Where To Start With Joan Didion and John Gregory Dunne

Capturing the tumultuous landscape of the United States, and in particular California, during a pivotal era of social change, the first work of nonfiction from one of American literature's most distinctive prose stylists is a modern classic. Collects essays on such diverse topics as John Wayne, the Haight-Asbury culture, and the Newport mansions.

An autobiographical portrait of marriage and motherhood by the acclaimed author details the critical illness of her daughter, Quintana Roo, followed by the fatal coronary of her husband, John Gregory Dunne, and her daughter's second bout with a life-threatening ailment, and her struggle to come to terms with life and death, illness, sanity, personal upheaval, and grief.

Examining key events, figures, and trends of the era—including Charles Manson, the Black Panthers, and the shopping mall—through the lens of her own spiritual confusion, Joan Didion helped to define mass culture as we now understand it. Written with a commanding sureness of tone and linguistic precision, The White Album is a central text of American reportage and a classic of American autobiography.

Didion applies her scalpel-like intelligence to California's ethic of ruthless self-sufficiency in order to examine that ethic’s often tenuous relationship to reality. Combining history and reportage, memoir and literary criticism, Where I Was From explores California’s romances with land and water; its unacknowledged debts to railroads, aerospace, and big government; the disjunction between its code of individualism and its fetish for prisons.

Here, Didion covers ground from Washington to Los Angeles, from a TV producer's gargantuan "manor" to the racial battlefields of New York's criminal courts. At each stop, she uncovers the mythic narratives that elude other observers: Didion tells us about the fantasies the media construct around crime victims and presidential candidates; she gives us new interpretations of the stories of Nancy Reagan and Patty Hearst; she charts America's rollercoaster ride through evanescent booms and hard times that won't go away.

Maria Wyeth is an ex-model and the star of two films directed by her estranged husband, Carter Lang. But in the spiritual desert of 1960s Los Angeles, Maria has lost the plot of her own life. Her daughter was born with an "aberrant chemical in her brain." Her long-troubled marriage has slipped beyond repair, and her disastrous love affairs and strained friendships provide little comfort. Her only escape is to get in her car and drive the freeway until it runs out "somewhere no place at all where the flawless burning concrete just stopped." But every ride to nowhere, every sleepless night numbed by pills and booze and sex, makes it harder for Maria to find the meaning in another day.

Everett McClellan and his wife, Lily, are the great-grandchildren of pioneers, and what happens to them is a tragic epilogue to the pioneer experience—a haunting portrait of a marriage whose wrong turns and betrayals are at once absolutely idiosyncratic and a razor-sharp commentary on the history of California.

An American woman, Charlotte, comes to a derelict Central American hoping to be reunited with her fugitive daughter. There she meets another American, Grace, who knows where all the skeletons are buried.

Inez Victor knows that the major casualty of the political life is memory. But the people around Inez have made careers out of losing track. Her senator husband wants to forget the failure of his last bid for the presidency. Her husband's handler would like the press to forget that Inez's father is a murderer. And, in 1975, America is doing its best to lose track of its one-time client, the lethally hemorrhaging republic of South Vietnam.

In 1967, Dunne asked for unlimited access to the inner workings of Twentieth Century Fox. Miraculously, he got it. For one year he went everywhere there was to go and talked to everyone worth talking to within the studio. He tracked every step of the creation of pictures like Dr. Dolittle, Planet of the Apes, and The Boston Strangler. The result is a work of reportage that may be the most minutely observed and therefore most uproariously funny portrait of the motion picture business.

Revealing the absurdities of Hollywood movie-making, the author offers an account of his eight-year struggle to see his screenplay for the film Up Close and Personal through production.

A collection of key nonfiction works includes the writer's frank observations on the film industry, politics, sports, and other topics; his reflections on raising an adopted daughter; and depictions of Las Vegas and a Hollywood film studio. 

In 1940s Los Angeles, an unidentified murder victim is found bisected in a shadowy lot. Two brothers, Tom and Des Spellacy, are at the heart of this powerful novel about Irish-Catholic life in Southern California just after World War II. Tom is a homicide detective and Des is a priest on the rise within the Church. The murder investigation provides the background against which are played the ever-changing loyalties of the two brothers. 

Set in the glamorous, gangster-dominated Hollywood of the 1940s, Playland tells the story of Blue Tyler, a child star who disappears from Hollywood and becomes a bag lady in New York City.

In the aftermath of Edgar Parlance’s killing, the small prairie town of Regent becomes a destination for everyone from a sociopathic teenage supermodel to an enigmatic attorney with secret familial links to the worlds of Hollywood and organized crime. Out of their manifold convergences, their jockeying for power, publicity, or love.