Joan Didion’s best-known line is not a line at all. It is a packing list, inserted midway through her 1979 book about counterculture, The White Album. It is considered the perfect example of its species. It is comprehensive, concise, tasteful and evocative. Starting with skirts and leotards, passing through bourbon and toiletries, it lands, with poetic circularity, on the key that will let her back into her house at journey’s end.
People forget that Didion did not consider the list a success. On the contrary, it stood for the failure of all our efforts to impose order on things. “It should be clear that this was a list by someone who prized control, yearned after momentum, someone determined to play her role as if she had the script,” she writes.
The White Album’s opening sentence, “We tell ourselves stories in order to live”, is also misunderstood. It is quoted as a trite testimony to the power of stories. Didion’s point is that stories ultimately aren’t up to the job, that the script is never found, and yet we keep trying.