It’s no secret that I love Didion. I cite her or take inspiration from her work in nearly every piece of personal writing I produce. I first fell in love when I read On Keeping a Notebook, which resonated with me in ways I didn’t know were possible, quite possibly because I was very into keeping a notebook at the time—something I still do, but less obsessively.

The White Album contains some truly stellar writing, but calling it essayism at its finest would be doing a disservice to Didion’s other anthologies, like Slouching Towards Bethlehem, which I think captured me more. The White Album has a decidedly anxious tone to it, and while still captivating, I felt less compelled by her writing by and large here.

Highlights include In Hollywood, in which she is her most poignant and sharp, eviscerating the myths of Hollywood in a similar magnitude but dissimilar fashion as she did the Haight in Slouching Towards Bethlehem.

The Woman’s Movement struck me as strange, and I came away more confused than anything. The White Album is personal and destabilizing (her signature), and the couple essays on water are fascinating, mixing fact and place and politics in a way that fascinates me. If I can ever write about infrastructure half as compellingly I will be happy.