Breakdown Lane

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.”

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Kelly Jane Torrance

Kelly Jane Torrance is a writer living in Washington, D.C.

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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 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.”