Introduction by John Leonard

Alfred A. Knopf/Everyman’s Library, 2006 ($30)

For those wondering how Joan Didion would follow up The Year of Magical Thinking, her heartbreaking memoir about the incoherence of grief that won the 2005 National Book Award, the wait has ended. Sort of. Elevating Didion to the ranks of another great 20th-century American journalist—George Orwell—Knopf’s Everyman’s Library has published her first seven volumes of nonfiction in We Tell Ourselves Stories in Order to Live, an 1,160-page behemoth named for the opening line of The White Album.

Preceded by a timeline that situates Didion and her publications among literary and historical milestones, the essays take us to California, South America, Miami, New York and Washington, DC between 1968 and 2003. The collection offers an incisive cultural history covering 1960s counterculture in Slouching Towards Bethlehem, the “wasteland” of the late 1960s and early 1970s in The White Album, civil war in Salvador, Miami’s complicity in the Cold War, 1980s political culture in After Henry, the destruction of American democracy in Political Fictions and the realization that California cannot fulfill dreams in Where I Was From.

Though Didion rarely mentions herself, her cynicism—dubbed “a hard-wired chill” by John Leonard, who introduces the collection—permeates everything from her profile of Joan Baez (“Exactly where…she wants to be seems an open question, bewildering to her”) to Bill Clinton’s impeachment (what she calls “Vichy Washington”). But it is Didion’s devotion to detail, shrewd observations, and concise, lyrical language that distinguish her from the likes of Wolf Blitzer, Maureen Dowd and George Will, whom she censures. For as you read—or reread—Didion, “[L]ife as you know it,” as she writes in Magical Thinking, “ends.”