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The episode you’re thinking of appears in “The White Album,” the title essay of Joan Didion’s 1979 collection The White Album.
In the opening section of that essay, Didion describes the disorienting atmosphere of Los Angeles in the late 1960s—Hollywood parties, recording studios, the Manson murders, and the general sense that ordinary social rules had become unstable. As part of that portrait, she recounts going to a Ralphs supermarket on Sunset Boulevard at North Fuller wearing only a bathing suit and a thin cotton skirt, and noticing that no one seemed to find this unusual. The moment serves as a small but telling example of how social boundaries in Los Angeles had become oddly fluid.
Her point is less about the outfit than about the atmosphere of the time:
- everyday behavior felt slightly surreal,
- social expectations seemed loosened or irrelevant,
- and people moved through public space with a kind of detached indifference.
The anecdote appears very early in the essay as part of the famous opening passage:
“We tell ourselves stories in order to live…”
From there she moves through a collage of scenes—Jim Morrison recording sessions, Huey Newton’s trial, the Manson murders, Hollywood parties, and her own nervous breakdown—to illustrate how fragmented the culture felt.
So the answer:
Essay: The White Album
Collection: The White Album (1979)
It’s a good example of Didion’s method: a tiny observational detail—a grocery trip in a bathing suit—quietly revealing something larger about Los Angeles culture and the psychological mood of the late 1960s.
If you’d like, I can also point out three or four other small LA moments in that essay that work the same way (the Doors studio scene, the Malibu house, the Black Panthers interview), because they’re almost constructed like film cuts.
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[This beautiful answer is actually wrong, the description of going to the supermarket in her bathing suit is in her first book, Slouching to Bethlehem, in the chapter, Los Angeles Notebook. The same chapter is also famous for a several page description of the alleged grand and adverse effects of Santa Ana wins on the human psyche.]
