Borrowing a title from Joan Didion’s most iconic line, “We tell ourselves stories in order to live,” New York Times movie critic Alissa Wilkinson releases on Tuesday “We Tell Ourselves Stories: Joan Didion and the American Dream Machine.” It follows a journey from New York to Los Angeles as a screenwriter in a rapidly changing Hollywood, dissecting the way cinema worked its way into Didion’s writing and demonstrating Hollywood’s grasp on American myth making and storytelling, including the kind Didion referred to – the narratives we tell ourselves to make sense of the world, especially when it’s in crisis. Wilkinson has contributed essays, features and criticism to such publications as Rolling Stone, Vulture, The Los Angeles Review of Books and Books & Culture. She speaks at Harvard Book Store on Monday. We interviewed her Friday; her words have been edited for length and clarity.
When did your interest in Didion start?
I didn’t read her until after college, when I moved to New York in 2005 for a job. That was right when “The Year of Magical Thinking” was being published, and there were posters everywhere; I remember them being in the subway very specifically. Everybody seemed to be talking about this book, and so I picked it up out of curiosity. It just so happened that right about when I was reading it, my father, who was 46 at the time, was diagnosed with a pretty aggressive leukemia and passed away suddenly, so then I had this further connection to it. And it surprised me, because it was a book about grief, but I had never read anybody write about grief that way before. I felt like a lot of what I’d read was platitudes, and Joan Didion was not interested in platitudes. On top of that, I didn’t really know a book could act that way, where its meaning is in the form as well as in what she’s actually saying. That sort of blew my mind. After that I think I most likely picked up a copy of “Slouching Towards Bethlehem” or “The White Album” off a table at a bookstore, and I kept reading her on and off through the following years. About eight years later, while in graduate school, I found myself contemplating a move to L.A., so I read Didion on L.A. and on leaving New York. I reviewed her books here and there and wrote about the film when it came out, so there were a lot of touch points along the way, but it wasn’t until 2020 that I actually got started. In April of that year, I was talking to my agent about books I was interested in writing, and she said she had always wanted to rep a book on Joan Didion, so I decided that was the one I should be writing. After some research, I landed on this angle into her. It felt like movies were a very important part of her work, her life and the way she thought about the world, but it was underexplored.
Tell me more about that angle, and why you wanted to write about Didion within this larger context of Hollywood and its influence.
April 2020 was obviously the depths of the early pandemic, and that summer was very slow and empty, so I read everything she wrote again. I also started watching movies she had written because I knew that was part of her career. Suddenly it struck me that not only would this angle make sense for me as a movie critic, but once I saw it in her work I couldn’t unsee it. Even in her very early work before she started working in Hollywood, when she was still a journalist in New York, she used a lot of movie metaphors. In her famous essay “Goodbye to All That,” about living in New York and leaving New York, she used cinematic metaphors in her language to talk about remembering herself and seeing herself. When I got to her later political writing, I realized that most of her political critiques are based in a fear that Hollywood is becoming American political culture, and that the logic of entertainment and of doing things for the cameras was becoming the rule. She felt like the government was becoming about constructing moments for the cameras rather than thinking about policy and governing. A lot of that was rooted in her intense distrust of Ronald Reagan, who, of course, had been an actor before he was governor of California and then president of the United States. But I think it was bigger than that; I think she saw a category of confusion that was very disturbing to her and wanted to explore it. Once I started to realize how this was laced throughout her work, it was a matter of thinking about which aspects of her biography and her writing would help flesh out this story.
Do you think Hollywood maintains that hold on us today? How has American storytelling changed since the 1960s and 1970s?
Didion grew up during the Golden Age of Hollywood – a time of happy endings, big moments, heroes and villains – and she entered a Hollywood that was rethinking that. She got to Hollywood a couple years before “Bonnie and Clyde,” which was the movie that kind of blew up what had been. I would say Hollywood has vacillated in the decades that have followed, in terms of patterns of storytelling, what we’re looking for in movies, what we believe about good and bad. But I think for Didion, it was as much the business of Hollywood that was seeping into American politics as the storytelling. She has an essay called “Insider Baseball” in her book “Political Fictions,” which came out in 2001 but is full of her reporting from the ’80s and ’90s. She wrote about Michael Dukakis’ 1998 campaign for president, describing it as a movie set that’s traveling from place to place. The goal is to get a sequel or get renewed for the next season, meaning winning the election, and that’s troublesome, because it shapes what you do, how you do it, and how you talk about it. She doesn’t write much of anything on this subject after the late aughts – I think she wrote one essay about Barack Obama – but it’s interesting to think about her metaphors and how they would have extended into today. A lot of people talk about present day politics as reality show politics, and I think that’s a pretty good extension of her perspective that what we see on TV is entertainment. In this case, that means what we see on our TVs but also on our phones, and the more we are watching and being entertained by those screens, the more we expect everything to conform to that. So naturally, politics becomes something you do for the cameras. I was just thinking about this while watching the footage from the Oval Office meeting with Volodymyr Zelensky, because I think that’s exactly what she would write about. It’s especially interesting if you remember that Didion was essentially conservative through her whole life, even after she stopped calling herself a Republican. Her critiques of people like Reagan are not about their policy, really, but about their style and what it means about the seriousness of their work.
The title is part of Didion’s most famous line, one that’s frequently misused and misunderstood. What do you think it signifies about the way we think about Didion, and what else about her is misunderstood?
I have a Google alert set for the phrase, and it’s almost entirely people quoting it as if it’s inspirational, like “Joan Didion said ‘We tell ourselves stories,’ so we should all tell our own stories.” It’s not what she meant, and I love a title with a double or triple meaning, so I wanted to use it for the title of the book. If you read a little beyond that first line, you’ll see that it’s not quite a critique, but more of a diagnosis. She uses it to introduce an essay about the feeling of living through the summer of 1969 in Los Angeles, which was incredibly chaotic with murders and conspiracy theories and all the rest. Her essay “The White Album” became the definitive evocation of that moment, and she was interested in reminding us that she, and we, don’t just look at the facts unmediated. We’re always looking at them through some story that we’re applying to them to live, to be able to go on. We look at a story about something happening to someone, and we say ‘That happened because they broke the law,’ or because they didn’t do something properly, and we say ‘I’m not like that, so that could never happen to me.’ That’s really the point of this statement. I think the other big misconception is her general iconography. Especially in the 21st century, though it has its roots in the ’70s, Didion has become this phenomenon, this icon of a certain kind of writer-meets-cool-girl. She’s often portrayed as very cool, very unsparing, very unemotional. The more you dig into her life, the more you see how some of that is true, but some of that is manufactured, perhaps a little deliberately, and some of it is just straight up false. As part of my work writing the book I dug into the film criticism that she wrote in the early ’60s and realized that she has pretty much the most populous taste you can imagine. She doesn’t like anything that we would think of as “cinephile” movies, even though she arguably wrote a couple of them. So it’s funny to see her face on tote bags and things like that. There’s also the fact that if you actually look at her work, while she produced many kinds of writing, the thing she may be best at is being a media theorist, which is not particularly sexy. I think her image is very appealing to a certain kind of writer, including me, but it is an image that has only some basis in reality and a lot of projection.
In what ways do you think we feel her legacy today?
At her core, I would describe Didion as a writer who was trying very hard to understand a moment, and that moment is not unlike the one we’re living in now. When you read what she wrote about the late ’60s, I think you can see the pattern repeating itself. That’s an important part of her legacy that we absolutely still feel today. Similarly, she has pretty strikingly given people different ways to think about grief and about mourning, not only for her husband in “The Year of Magical Thinking,” but also in her work more broadly for a world that she felt had gone away. She feels like someone who was constantly grieving something, a way of life or just a sort of certainty about the world. When you go deeper, you see this person whose goal was truly to always be reexamining the stories she was telling herself. When she started doing that in public, she encouraged the rest of us to never take anything we believe at face value, but to think about where it came from, as well as the way we describe it to ourselves, and to constantly be open to the notion that we might be wrong. This is a remarkable throughline to see surface in her work over her lifetime, and for a writer like me, it’s been a wonderful thing to witness and live alongside for some years. I’m hoping that’s something that people will take away from my book: that she didn’t come into the world fully formed with answers, and she didn’t leave the world with answers either.
Alissa Wilkinson reads from “We Tell Ourselves Stories” at 7 p.m. Monday at Harvard Book Store, 1256 Massachusetts Ave., Harvard Square, Cambridge. Free.
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