We tell ourselves stories to live, wrote Didion to open this collection of essays written between 1968 and 1978.

But the essays aren’t necessarily stories. Some are stories; others are musings, meanderings, generally about things one wouldn’t ever imagine musing over, reminiscent of the turtle crossing the road in chapter whatever of The Grapes of Wrath, at which point I quit reading because the turtle spent an entire chapter and I still don’t know if it got to the other side. Things like that.

Like: the California water system, the Los Angeles traffic control center, the Mexican ex-pat who grows orchids for a living, the lifeguard system in Malibu, on the migraines she endured many times a month.

These aren’t stories with plot and purpose, characters and movement; they are simply pondering about so many things she’s experienced, or literary tableaus of scenes in which she found herself. On a plane to Hawaii, in the studio with The Doors waiting on the very late Jim Morrison, visiting Linda Kasabian or Huey Newton in jail, or Eldridge Cleaver at home, or at a photo shoot with Nancy Reagan. She describes the time of her life this way: “I wrote a couple of times a month for one magazine or another, published two books, worked on several motion pictures; participated in the paranoia of the time…”

So, don’t read The White Album for chilling or enchanting narration, but for a peek into the head of a woman who knows how language works. Read this for the stunning turns of phrases that make you wish you could do that. (“Participated in the paranoia of the time.”) Like this:

Didion writes about the time she spent in 1968 in a psychiatric hospital, after experiencing an attack of “vertigo, nausea and a feeling she was going to pass out” and ends the essay: “By way of comment, I offer only that an attack of vertigo and nausea does not now seem to me an inappropriate response to the summer of 1968.”

She describes the “new” Governor’s Mansion Ronald and Nancy Reagan built in Sacramento, in which no one had ever lived: “The walls ‘resemble’ local adobe, but they are not: they are the same concrete blocks, plastered and painted a rather stale, yellowed cream, used in so many supermarkets and housing projects and Coca-Cola bottling plants….There is one of those kitchens which seem designed exclusively for defrosting by microwave and compacting trash. It is a house built for a family of snackers.… a case study in the architecture of limited possibilities… as devoid of privacy or personal eccentricity as the lobby area in a Ramada Inn…. I have seldom seen a house so evocative of the unspeakable.”

She spent an evening at a national congress of the Junior Chamber of Commerce in Santa Monica, recounting the minutiae of the conversations and dress code and guest list, and notes: “In many ways, the Jaycees’ 32nd Annual Congress of America’s Ten Outstanding Young Men was a curious and troubling way to spend a few days in the opening weeks of 1970.”

Of one of Doris Lessing’s books, she notes in part: “This is the initial revelation in the book, and it is also the only one.”

And of a visit to Scoffield Barracks: “A foursome on the post golf course seemed to have been playing since 1940, and to be doomed to continue.”

She waxes philosophical:

“I have trouble maintaining the basic notion that keeping promises matters in a world where everything I was taught seems beside the point.”

“A place belongs forever to whoever claims it hardest, remembers it most obsessively, wrenches it from itself, shapes it, renders it, loves it so radically, that he remakes it in his image…”

And on the developers of shopping malls and the mysticism with which they were held in the 1970s: One thing you will note about shopping center theory is that you could have thought of it yourself, and a course in it will go a long way toward dispelling the notion that business proceeds from mysteries too recondite for you and me.”

In one essay enticingly titled “One Morning After the Sixties,” written in 1970, she reminiscences about the 1950s at Berkeley. At a fraternity house, where she stayed behind while others went to a football game, she described “listening to a middle aged man pick out on a piano in need of tuning the melodic line to Blue Moon. All that afternoon he sat at the piano and all that afternoon he played ‘Blue Moon’ and he never got it right. I can hear and see it still, the wrong note in ‘We will thrive on / Keep alive on,’ the sunlight falling through the big windows, the man picking up his drink and beginning again and telling me, without ever saying a word, something I had not known before about bad marriages and wasted time and looking backward.”

And, in the same essay, these comments on life at Berkeley:

“We took it for granted that the Board of Regents would sometimes act wrongly. We simply avoided those students rumored to be FBI informants…. A few of the people I knew at Berkeley killed themselves not long after. Another attempted suicide in Mexico and then, in a recovery which seemed in many ways a more advanced derangement, came home and joined the Bank of America’s three-year executive training program.”

Of the few years she spent in Malibu: "I had not before 1971 and will probably not again live in a place with a Chevrolet named after it.”

Didion can use words. She can make you laugh, make you wistful. She can interest you in things you never imagined being interested in. She can do it with a particular aptitude for not taking herself too seriously, but recognizing the utter seriousness of the world and times in which she lived.

Don’t hurry. Mull each essay and let the word images take you someplace. You’ll know more, and perhaps find a kind of zen in the travel.