1. Joan Didion moved to California in the late 60s – the time period when the Haight was at its height, and the psychology of liberation had mass appeal.

But Didion witnessed a very different version of San Francisco, and her essays on that city, and on Sacramento and Los Angeles, cast a dark shadow over the sunny countercultural celebrations we witnessed in ?Summer of Love.? One of the main goals of the counterculture was honest self-expression based on the sincere attempt to know oneself (either through the use of psychoanalysis, drugs, music or intimate connectedness to others),

and another of its goals was the freedom to live a peaceful, non-materialistic and "authentic" life, but Didion characterizes such goals as unattainable, given the cast of characters, and shows how those very goals lead to tragedies with both personal and social consequences. Use Didion?s essays in Slouching Toward Bethlehem.

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