Quarantine Book Club: Joan Didion's Creative Nonfiction
Saturdays at 10am PST, August 1st - September 5th
- All tickets include access to six virtual meetings
We will read the best of Joan Didion's essays and talk about the ways in which they changed literature and journalism forever. By centering a woman's perspective in the major events of her day, and by combining the instincts of a reporter with the techniques of a novelist, Didion's work did things that hadn't been done before.
We will be reading from two essay collections of hers, "The White Album" (1979) and "After Henry" (1992), both of which you should buy or borrow from the library. We will discuss her brilliant, iconic, and sometimes frustrating takes on the late 1960s, feminism, brush fires, Nancy Reagan, presidential politics, the Central Park Five, Patty Hearst, and more. Bonus for anyone who was in the "Giovanni's Room" book club: James Baldwin himself makes an appearance in one of these essays—at a dinner party in Hollywood.
You do not need to read or prepare anything for the first meeting, but you should try to have a copy of "The White Album" with you. In the second half of this six-week book club, we'll look at "After Henry." This book club is open to anyone in the world, and meets live on Zoom each Saturday. Recordings are available after the fact for any ticket-holder who misses a live session.
