Breakdown Lane.(We Tell Ourselves Stories in Order to Live: Collected Nonfiction)(Book review)

We Tell Ourselves Stories in Order to Live: Collected Nonfiction, by Joan Didion (Knopf, 1,160 pp., $30)

THE 1960s gave Joan Didion a nervous breakdown--or so it often seems, judging from her work on those years. "I went to San Francisco," she writes in the preface to her 1968 essay collection Slouching Towards Bethlehem, "because I had not been able to work in some months, had been paralyzed by the conviction that writing was an irrelevant act, that the world as I had understood it no longer existed." Lines from the Yeats poem from which she took her book's title--and…