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."

Other writers have explored those riotous times. But none were as personally troubled by them as Joan Didion. Her confessional style helped herald the New Journalism and opened the doors--for good and ill--for women to write openly about their experiences. If all the doyenne of American journalism explored were her own psyche, however, we shouldn't care so much about her work, which is now part of the Everyman's Library. We Tell Ourselves Stories in Order to Live contains seven books of journalism--all of her non-fiction except her 2005 memoir of new widowhood, The Year of Magical Thinking.

Didion's writing was from the beginning startlingly individual. She called herself "neurotically inarticulate." She told us she turned down acid in Haight-Ashbury, pleading that she was "unstable." But it's clear that what unsettled her most was the increasing breakdown of society. Crime is a frequent obsession of hers, the evidence that too many people are not keeping up their part of the social contract. With Didion, the personal always turns out to be the political.

In the essay "Slouching Towards Bethlehem," Didion explores with a novelist's eye for detail (she's written five works of fiction) the lives and homes of the denizens of Haight-Ashbury. It is a series of little vignettes, and one may wonder--as one often does of Didion's work---whether they make a whole. But Didion's light touch eventually gives way to more serious analysis.

"These were children who grew up cut loose from the web of cousins and great-aunts and family doctors and lifelong neighbors who had traditionally suggested and enforced the society's values," she writes of the stoned teenagers. "They are less in rebellion against the society than ignorant of it."

Didion read the results of the Sixties before they had even ended. But then, she had always been a bit cynical: "As it happens I am still committed to the idea that the ability to think for one's self depends upon one's mastery of the language, and I am not optimistic about children who will settle for saying, to indicate that their mother and father do not live together, that they come from 'a broken home.'"

"Slouching," like much of her work of the time originally published in The Saturday Evening Post, is one of Didion's most perceptive essays. She's still working--the bestselling Year of Magical Thinking was a National Book Award winner and will soon be a Broadway show starring Vanessa Redgrave--but her really important journalism examined the changing America of the 1960s and 1970s. One might fairly ask, on the publication of this 1,100-plus-page volume: Is Joan Didion still relevant?

One might as well ask whether F. Scott Fitzgerald or Henry James should still be read. Didion's gifts don't approach the genius of those two men, but she's one of the best living chroniclers of the American psyche--not just her own. Take the essay "7000 Romaine, Los Angeles 38." Didion might seem to be wasting her considerable talents writing about an already oft-explored figure like Howard Hughes. But her sharply discerning essay, with shades of James, not only hints at what the Master might have made of Hughes. It explains the American mind, even today:

   That we have made a hero of Howard
   Hughes tells us something interesting
   about ourselves, something only dimly
   remembered, tells us that the
   secret point of money and power
   in America is neither the things
   that money can buy nor power
   for power's sake (Americans are
   uneasy with their possessions,
   guilty about power, all of which
   is difficult for Europeans to perceive
   because they are themselves
   so truly materialistic,
   so versed in the uses of power),
   but absolute personal freedom,
   mobility, privacy. It is the instinct which
   drove America to the Pacific, all through
   the nineteenth century, the desire to be
   able to find a restaurant open in case you
   want a sandwich, to be a free agent, live
   by one's own rules.

In the age of blogs, cellphone cameras, and reality TV, Didion's last sentence is hauntingly prescient: "He is the last private man, the dream we no longer admit."

It might seem funny to point to a 1967 essay as evidence of Didion's relevance. Even now, she's sometimes as good as she was back then at deftly detailing a particular story. (She might be describing her own method when she writes in "Times Mirror Square," an essay about the Los Angeles Times published in her 1992 book After Henry: "This kind of detail was sometimes dismissed by reporters at other papers as 'L.A. color,' but really it was something different: The details gave the tone of the situation, the subtext without which the text could not be understood.") But she isn't always willing to tell us what she thinks the particulars mean; she sometimes provides the subtext without the text. Other times she reads too much into the particulars, generalizing where it isn't warranted. And when she turned to politics as she got older, she seemed to lose some of the personal passion that made her best work so compelling.

Even with these faults, Joan Didion remains one of the best regarded of conservative commentators. It's an odd statement to make of someone who now makes her home in The New York Review of Books poking fun at such figures as Ronald Reagan, Newt Gingrich, and Dick Cheney. But Didion did, after all, get her start in journalism at NATIONAL REVIEW. Her forefathers, she writes in the foreword to Political Fictions, a 2001 collection of NYRB pieces, "believed above all that a limited government had no business tinkering with the private or cultural life of its citizens." She voted for Barry Goldwater in 1964, but became a Democrat in disgust ("personally offended") after the California Republicans who rejected Goldwater embraced Reagan, a man she didn't see as "an authentic conservative." Now Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, "liberal Hollywood" and the religious Right are all targets of Didion's dark wit.

But as to her basic conservatism, it should be proof enough to point out that Didion believes in original sin. In "On the Morning After the Sixties," an essay from her 1979 collection The White Album, she writes of "the ambiguity of belonging to a generation distrustful of political highs, the historical irrelevancy of growing up convinced that the heart of darkness lay not in some error of social organization but in man's own blood." It's hard to imagine such a line in NYRB. But Didion has spent her long career reminding us of that lesson in vivid detail. Say what you will about her somewhat self-centered style; America needs more courageous thinkers who will write about life as it is lived--not as elites on all sides seek to manufacture it.

Kelly Jane Torrance is an arts and entertainment writer at the Washington Times and fiction editor of Doublethink.