A series of events will take place this month involving the Joan Didion book as part of the fourth annual One Book, One City-Malibu.
By Joe Fasbinder / Special to The Malibu Times
One Book, One City-Malibu returns this month for a fourth year, and this time the chosen book is “The White Album,” a collection of essays by former Malibu resident Joan Didion.
A series of events will take place this month involving the book, which is written in the New Journalism style, a type of writing popularized by Tom Wolfe and Hunter S. Thompson in which the author inserts himself into the nonfiction story and includes subjective observations in the piece but usually remains unbiased.
“The theory is that old journalism created New Journalism because the New Journalism abandoned `plodding’ formulas of the 1950s New Yorker journalese,” said Alexis Deutsch-Adler, co-founder of One Book, One City. “The New Journalists were searching for realism without fictionalizing. They gave themselves permission to use more dialogue and monologue. The critics believed that the New Journalism offered newspaper and magazine writing daring breakthroughs that allowed for more personal experiences without over editorializing. The New Journalists wanted to evoke feelings from their readers.”
“The White Album,” which was first published in 1979, contains Didion’s observations on a wide range of subjects, including Malibu, where she lived from 1968 to 1976 with her husband, John Gregory Dunne, and their daughter.
A One Book, One City kick-off event will take place at 3 p.m. on Saturday at the Malibu Library and feature keynote speaker Mark Weingarten, author of “The Gang Who Wouldn’t Write Straight: Wolfe, Thompson, Didion and the New Journalism Revolution.” There will also be refreshments and music at the event, with city and library officials attending.
On May 10, a discussion on “The White Album” will take place at Diesel, A Bookstore at 7 p.m. A forum will take place on May 20 with a guest author at the Malibu Library at 3 p.m. And the festivities will conclude on June 3 with a luncheon and a guest speaker whose name has not been announced. The time and place for that event has also not been released.
Throughout the month, there will be a writing contest open to all Malibu residents. Participants are asked to write either fiction or poetry in New Journalism form, and the winners will be announced at the luncheon.
Deutsch-Adler got the idea for One Book, One City in 2003 after reading a New York Times article about programs in Seattle and Chicago. She then approached the Friends of the Malibu Library, a nonprofit group that donates money to the library, about doing a similar program in Malibu. The book chosen for that year was J.D. Salinger’s “The Catcher in the Rye.” The following year the selection was “The Great Gatsby” by F. Scott Fizgerald and in 2005 it was Frederick Kohner’s “Gidget.”
One Book, One City is designed to promote literacy, and money raised by the event will go to help the financially beleaguered Malibu LIbrary as well as a Malibu Labor Exchange program that teaches English as a second language.
“It’s a great way to get people to communicate in an apolitical environment,” said Deutsch-Adlrer about the event. “It’s nondivisive, and a great way to get people together.”
Copies of “The White Album” can be found at the Malibu Library, 23519 Civic Center Way, and Diesel, A Bookstore, 3890 Cross Creek Road. Entries for the writing contest should be submitted to Diesel by May 31. For more information on One Book, One City, call 456.6438.