Jone Didian was a literary great. Works including slouching towards Bethlehem and the

White Album helped change the shape of journalism and on the next selected shorts we hear highlights

from each. Stay tuned as we celebrate the life and work of the great Jone Didian.

I'm your host, Meg Wallitzer, and you're listening to selected shorts where our greatest actors

transport us through the magic of fiction, one short story at a time.

Jone Didian was beloved by generations of readers. She wrote novels and screenplays as well as

memoirs and essays that occupy a singular place in the cultural imagination. Sophisticated, knowing,

a writer with a style and a voice that you could recognize anywhere. Taking up the torch of

what was called new journalism, she placed herself squarely in her repertoire. She was a distant

cool-eyed observer searching for order in a world determined to fall apart. Didian spoke to the

obvious but often ignored elements underpinning American culture, including race and class,

while candidly sharing her own life and thinking. Her writing was pithy, philosophical,

peacant, seemingly casual, yet full of incisive revelation.

When Didian died in 2021, her star was undimmed. You never know which writers will continue to be

read after they're gone, but Didian's influence only seems to expand over time. I think it's still

expanding. In this hour, essays that reveal the two sides of Jone Didian, one, the adult Didian,

at the edge of a nervous breakdown, reporting from California in the late 60s,

and the other, a youthful Didian, full of hope and life, living in New York and discovering how

everything in her life is beginning to change. Didians essay The White Album famously begins with

the line, we tell ourselves stories in order to live. Here, these stories are jarring visions of

the late 60s distilled in crisp, propulsive sentences. To inhabit Didian's complex world, we have an

actor best known for her longtime role in the series, LA Law. This is Jill Eichenberry performing

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