Slouching Towards Bethlehem: Essays
By: Joan Didion
FSG Classics
256 pages
Slouching Towards Bethlehem is a collection of essays in book form. This collection put Didion on the map. In an odd way though, the collection feels autobiographical. I sometimes can’t tell if Didion is writing about the particular topic at hand, or about herself. Maybe like this blog? At the end of it all, it’s kind of a journal about me. My favorite chapter was Didion writing about her hometown of Sacramento. The prose of this book was beautiful too. Make sure you watch the Netflix documentary on Didion, The Center Will Not Hold.
Two of my favorite quotes:
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 interests. And it always does. That is one last thing to remember: writers are always selling somebody out.
My husband likes my family but is uneasy in their house, because once there I fall into their ways, which are difficult, oblique, deliberately inarticulate, not my husband’s ways.