As a native of Los Angeles, I have always read Joan Didion with much the same mixture of feelings that, I imagine, a Samoan might feel toward Margaret Mead. Every so often, in the lethally stylized essays of “Slouching Towards Bethlehem” or “The White Album,”there is a place or a phenomenon I recognize with a gratified shock. Ms Didion even writes about the neighborhood I grew up in, Palms, which she accurately describes as “an invisible prairie of stucco bungalows and twostory ‘units.'”

Yet the satisfaction of seeing places I know captured for literature is soured by the use Ms. Didion makes of those places. Take her reference to Palms, which occurs in the essay “Notes Toward a Dreampolitik”in “The White Album.” Already there is a hint of contempt in that adjective “invisible,” implying as it does that the writer occupies heights from which mere stucco bungalows are beneath notice. Palms “is a part of Los Angeles,” she writes, “through which many people drive on their way from 20th Century Fox to Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer” — much as one might describe Ohio as a place over which many people fly on their way from Manhattan to Hollywood.

Such a place, Ms Didion suggests, cannot even be mentioned without apology: “I mention it at all,” she goes on to say, “only because it is in Palms that a young woman named Dallas Beardsley lives.” And Dallas Beardsley — a 22-year-old would-be starlet who took out a self-promoting advertisement in Variety — is worth mentioning only because she represents the bizarre and futile persistence of provincial America, which Ms. Didion considers an “invisible city” untouched by the dark glamours of the ’60s. “I had the distinct sense,” she writes, “that everyone I knew had some fever which had not yet infected the invisible city.”

In that discrimination between “everyone I knew” and “the invisible city” lies the seductiveness of Ms. Didion’s nonfiction, which makes a bid for the canon in the new Everyman’s Library volume “We Tell Ourselves Stories in Order to Live” (1,122 pages, $30).This giant book collects seven volumes of Ms Didion’s essays and reportage, from her 1968 debut, “Slouching Towards Bethlehem,” to her family history “Where I Was From,” published in 2003. Only “The Year of Magical Thinking,” her 2005 best seller and National Book Award winner, is missing; one goal of this collection is to introduce the rest of Ms. Didion’s work to readers who only know her from that wrenching memoir.

As John Leonard writes in his introduction to “We Tell Ourselves Stories,” “The Year of Magical Thinking” — an account of the sudden death of Ms. Didion’s husband, John Gregory Dunne, and the mortal illness of her daughter Quintana — is in some ways a natural extension of her earlier work. “All these years,” Mr. Leonard points out, “Didion has been writing about loss. All these years, she has been rehearsing death.” Yet there is also a significant difference between “Magical Thinking,”with its frank emotional vulnerability, and most of Ms. Didion’s earlier writing. In fact, Ms. Didion’s distinctive accomplishment has always been to make depression and deathmindedness sound cool, to turn them into badges of membership in the bicoastal club of “everyone I knew.”

What Ms. Didion does to Palms in “Notes Toward a Dreampolitik,” in fact, is what she does to every place or person she approaches as a journalist.The range of stories she has covered over the last 40 years is impressively broad, evidence of an intrepidity at odds with her frail persona (and her famously slight person): the engineering of the California Aqueduct, the Cuban exile in Miami, the civil war in El Salvador, the Starr Report. But all of them are used as stage sets, against which the writer herself stands out in sharp, narcissistic relief. For the real subject and glory of Ms. Didion’s nonfiction has always been her own voice — the knowing, nerveless, sibylline voice that by now is as immediately recognizable, and as easily parodied, as Hemingway’s.

Indeed, Joan Didion, as we come to know her in this book, is clearly a literary descendant of Hemingway, who created the genre in which she excels: what might be called modernist melodrama. Just as a Method actor was ostentatiously inarticulate where a 19thcentury ham would rant and rave, so Ms. Didion employs tranced repetition, ironic understatement, and blank space to create an atmosphere of psychic prostration. She always seems to be writing on the brink of a catastrophe so awful that her only available response is to withdraw into a kind of autism. She created or perfected one of the classic 1960s characters — the existentialist on Valium.

To get a sense of how deliberately Ms. Didion fashions this persona, just open “We Tell Ourselves Stories” to almost any page: “Quite often during the past several years I have felt myself a sleepwalker … alert only to the stuff of bad dreams.” “Actual participation [in “the freeway experience”] requires a total surrender, a concentration so intense as to seem a kind of narcosis.” “I had come to find narrative sentimental.” By the time Ms. Didion, in “Where I Was From,” quotes a letter she wrote home from college in the early 1950s — “A woman committed suicide by jumping out a window across from the Waldorf. … Nancy said it was terrible, they had to clean up the street with fire hoses” — the Charles Addams comedy of it all becomes irresistible.

The key to enjoying Ms. Didion’s work, then, is to approach her not as a journalist, whose goal is to get the story right, but as a performance artist, who wants to create the strongest possible impression. This is easiest to recognize in Ms. Didion’s first books, still her best, with their brooding California Gothic. When she begins a “Los Angeles Notebook” with “There is something uneasy in the Los Angeles air this afternoon, some unnatural stillness, some tension,” we know we are dealing with a case of pathetic fallacy on the order of “It was a dark and stormy night.”

That is why Ms. Didion’s California, from “Slouching Towards Bethlehem” to “Where I Was From,” is never the California I know, but only the murderously odd California of the Donner Party and Patty Hearst. It is a place where the defense plant is always shutting down, the farm always being sold off to developers, the Santa Ana winds always driving people mad. For any more accurate or comprehensive view — including one that takes any notice at all of California’s Latinos and Asians — we must look to other writers, who are able to hold self and world in a steadier, if less seductive, balance.