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Article: Breakdown Lane.(We Tell Ourselves Stories in Order to Live: Collected Nonfiction)(Book review)
- Article from:
- National Review
- Article date:
- April 2, 2007
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 2007 National Review, Inc. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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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 ...