The White Album: Didion's Grammar of Anti-sentimentality

The making of “The White Album” spans an entire decade. It begins in 1968, triggered by the Manson Murders and a core of three articles written by Didion in the Saturday Evening Post, and ends with the essay’s publication in the nonfiction collection of the same title in 1979. During this time, Didion refines her own grammar of anti-sentimentality, her aesthetic and ethic quest to expose, and write against, the proliferation of narratives fed on “polarized and cheapened” ideas, and separated from the social experience. Her call to “struggle to see what’s really going on” is at the heart of the Commencement Address Didion gave at UC Riverside in 1975, a text that can be read as anticipating and illuminating “The White Album” and the postulated need to tell stories even when traditional tools of historical analysis have lost their effectiveness. In the following essay, I will read “The White Album” in the light of Didion’s commitment to unveiling California’s sentimental narratives in the 1960s. I will do so by both contextualizing its publication history and analyzing its composition strategies at structural and stylistic level.