Joan Didion's second essay collection covers the late 1960s in California: the Manson murders, Black Panthers, shopping malls, migraines, the sense that the narrative was shattering. The title essay opens with one of her most famous lines: we tell ourselves stories in order to live. But the essays that follow show what happens when the stories stop working. Didion's prose is precise, cool, and somehow also anguished. The collection established her as the essential chronicler of American unraveling.