Joan Didion Maps the California Dream

Can Binge-Reading Her Books Explain My Homeland? Can It Explain Me?

Maybe she was prone to overdoing it. Joan Didion, as she admitted in her nonfiction essay collection, The White Album, binged Doris Lessing novels. She binged biker movies too. “I saw nine of them recently,” she said, “saw the first one almost by accident and the rest of them with a notebook.” Jamming that much experience through a short window of time …