slouching towards bethlehem by joan didion

I wonder what my mother must have thought of this collection of essays about people, places, lifestyles so radically different than anything in her experience, yet which were happening simultaneous to her sheltered life. nothing but trouble can come from such a book. I recall loving the title-the evocation of the Bible that seemed almost sacrilegious to me, a child of a conservative Christian family. I felt the book must be some passageway to adulthood, some essentialness of feminism that both intrigued and bored me. I recall her clutching the book as though it were a lifeline, a rope to a past she never had. I recall the cover: gun-metal gray with white lettering.

She majored in English and one day brought home, as a reading assignment, a copy of Slouching Towards Bethlehem.

It wasn't until she divorced at thirty-six, the same year Ronald Reagan ushered in the folly of trickle-down economics and the prison-industrial complex, that she discovered 'the sixties'. Married at seventeen, her 1960s and 70s were spent as a young wife and mother of four. My mother was a freshman in college when I was a freshman in high school.

Slouching towards bethlehem by joan didion