Telling ourselves stories

In We Tell Ourselves Stories: Joan Didion and the American Dream Machine (Liveright, 272 pp.), Alissa Wilkinson examines how filmmaking shaped the work of an American literary icon. In the process, the book also necessarily becomes about John Wayne, Ronald Reagan, JFK, Sept. 11, Marvel heroes, and much more. Wilkinson’s thesis: Didion is “most fruitfully understood through the lens of American mythmaking in Hollywood.”

We Tell Ourselves Stories Alissa Wilkinson

Now a film critic at The New York Times, Wilkinson previously spent 14 years as an English and humanities professor at The King’s College in New York City, a now-disbanded Christian institution. Her book is not explicitly about faith but asks questions relevant for any American Christian. What stories do we tell ourselves to make sense of our history? Do we oversentimentalize to justify current or past policies? Do we believe in charades? The book centers on Didion, of course, but it also serves as a survey of 20th-century attitudes toward film and politics—and deftly details how American storytelling translates from TV screen to political narrative. “This book is not a biography of Joan Didion,” Wilkinson clarifies. “As Didion put it, I am writing to find out what I think.” Wilkinson follows Didion through film history—from the 1930s Legion of Decency to blacklisting suspected communists in the 1950s to the 1980s with its circus of televised politics.

Didion understood both Hollywood and Washington. She and her husband worked as journalists and authors, but they also wrote screenplays while living in California. Wilkinson writes of Didion’s epiphany, in which she connected these two parts of her life and saw that modern American political rhetoric used skills siphoned from the silver screen. “Campaigns were traveling movie sets. The journalists covering them—the press members she [Didion] was sharing a plane with—were like entertainment journalists, repeating the story that the campaign, or the movie studio, wanted told, rather than reporting that story for what it was: a fiction made up by the participants with the plan to feed it to the masses.”

If you’re not a Didion reader yet, Wilkinson will help you understand why she became a star whose fans buy tote bags printed with images of her face. Wilkinson also points out the frequent misapplication of one of Didion’s most famous lines: “We tell ourselves stories in order to live.” That sentiment looks good on a tote bag, but Didion’s point was that we just make up the stories that give our lives meaning. Sadly, Joan the journalist never really understood the true story to which we all belong.