We Tell Ourselves Stories: Joan Didion and the American Dream Machine

Very well written and insightful bio of Joan Didion.

This brilliant effort by critic Alissa Wilkinson explores Joan Didion's writing throughly, and discusses many of the ways the movies influenced her. Didion may have been the first to pick up on the way American politics has become a Hollywood production.I have read several of Didion's novels, and most of her non fiction books, but Wilkinson is well informed on both.From a perspective of 60 odd years, it is now pretty clear that Didion was the writer who got the 60s right, with her books Slouching Toward Bethlehem and The White Album, capturing both the events and the public reaction to them. Of the Manson killings: "I remember no one was surprised." Of The Cold War: "It seemed very hot at the time."In the late 20th century, she recognized much of Reagan's foreign policy initiatives as driven by Reagan casting himself in the role of John Wayne.While I loved the book, I think the author may have missed an opportunity by not giving us much insight into John Gregory Dunne, her husband and script writing partner when they moved back to California. It would have helped detail the couple's Hollywood years, and helped set the stage for Didion's late in life masterpiece, The Year of Magical Thinking, which she wrote following his sudden, massive, fatal heart attack.Personally, I just don't agree with the critics, Wilkinson included, who regard Magical Thinking as an outlier in Didion's work, as it was so deeply personal. I feel she was a hard nosed reporter here as always, and in this book just turned the lens inward. (She was 71 when the book was published, and it is rare that great art is produced at that age.).The book's strengths include detailing the writing process in several media - prose, film and theater.Highly recommended and I don't think you have to be a Joan Didion fan to enjoy it. Of course, it helps, and I suspect her fans are the intended audience.

For Didion lovers, there are never enough of her works to grow dull!

One year since the publication of this book, the adoration of Joan Didion has progressed beyond a mere trend into a full-blown cottage industry. But there's no reason to hold it against this ambitious little tag-along. Wilkinson is well acquainted with her subject, and although she neither knew Didion personally nor had access to her papers, her project is well researched and thematically cohesive. A former film explainer at Vox, Wilkinson has a gift for synthesizing disparate strands of information and making strong connections between ideas. She offers a satisfying hypothesis as to why Didion, a one-time conservative Republican and John Wayne megafan, had no truck with Reagan. (In sum, she liked to keep her categories discrete, and when Hollywood crossed over into politics, she balked.) The title of the book, which borrows the first four words of an existing Didion collection, exudes confidence, as does the spare, handsome cover design. The tone throughout is scholarly yet accessible, seeking a shared border between biography and Hollywood history. Wilkinson tackles the dense subject matter with the determination of a grad student facing a term paper deadline. The index is plump with citations. In short, the author has done her homework. And this, perhaps, goes some way toward explaining why the book, despite enthusiastic endorsements and positive reviews, never quite became a bestseller. It's a bit too polite, a bit too pedagogic, a bit too careful not to offend the liberal readership for which it was intended. The de facto position of Didion scholars is to view her as America's peerless prophet and diagnostician of moral decay, and Wilkinson marches in lockstep with her predecessors. In the effort to connect Didion's views on the Hollywoodization of politics to Where We Are Now, the dots join up a little too easily.Addendum: I listened to the audiobook the day it dropped on Hoopla. Wilkinson does a marvelous job of reading her own prose, though certain names--Claudette Colbert, Ramon Navarro, Wojciech Frykowski, Alan Pakula--are casualties of mispronunciation. I'm happy to report that the error regarding the date of JFK's assassination has been corrected. (The faux pas regarding Raiders of the Lost Ark coming out the same year as The Empire Strikes Back will have to wait for a later edition.)