Breakdown Lane.(We Tell Ourselves Stories in Order to Live: Collected Nonfiction)(Book review)

We Tell Ourselves Stories in Order to Live: Collected Nonfiction, by Joan Didion (Knopf, 1,160 pp., $30)

THE 1960s gave Joan Didion a nervous breakdown--or so it often seems, judging from her work on those years. "I went to San Francisco," she writes in the preface to her 1968 essay collection Slouching Towards Bethlehem, "because I had not been able to work in some months, had been paralyzed by the conviction that writing was an irrelevant act, that the world as I had understood it no longer existed." Lines from the Yeats poem from which she took her book's title--and that of her essay about a 1967 trip to the Summer of Love--"reverberated in my inner ear as if they were surgically implanted there." (One of its most famous: "Things fall apart; the center cannot hold.") While writing about the events of 1967, she was seized by an unnamed illness. "I drank gin-and-hot-water to blunt the pain and took Dexedrine to blunt the gin and wrote the piece."

Other writers have explored those riotous times. But none were as personally troubled by them as Joan Didion. Her confessional style helped herald the New Journalism and opened the doors--for good and ill--for women to write openly about their experiences. If all the doyenne of American journalism explored were her own psyche, however, we shouldn't care so much about her work, which is now part of the Everyman's Library. We Tell Ourselves Stories in Order to Live contains seven books of journalism--all of her non-fiction except her 2005 memoir of new widowhood, The Year of Magical Thinking.

Didion's writing was from the beginning startlingly individual. She called herself "neurotically inarticulate." She told us she turned down acid in Haight-Ashbury, pleading that she was "unstable." But it's clear that what unsettled her most was the increasing breakdown of society. Crime is a frequent obsession of hers, the evidence that too many people are not keeping up their part of the social contract. With Didion, the personal always turns out to be the political.

In the essay "Slouching Towards Bethlehem," Didion explores with a novelist's eye for detail (she's written five works of fiction) the lives and homes of the denizens of Haight-Ashbury. It is a series of little vignettes, and one may wonder--as one often does of Didion's work---whether they make a whole. But Didion's light touch eventually gives way to more serious analysis.

"These were children who grew up cut loose from the web of cousins and great-aunts and family doctors and lifelong neighbors who had traditionally suggested and enforced the society's values," she writes of the stoned teenagers. "They are less in rebellion against the society than ignorant of it."

Didion read the results of the Sixties before they had even ended. But then, she had always been a bit cynical: "As it happens I am still committed to the idea that the ability to think for one's self depends upon one's mastery of the language, and I am not optimistic about children who will settle for saying, to indicate that their mother and father do not live together, that they come from 'a broken home.'"