where are we going as professionals?, she was asked by fellow writers.
Where are we going next?, she was asked by her daughter, Quintana, whom accompanied her as she went through states.
Do you want to know what she answered? I guess you’ll have to read to find out.
In “On the mall”, she really shows us her journalistic talent.
We’re talking names, details, how and when malls were created. All about the beginning of malls in one little essay. The psychology of the creation of shopping malls is another one of those things that you’d normally never even care to read about, unless you’re my friend Griffin. That’s the only person I can think of who’d read a book about such a thing. Some even might prefer to stay alienated, because ‘shopping is a sport’.
“ One thing you will note about shopping-center theory is that you could have thought of it yourself, and a course in it will go a long way toward dispelling the notion that business proceeds from mysteries too recondite for you and me.”
- Joan Didion
We really needed a ‘femininomenon’ to open our eyes, slap us in the face and take us backstage. Such a good reminder to me that everything that I see, or listen to, or read, will try to sell me something. And that one day, I’ll have to succumb to it. Because if shopping is a sport, consuming is a norm.
1960s ROCHESTER NEW YORK Midtown Square Shopping Mall Interior Vintage Postcard.
And last, but not least: “In Bogota”.
There is really no one that appreciates the beauty of South America more than me. It’s something that you have to see personally, something you never knew you needed to have until you found yourself in it, like a mother’s embrace. And as a #Bogotalover, I couldn’t see Didion’s Bogota as clearly as I saw her Hollywood.
But I think that a showstopper named Jay Duret might tell you all about Bogota. You’ll love it.
LAST PART: ON THE MORNING AFTER THE SIXTIES
On this final part of the book, Joan takes us back to her time studying in Berkeley. Most precisely, 1953. 1 She talks about how her generation was the first one to go from extremely alienated to extremely political.
Her generation found their future to be quite ambiguous, and the future of their country, too. It felt like a generation stuck in quicksand, but trying their best to do delicate, subtle movements to get out. This being for the white Berkeley middle to upper class Americans. The sense of monotony and depression felt at that time was totally clashing with the actual political state of the moment2, that some of them actively chose to ignore.
The young adults in the 50s were the cause of the young adults in the 70s. The inertia in times of violence, segregation and discrimination was the cause of the rise of political protests all across America.
Joan Didion starts this book with the political frenzy of the 1960s-1970s, and almost ends it by telling us that it hasn’t always been this way. And by reminding us that we slowly forget what having a voice feels like when we stay quiet for too long.
The Beggining: Berkeley, 1964. (Worth the read!)
QUIET DAYS IN MALIBU
I love these.
These should be a book on their own. By giving us full detail and expressing her own personal thoughts and feelings about orchids, Didion shows us that plants are, yes, worth reading about. The outcome of orchids can pull you back from your seat as much as a good romance novel. Or maybe that’s just Joan Didion’s magic.
Beautiful orchids. To you. For reading this far. :)
The constant house fires in Malibu are the final subject of this book.
They conclude “The White Album” tragically. And perfectly. By seeing the house she and her family lived on burned down, alongside many special Malibu things and buildings she kept close to her heart - she concluded that it was time.
The quiet days in Malibu are over. And so were the 1960s.
In loving memory of Joan Didion (1934-2021)
THANK YOU!
Oh, wow. Thank you for doing this with me. This was a fun ride, wasn’t it? I hope you learned a thing or two about this beautiful book. I’ll miss talking about this one.
RECAP: Eisenhower era. End of the Korean War. Nuclear Weapons! Air strikes!
The main thing being The Civil Rights Movement.
I LOVE CERTIFIED BOOK CLUB!!! this has been such a pleasure to read!! and i can’t wait for our next book
I enjoyed this series so much! Never read Didion before -- she was a favorite of my Dad's -- and now she belongs on my bookshelf with her contemporaries Tom Wolfe and Hunter S. Thompson. Looking forward to a new series on Camus or Fitzgerald.