Joan Didion’s packing list and the illusion of preparedness

It’s the holiday season. You’re packing for your trip. There is no better time to revisit this: two skirts. Two jerseys. A bottle of bourbon. This is the famous packing list from The White Album. It is as precise as it is strange. It reads like a ritual, a personal inventory, a whisper of both glamour and dread.

It’s not really about the clothes. It’s about control. About readiness. About who she became when the suitcase clicked shut.

The list appears near the end of The White Album. It’s a book that captures the disquiet of its time with eerie precision, and somehow, still speaks to the quiet chaos of ours. The list casually inserted—almost as an aside—in an essay that drifts through breakdown and meaninglessness. 

It’s a moment of stillness. Of order. The list reflects Didion’s belief in preparation as self-preservation. The act of packing isn’t just logistical. It’s more than that. It’s psychological. In an unpredictable world, a suitcase is a declaration. It says I have everything, and I am ready.

And yet, we know she wasn’t. No one is. That’s the tension: the list is a kind of fiction. One, we all write in our own way.

What would your version of the Didion list look like? Not the literal one, but the one that protects you from unravelling. The one that says, I still know who I am. Or at least, who I need to be.

Joan Didion’s Packing List (Selected)

1. Two skirts

2. Two jerseys or leotards

3. One pullover sweater

4. Two pairs of shoes

5. Cigarettes

6. Bourbon

7. Shampoo

8. Toothbrush and paste

9. Nightgown

10. Typewriter

11. “A mohair throw for the hotel room.”

12. “Yellow legal pads.”

It’s intimate. It’s armour. It’s a myth. And perhaps the most revealing thing Didion ever wrote about herself, not in what she included, but in what she needed it to mean.