These essays track the late 1960s as already disintegrating while it’s being named. Haight-Ashbury, California mythologies, moral drift...very much relatable even now.

The famous title essay is full of people speaking in fragments, systems dissolving, meaning no longer holds its shape. Elsewhere, pieces like Some Dreamers of the Golden Dream and On Self-Respect show the full range—controlled, precise, but always circling instability beneath the surface.

What makes this book endure is that it never settles into nostalgia. It’s not “the 60s” as myth; it’s the feeling of a culture losing its narrative about itself. You read it now and it doesn’t feel historical—it feels like "it".

This is Didion’s breakout. She effectively defines the tone of modern literary journalism. Humble brag. Everything people now flatten into “cool detachment” is actually something much more precise: a refusal to stabilise meaning when the world itself isn’t stable. She did it first. 

UK first edition, 1969 (Andre Deutsch). Original dust jacket present. Jacket clean with light general handling wear and minor edge rubbing; no major tears. Boards sharp and well-preserved. Binding firm with no lean. Interior clean throughout with no inscriptions. Paper lightly toned as expected. A very solid copy overall, with good shelf presence.