Summary Of Joan Didion's Slouching Toward Bethlehem

Joan Didion’s book, Slouching Toward Bethlehem, takes place in California during the 1960s. She opens the book with a different feel from what most people would have imagined California to be like today. People picture California as a beautiful place full of sunshine and happiness and make it out to be the ideal life. However, Didion describes how terribly wrong that visualization of California is. During the 1960s, it was a place of “love and death in the golden land,” and it held “seasons of suicide and divorce” (3). The author sets up the idea of conflict in the beginning paragraph that puts a depressed mood on the readers and this continues throughout the book. California was thought of as “the beginning of the end” (98). She moved to New