Joan Didion wrote journalism, essays, novels, screenplays, and late-career memoirs over fifty years, and the quality is uneven — more uneven than the hagiographic accounts of her work suggest. The novels are not as good as the essays. The political journalism from El Salvador and Miami in the 1980s is some of the best American political writing of the twentieth century, and it is underread. The late grief memoirs — The Year of Magical Thinking and Blue Nights — are essential, and different from each other in ways that matter. The best entry point depends on which version of Didion you are looking for.

For most readers, start with Slouching Towards Bethlehem (1968). It is her first essay collection and, along with The White Album, her best. The title essay is a portrait of the Haight-Ashbury counterculture in 1967 — the summer of love as a failure of adult supervision, a generation consuming itself on ideology and bad drugs. "The Center Cannot Hold" opens the collection and contains the line most often quoted from Didion's early work. But the essay worth most attention is "Slouching Towards Bethlehem" itself, which makes a genuinely disturbing case that the cultural story of the 1960s was not liberation but fragmentation. The essays and memoir shelf at byallo carries this alongside The Year of Magical Thinking and other essential works in the genre.

After Slouching, read The White Album (1979). It begins with one of the most famous lines in American nonfiction: "We tell ourselves stories in order to live." The essays in this collection cover the late 1960s and early 1970s — Charles Manson, the Black Panthers, the California water project, the women's movement — from the perspective of a writer who experienced a nervous breakdown in 1968 and watched everything she thought she understood about narrative and meaning fall apart. The White Album is darker and stranger than Slouching, and in some ways more modern in its anxiety about how stories work.

The political books — Salvador (1983) and Miami (1987) — are different in register from the personal essays and are often overlooked. Salvador is a 90-page account of two weeks in El Salvador in 1982, during the period of US-backed military death squads. Didion applies the same forensic attention she brought to California to American foreign policy, and the result is disturbing in a way that more conventional political reporting is not, because she is watching the official narrative being constructed in real time and noting where it does not match what she is observing. Miami is a longer account of the Cuban exile community and its relationship to US policy — still essential for understanding South Florida.

The late memoirs come last. The Year of Magical Thinking (2005) documents the year after her husband John Gregory Dunne's sudden death — the "magical thinking" of the title being her unconscious refusal to believe the death was permanent. It is the most precise account of acute grief in modern American literature. Blue Nights (2011) is a companion piece about aging and the illness and death of her daughter Quintana, and it is less controlled, more fragmented, in a way that reflects the different quality of that particular loss. Read The Year of Magical Thinking first. Blue Nights is for after. The essays and memoir shelf carries the full range of this tradition.

The novels — Play It As It Lays, A Book of Common Prayer, Democracy — are worth reading after you have established the essays as your frame, because the qualities that make the essays extraordinary (the precision, the ear for the distorted official narrative, the attention to how people perform their lives) are present in the novels but embedded in less certain fictional architecture. Democracy is the best of the three. Play It As It Lays is the most purely spare and is short enough to read in an afternoon. Start with the essays.