The White Album (book)

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**Title** **The White Album**
1990 trade paperback cover
Author	Joan Didion
Country	United States
Language	English
Genre(s)	Essays
Publisher	Simon & Schuster (orig. publisher) & Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Released	1979
Media type	Print (Hardback & Paperback)
Pages	224 pp (Farrar, Straus and Giroux paperback edition)
ISBN	ISBN 0-374-52221-9 (Farrar, Straus and Giroux paperback edition)

The White Album is a 1979 book of essays by Joan Didion.

1 Contents
2 External links

[edit] Contents

[edit] I. The White Album

The White Album

The white album is an essay containing multiple short stories related to the authors life in the 60's. She describes Black panther meetings, drug related experiences and encounters with the entertainers of the age. However due to her style and the rather absurd content of the stories themselves the essay presents a paranoic, insane America. Describing teenagers who seem brainwashed and adults without any purpose Didion presents a personality crisis that hit America between 1960 and 1970. She blames the older generation for not giving teenagers a direction.

"At some point between 1945 and 1967 we had somehow neglected to tell these children the rules of the game we happened to be playing . . . These were children who grew up cut loose from the web of cousins and great-aunts and family doctors and lifelong neighbors who had traditionally suggested and enforced the society's values. ... They are less in rebellion against society than ignorant of it, able only to feed back certain of its most publicized self-doubts, Vietnam, Sran-Wrap, diet pills, the Bomb. They feed back exactly what is given to them. Because they do not believe in words--words are for 'typeheads,' Chester Anderson tells them, and a thought which needs words is just one more of those ego trips--their only proficient vocabulary is in the society's platitudes. As it happens I am still committed to the idea that the ability to think for one's self depends upon one's mastery of the language, and I am not optimistic about children who will settle for saying, to indicate that their mother and father do not live together, that they come from 'a broken home.' They are sixteen, fifteen, fourteen years old, younger all the time, an army of children waiting to be given the words."

However the ending, when the author moves away from the crazy world of Hollywood and reconstructs an old house that had a few lingering feelings from the 60's denotes that there is still hope to escape the paranoia of the 60's.