In We Tell Ourselves Stories, Alissa Wilkinson offers a penetrating and original exploration of Joan Didion’s complex entanglement with Hollywood and the broader machinery of American myth-making. Rather than providing a conventional biography, Wilkinson presents a focused, critical study that repositions Didion as a central figure in the cultural feedback loop between literature, film, and national identity. Through this lens, the book invites readers to reconsider Didion not just as a literary stylist but as a cultural theorist deeply engaged with the stories that define American life.
Wilkinson, drawing on her experience as a film critic and scholar, investigates how Didion's proximity to Hollywood—both geographic and professional—shaped her worldview and narrative technique. Didion’s relationship with Hollywood was not just one of professional involvement but of profound symbolic significance. Early in life, she was drawn to the American mythos epitomized by figures like John Wayne, whose rugged individualism and moral certainty came to symbolize a kind of unambiguous American virtue. This early fascination with Wayne is a crucial part of Wilkinson’s argument: he represented an idealized vision of America that Didion would later come to question, dismantle, and reconstruct through her writing.
John Wayne, in Wilkinson’s account, was more than a movie star to Didion—he was a metaphor for the American imagination. His stoic masculinity and frontier ethos stood in sharp contrast to the chaotic and disillusioned world that Didion would eventually document in her essays and novels. Wilkinson skillfully traces how this symbolic attachment to Wayne helped shape Didion’s initial conservatism and how her gradual disillusionment with the ideals he embodied mirrored her broader critique of American politics and culture. In one of her most famous essays, Didion recounts watching Wayne on screen and feeling as though she believed in the clarity he projected. That yearning—for order, for narrative coherence—became a recurring theme in her work, even as she chronicled the erosion of those very illusions.
The book’s core strength lies in its analysis of Didion’s work as a screenwriter alongside her husband, John Gregory Dunne. Together, they penned scripts for major Hollywood films, including A Star Is Born and True Confessions. Wilkinson argues that this screenwriting career was not a diversion from Didion’s literary pursuits but an extension of them. The collaborative and commercial nature of film writing exposed Didion to the blunt mechanisms of narrative construction, revealing how easily stories can be manipulated, shaped, and sold. This understanding fed back into her nonfiction, where she applied a similarly rigorous scrutiny to political rhetoric, media spectacle, and institutional narratives.
Wilkinson's interpretation is that Didion's nonfiction works, particularly The White Album and Slouching Towards Bethlehem, are essentially critiques of storytelling itself. She demonstrates how Didion used her writing to peel back the facade of political speeches, social movements, and cultural fads, revealing the performance beneath. Hollywood, as both a place and an idea, becomes the ultimate symbol of these performed realities—an industry built on illusion, yet capable of profound emotional truth.
What makes We Tell Ourselves Stories especially engaging is Wilkinson's ability to bridge film criticism and literary analysis with clarity and sophistication. She does not merely praise Didion’s aesthetic accomplishments; she contextualizes them within the larger cultural forces that shaped and were shaped by Didion's work. Her prose is direct and insightful, striking a balance between intellectual rigor and narrative accessibility. This allows the book to resonate with both devoted Didion readers and those newer to her work.
Another standout aspect of the book is its careful attention to Didion’s ideological evolution. Wilkinson charts Didion’s movement from an early belief in traditional structures and American exceptionalism to a more ambivalent, even skeptical, view of those same institutions. This journey, Wilkinson argues, was not simply personal but emblematic of a broader national reckoning during the postwar and Vietnam eras. Hollywood played a critical role in both reflecting and shaping these shifts in consciousness, making it a fitting focal point for understanding Didion’s transformation.
If the book has a limitation, it’s that its focused scope—centered so intensely on Didion’s Hollywood years—sometimes leaves out other major aspects of her legacy. Readers hoping for a fuller account of her reporting in El Salvador or her late-life meditations on grief may find those areas underexplored. But this is less a flaw than a matter of intent. Wilkinson is clear about her purpose: to illuminate the underappreciated impact of Hollywood on Didion’s intellectual and artistic development.
In its final chapters, We Tell Ourselves Stories draws a poignant line from Didion’s early idolization of John Wayne to her late-career essays, where the tidy myths of American greatness give way to personal and national disillusionment. Wilkinson suggests that Didion never entirely abandoned the longing for clarity that Wayne represented. Instead, she learned to live within the ambiguity, chronicling its complexities with unmatched precision.
Ultimately, Alissa Wilkinson has written a perceptive and original study that deepens our understanding of Joan Didion as both a writer and a cultural seismograph. By framing Didion’s work through her engagement with Hollywood myth-making, We Tell Ourselves Stories uncovers new dimensions of her legacy—showing how one of America’s most iconic writers became one of its sharpest critics. For anyone interested in the intersections of film, literature, and national identity, this book is an essential read.
We Tell Ourselves Stories will be available on May 27th.