To this end," Henderson noted, "she violates the conventions of traditional journalism whenever it suits her purpose, fusing the public and the personal, frequently placing herself in an otherwise objective essay, giving us her private and often anguished experience as a metaphor for the writer, for her generation, and sometimes for her entire society."
As Didion herself explained in an oft-quoted passage from Slouching Towards Bethlehem, "My only advantage as a reporter is that I am so physically small, so temperamentally unobtrusive, and so neurotically inarticulate that people tend to forget that my presence runs counter to their best interests. And it always does. That is one last thing to remember: writers are always selling somebody out."
A second collection of Didion essays, The White Album, was published by Simon and Schuster in 1979. Also composed of writings originally published elsewhere, The White Album is named for the legendary, untitled Beatles album, which Didion said epitomized the 1960s for her. In the book, she recalled the months she spent in a psychiatric facility in Santa Monica.
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