Joan Didion

The author and narrator of "The White Album" emerges as the central character of the entire collection of essays and articles, as they are a collection of her works previously published during the late Sixties and the early Seventies. The alarming events of the decade, alongside the seemingly insignificant, the quirky and the mundane are presented through Didion's eyes in her role as a reporter-commentator as she navigates the years that the 'Love Revolution' started.

As a character, Joan Didion is startling honest about aspects of her life; frank about a threatened divorce, about emotional instability, flights of fancy or sudden intimate feelings of belonging as she reports on people and places that exist around her. What emerges through the essay is a picture of a well-educated, intelligent and independent woman who is taking in an Outsider role in order to study the events that she sees...