We Tell Ourselves Stories in Order to Live ─ Collected Nonfiction

Slouching Towards Bethlehem captures the counterculture of the sixties, its mood and lifestyle, as symbolized by California, Joan Baez, Haight-Ashbury. The White Album covers the revolutionary politics and the "contemporary wasteland" of the late sixties and early seventies, in pieces on the Manson family, the Black Panthers, and Hollywood. Salvador is a riveting look at the social and political landscape of civil war. Miami exposes the secret role this largely Latin city played in the Cold War, from the Bay of Pigs through Watergate. In After Henry Didion reports on the Reagans, Patty Hearst, and the Central Park jogger case. The eight essays in Political Fictions - on censorship in the media, Gingrich, Clinton, Starr, and "compassionate conservatism," among others - show us how we got to the political scene of today. And in Where I Was From Didion shows that California was never the land of the golden dream.

Joan Didion was born in California and lives in New York City. She is the author of five novels and seven previous books of nonfiction.