On reading about the upcoming publication of Notes to John—Joan Didion’s private journal, written in the wake of her husband’s death and structured around her sessions with a psychiatrist—and We Tell Ourselves Stories: Joan Didion and the American Dream Machine, Alissa Wilkinson’s biography tracing Didion’s relationship with Hollywood and its fictions, I picked up The White Album and Fixed Ideas: America Since 9.11. It seemed the right place to return to her, to the essays where she dismantles the idea that history arrives in a coherent narrative.
Joan Didion’s political importance has always been in what she refuses to take for granted. She did not theorise or campaign. She did not engage in argument. Instead, she watched. She recorded. She took note of where the story did not match the facts, of how language shifted to accommodate power, of what was omitted, reworded, softened, distorted. If her essays feel urgent now, it is not because she foresaw the present but because she understood the pattern. The mechanisms were already in place. The fictions had already been fixed.
Two of her books, The White Album (1979) and Fixed Ideas: America Since 9.11 (2003), examine the moments when these fictions falter. The White Album is a study in fracture, a record of how the stories of the 1960s, of revolution, of transformation, of a world being made new, began to come apart. Fixed Ideas takes up a different crisis, the aftermath of 9/11, and tracks the ways in which fear was turned into an organising principle, how national unity was imposed as an instrument of coercion. Both books ask the same question: what happens when the stories fail?
“We tell ourselves stories in order to live.”
It has become the most quoted line of Didion’s career, usually severed from the sentence that follows: “The princess is caged in the consulate. The man with the candy will lead the children into the sea.” The problem, The White Album suggests, is that the stories do not always make sense. The logic does not always hold.
She describes Los Angeles in the late 1960s as a city waiting for something terrible to happen. Open gates. Strangers at the door. A generalised sense of dread.
“The jitters were setting in. I recall sitting in a recording studio watching a band cut some tracks and being suddenly flooded with tears, a serious breakdown of my defences, a lapse into what was probably clinical depression. I remember that no one asked me what was wrong, that everyone looked away, that the music went on.”
Her breakdown is presented as a reasonable response. She does not offer analysis, only observation. The world does not add up.
The Manson murders, which others would cast as the violent conclusion of the decade, are not, in Didion’s telling, an aberration but an inevitability. The counterculture does not collapse in horror at what it has created; it continues, rudderless, stripped of real political purpose, existing mostly as an aesthetic. The radicals pose. The liberals host fundraisers. Huey Newton’s trial is less a legal proceeding than a performance in which guilt and innocence have already been decided.
“I am telling you neither that Huey Newton killed John Frey nor that Huey Newton did not kill John Frey, for in the context of revolutionary politics Huey Newton’s guilt or innocence was irrelevant.”
The shape of history, The White Album suggests, is not always clear at the time. Fixed Ideas was written when that shape had already been imposed.
In 2024, the sense of waiting has returned. The language is familiar. The stakes have been made clear. Trump is once again in power, and the old narratives, about norms holding, about the system being stronger than the individual, about the inevitability of reason prevailing, sound thin even to those repeating them. It is not that the crisis has arrived; it is that it never ended. The US has split into separate realities, each with its own fixed ideas, each convinced the other is living in a fantasy. The story of American democracy, the old, foundational narrative of order and self-correction, is losing its force. Didion knew that stories do not simply fade; they are abandoned when they no longer serve.
The war on terror, as Didion presents it, was not a response to an attack but a consolidation of power. The story was fixed from the beginning. America was under attack because it was free. It would respond because it was strong. Any attempt to interrogate the causes of 9/11 was met with the same answer.
“Inquiry into the nature of the enemy we faced, in other words, was to be interpreted as sympathy for that enemy.”
It is a world in which the political and the moral have been made indistinguishable, in which questioning the necessity of war becomes equivalent to treason. She watches as the press absorbs the language of the White House, as dissent is rewritten as weakness, as the rhetoric of patriotism is used to render debate impossible.
Didion did not live to write about Trump, but she would have recognised the logic. If Bush relied on a simplified moral framework, Trump relied on chaos. The narrative was different, but the effect was the same: loyalty above truth, grievance above fact, the belief that reality was whatever those in power said it was. Political Fictions (2001) had already identified the process.
“No one who has ever sat through a White House briefing or a Presidential press conference can mistake these events for anything but the ritual that they are.”
Trump dispensed with the ritual altogether. The performance was the thing itself.
What does it mean to read Didion now? Perhaps it is to be reminded that there is nothing new about political disintegration. That every era believes itself to be unprecedented. That history does not repeat, but the structure holds. Will it this time around?
Didion’s work was never prophecy. It was something more precise. She recorded the gap between what was happening and what was being said. She watched as language was reshaped, as meaning was imposed, as the past was rewritten to accommodate the present. The political fictions she spent her career dismantling are still with us. If anything, they have become more immersive, more difficult to escape. The challenge, then, is not just to read Didion but to read like her: to take nothing for granted, to watch how the story is being told, to ask what it is that we are being asked to believe.
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