Summary of Joan Didion's Collected Essays

Please note: This is a companion version & not the original book. Book Preview:

#1 We tell ourselves stories in order to live. We look for the sermon in the suicide, the social or moral lesson in the murder of five. We interpret what we see, select the most workable of the multiple choices, and live entirely by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images.

#2 I was meant to have a script, but I didn’t. I was meant to know the plot, but I didn’t. I was meant to believe in the narrative, but I didn’t. I was beginning to perceive the experience as more electrical than ethical.

#3 The patient to whom this psychiatric report refers is me. The tests mentioned were administered privately in the outpatient psychiatric clinic at St. John’s Hospital in Santa Monica in the summer of 1968, shortly after I suffered the attack of vertigo and nausea mentioned in the first sentence.

#4 I lived in a large house in a part of Hollywood that had once been expensive but was now described as a senseless-killing neighborhood. The owners were waiting for a zoning change to tear the house down and build a high-rise apartment building.

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eBook: 21 kwietnia 2022