We Tell Ourselves Stories: Joan Didion and the American Dream Machine
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- $14.99
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
Most Anticipated Books of 2025 • Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, W Magazine, The Millions
Best Books of Spring 2025 • Oprah Daily, Town & Country
“Sharp, elegant and eye-opening . . . a crucial toolbox for understanding both Joan Didion and Hollywood.” —Emily Nussbaum
Joan Didion opened The White Album (1979) with what would become one of the most iconic lines in American literature: “We tell ourselves stories in order to live.” Today, this phrase is deployed inspirationally, printed on T-shirts and posters, used as a battle cry for artists and writers. In truth, Didion was describing something much less rosy: our human tendency to manufacture delusions that might ward away our anxieties when society seems to spin off its axis. Nowhere was this collective hallucination more effectively crafted than in Hollywood.
In this riveting cultural biography, New York Times film critic Alissa Wilkinson examines Joan Didion’s influence through the lens of American mythmaking. As a young girl, Didion was infatuated with John Wayne and his on-screen bravado, and was fascinated by her California pioneer ancestry and the infamous Donner Party. The mythos that preoccupied her early years continued to influence her work as a magazine writer and film critic in New York, offering glimmers of the many stories Didion told herself that would come to unravel over the course of her career. But out west, show business beckoned.
We Tell Ourselves Stories eloquently traces Didion’s journey from New York to her arrival in Hollywood as a screenwriter at the twilight of the old studio system. She spent much of her adult life deeply embroiled in the glitz and glamor of the Los Angeles elite, where she acutely observed—and denounced—how the nation’s fears and dreams were sensationalized on screen. Meanwhile, she paid the bills writing movie scripts like A Star Is Born, while her books propelled her to celestial heights of fame.
Peering through a scrim of celluloid, Wilkinson incisively dissects the cinematic motifs and machinations that informed Didion’s writing—and how her writing, ultimately, demonstrated Hollywood’s addictive grasp on the American imagination. More than a portrait of a writer, We Tell Ourselves Stories shines a new light on a legacy whose impact will be felt for generations.
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New York Times film critic Wilkinson (Salty) serves up a perceptive study of Hollywood's influence on Joan Didion's outlook and literary sensibilities. Didion's childhood fascination with John Wayne taught her the seductiveness of myth, Wilkinson argues, suggesting that her early admiration for the pioneer spirit of Wayne's westerns later gave way to disillusionment with the notion that settling the frontier "tended to the greater good." Wilkinson suggests that as Didion successfully strived to break into the film industry in the late 1960s, her transformation from Goldwater Republican to iconoclast mirrored broader changes in Hollywood, with her ambivalence over hippies and the women's movement reflecting the schism between the conservative Motion Picture Academy and the rebellious New Hollywood. Contending that Didion demonstrated a prescient understanding that "politics and Hollywood are more similar than different," Wilkinson discusses Didion's argument in her 2001 essay collection Political Fictions that the "concocted nostalgia" peddled by the Bill Clinton and George W. Bush campaigns resembled in substance and perniciousness the patriotic myths purveyed in John Wayne's films. Wilkinson's penetrating analysis uncovers the profundity of Didion's famous assertion that "we tell ourselves stories in order to live," cleverly using the writer's biography to explore how narratives shape reality. Of the numerous books on Didion released after her death in 2021, this ranks near the top.
