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Joan Didion

Wednesday 21st of January 2026

1960s We were seeing the desperate attempt of a handful of pathetically unequipped children to create a community in a social vacuum. Once we had seen these children, we could no longer overlook the vacuum, no longer pretend the society's  atomization could be reversed. This was not a traditional generational rebellion. Joan Didion, “Slouching Towards Bethlehem,” on hippies in San Francisco in 1967 © 2017 Kwiple.com
1988 Presidential election It was clear for example in 1988 that the politifcal process had already become perilously remote from the electorate it was meant to represent. It was also clear in 1988 that the decision of the two major parties to obscure any possible perceived distinction between themselves, and by so doing to narrow the contested ground to a handful of selected “target” voters, had already imposed considerable strain on the basic principle of the democratic exercise, that of assuring the nation's citizens a voice in its affairs. Joan Didion, Political Fictions © 2017 Kwiple.com
1992 Presidential election What seemed novel about the use of focus groups in the 1992 campaign was the increasingly narrow part of the population to which either party was interested in listening, and the extent to which this extreme selectivity had transformed the governing of the country, for most of its citizens, into a series of signals meant for someone else. Joan Didion, “Eyes on the Prize” © 2017 Kwiple.com
Aging I think we are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not. Otherwise they turn up unannounced and surprise us, come hammering on the mind's door at 4 a.m. of a bad night and demand to know who deserted them, who betrayed them, who is going to make amends. Joan Didion, “On Keeping a Notebook” © 2017 Kwiple.com
Agribusiness  To live as farmers would have been,  for the acquisitors of these operations, a bewilderingly alien concept, since their holdings were about something else altogether: they were temporary chips in the greater game of capital formation. Joan Didion, Where I Was From, on the familial ancestors of California's “shipper-growers,” many of whom owned tens or hundreds of thousands of acres © 2017 Kwiple.com
California Douglas [Aircraft Company] built Santa Monica and then left it, and the streets running south of what had been the first Douglas plant were now lined with body shops, mini-marts, Pentecostal churches and walk-in dentists. Still, Santa Monica had its ocean, its beaches, its climate, its sun and its fog and its climbing roses. The Gateway Cities will have only their warehouses. Joan Didion, Where I Was From © 2017 Kwiple.com
California Lakewood exists because at a given time in a different economy it seemed an efficient idea to provide population density for the mall and a labor pool for the Douglas plant. There are a lot of places like Lakewood in California. They were California's mill towns, breeder towns for the boom. When times were good and there was money to spread around, these were the towns that proved Marx wrong, that managed to increase the proletariat and simultaneously, by calling it middle class, to co-opt it. Joan Didion, “Trouble in Lakewood” © 2017 Kwiple.com
Class struggle Hey, hey, that's OK You're gonna work for us one day Chant repeated by fans of a Newport Beach, CA, high school football team losing to a team from Costa Mesa, CA Quoted by Joan Didion in “Where I Was From”  © 2017 Kwiple.com
Employment Even within Los Angeles County, there had seemed no meaningful understand- ing that if General Motors shut down its assembly plant in Van Nuys, say, as it did in fact do in 1992, twenty-six hundred jobs lost, the bell would eventually toll in Bell Air, where the people lived who held the paper on the people who held the mortgages in Van Nuys. Joan Didion, Where I Was From © 2017 Kwiple.com
Foreign relations Hugh Barrera, an ARENA contender for the presidency, told Laurie Becklund of The Los Angeles Times  when she asked  in April of 1982 if ARENA did not fear losing American aid by trying to shut the Christian Democrats out of the government, “Congress would not risk losing a whole country over one party. That would be turning against a U.S. ally and encouraging Soviet intervention here. It would not be intelligent.” In other words, “anti-communism” was seen, correctly, as the bait the United States would always take. Joan Didion, Salvador [ARENA is a right-wing party in El Salvador] © 2017 Kwiple.com
Housing There is that most ubiquitous of all “luxury features,” a bidet in the master bedroom. There is one of those kitchens which seem designed exclusively for defrosting by microware and compacting trash. It is a house built for a family of snackers. Joan Didion, on “Taj Mahal,” the 8-bedroom, 8-bathroom, 12,000 square feet Governor's mansion built in Carmichael, CA, for Ronald Reagan by his friends, but never lived in by Reagan or any later governor © 2017 Kwiple.com
Politics This notion, that the citizen's choice among determinedly centrist candidates makes a “difference,” is in fact the narrative's most central element and its most fictive. Joan Didion, “Insider Baseball” © 2017 Kwiple.com
Politics A two-party system in which both parties are committed to calibrating the precise level of incremental tinkering required to get elected is not likely to be a meaningful system,  nor is an election likely to be meaning- ful when it is specifically crafted as an exercise in personalismo,  in “appearing presidential” to that diminishing percentage of the population that still pays attention.  Joan Didion, “Eyes on the Prize” © 2017 Kwiple.com
Politics When we talk about the process, then, we are talking, increasingly, not about “the democratic process,” or the general mech- anism affording the citizens of a state a voice in its affairs, but the reverse: a mech- anism seen as so specialized that access to it is correctly limited to its own professionals, to those who manage policy and those who report on it, to those who run the polls and those who quote them, to those who ask and those who answer the questions on Sunday shows, to the media consultants, to the col- umnists, to the issues advisers, to those who give the off-the-record breakfasts and those who attend them; to that handful of insiders who invent, year in and year out, the narrative of public life. Joan Didion, “Insider Baseball” © 2017 Kwiple.com
Selfie I didn't take seriously how troubled she was. When she was six, she called Camarillo State Psychiatric Hospital and asked what to do if you think you're going crazy. That should have triggered something in me other than amusement. Joan Didion on the death of her adopted daughter © 2017 Kwiple.com
Selfie  I lack all temperament for paradise, real or facsimilie. Joan Didion © 2017 Kwiple.com
Selfie If I could believe that going to a barricade would affect man's fate in the slightest I would go to that barricade, and quite often I wish I could, but it would be less than honest to say that I expect to happen upon such a happy ending. Joan Didion, “On the Morning After the Sixties” © 2017 Kwiple.com
Selfie It doesn't matter to me what people say to me in the interview because I don't trust it. Joan Didion © 2017 Kwiple.com
Selfie 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 interest. And it always does. That is one last thing to remember: writers are always selling somebody out. Joan Didion, Preface to Slouching Towards Bethlehem © 201 Kwiple.com
Selfie Quite often during the past several years I have felt myself a sleepwalker, moving through the world unconscious of the moment's high issues, oblivious to its data, alert only to the stuff of bad dreams … Acquaintances read The New York Times,  and try to tell me the news of the world. I listen to call-in shows. Joan Didion, “In the Islands” © 2017 Kwiple.com
 
Snapshot In John Wayne's world, John Wayne was supposed to give the orders.  John Wayne portrayed by Joan Didion © 2017 Kwiple.com
Sterilization By the end of 1920, of the 3,233 sterilizations for insanity  or feeblemindedness performed to that date throughout the United States, 2,558, or seventy-nine percent, had taken place in California. Joan Didion, Where I Was From  © 2017 Kwiple.com
 
Terrorism Terror is the given of the place. … Body dumps are seen in El Salvador as a kind of visitors' must-do, difficult but worth the detour. “Of course you have seen El Playón,” an aide to President Alvaro Magaña said to me one day, and proceeded to discuss the site geologically, as evidence of the country's geothermal resources. Joan Didion, Salvador © 2017 Kwiple.com