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

by Alissa Wilkinson

Longlisted for the 2025 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction

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 “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 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.

Genres: Nonfiction, Biography, History, Cultural, Literary Criticism, Writing, Pop Culture

264 pages, Kindle Edition

First published March 11, 2025

About the author

Alissa Wilkinson is a film, culture, and food writer. She is currently the senior culture reporter at Vox.com, as well an associate professor at The King's College. She was a writing fellow at the Sundance Institute's Art of Nonfiction initiative and has written for Rolling Stone, The Atlantic, The Washington Post, and Los Angeles Review of Books. Wilkinson is a frequent guest commentator on various media, including PBS Newshour, NPR's Morning Edition, All Things Considered, and On Point. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.

Reviews

[kimberly · Rating 4 out of 5]

For years, Joan Didion captured audiences with her dry wit and sophisticated, sharp prose, writing about politics, current events, and stars until, ultimately, becoming a star herself. Many come across Didion as the author of some of the literary world’s finest works—Slouching Towards Bethlehem, The White Album, The Year of Magical Thinking—but fail to recognize her as the incredible screenwriter that she was. After moving to the Hollywood Hills in 1965, Didion, along with her husband, John Gregory Dunne, spent much of her time writing multiple screenplays, launching her deep in to the politics, nuances, and mythologies of Hollywood.

Though this book contains pieces of Didion’s life, Wilkinson makes it clear from the beginning that this is not a biography. Wilkinson’s aim in We Tell Ourselves Stories is to look at the narratives that Hollywood film has given us, which allows viewers a unique way of understanding their own lives, and to look back at how Hollywood influenced and shaped Didion’s own work and life. Didion once said, “I write entirely to find out what I'm thinking, what I'm looking at, what I see and what it means”. Here, Wilkinson shows readers that film has been doing exactly that for all of us—Didion included—for decades and decades.
“What I’m arguing here is that Didion is perhaps best, or most fruitfully, understood through the lens of American mythmaking in Hollywood. She was influenced by it, came to understand how it worked, and then used it as a tool to understand the rest of the world.”

A captivating blend of biography, film and cultural history, and literary critique. Wilkinson writes with sharp focus, providing plentiful and rich research, giving readers a deeper understanding of Joan Didion’s work and the unrelenting grasp that Hollywood has on the imagination. It is always such a pleasure to read about Didion when the information comes from an author who is capable of handling her legacy.

Thank you W. W. Norton & Co for the early copy in exchange for an honest review. Available Mar. 11 2025

[Laura · Rating 5 out of 5]

I've followed Alissa Wilkinson's career from her early days at CT, then Vox, to her current (well deserved) role as a film critic for NYT. I've lost count of the number of times her reviews have convinced me to watch a movie that, once I started it, I realized was clearly not for me. That's the thing about her writing--it's always compelling, driven by a clear and provocative thesis, elucidated with unexpected insights and connections. She's able to connect a movie with the motives of the storyteller, drawing lines between current cultural artifacts and back to historical trends. It literally doesn't matter what she's writing about, I always find so much to think about that I become convinced that I, too, need to see this movie. Most of the time, I end up enjoying her writing even more than the subject she's writing about. So even though I know next to nothing about Joan Didion, I truly enjoyed this book.

We Tell Ourselves Stories combines Didion's biographical history with excerpts from her essays and novels to illuminate Didion's unique insight on show business and the way our contemporary politics have come to resemble show business. Wilkinson notices a pattern in Didion's life: "She would first notice and write about the myths she believed and questioned; then she would write about the world that created the myths; and then she would use that lens to examine the symbiosis between media, politics, and what she thought of as 'sentimentalization' in the culture narratives we tell to keep ourselves afloat." I wonder if even Didion knew herself as well as Wilkinson does, if she saw as much coherence in her writing and life story as Wilkinson reveals in this narrative.

It's the kind of story that would probably be better read by someone who knows Didion's work (I'm only familiar with A Year of Magical Thinking), but even without a lot of background knowledge, I was fascinated to learn more about the intertwining of show business and politics in the era just before I became aware of either. Wilkinson is a thoughtful, attentive biographer/critic (she says that this isn't strictly a biography, but rather an exploration of how one woman was uniquely poised to understand the mythologies of Hollywood as first as a critic, later as insider and eventually as a political writer.) Perhaps Didion is a guide to help us understand our contemporary era. I don't know enough about her to concur, but once again I find myself captivated by Wilkinson's argument. Wilkinson's admiration is sincere and comprehensive, but not ingratiating.

[Stetson · Rating 4 out of 5]

Alissa Wilkinson, NYT film critic and former humanities professor, has authored a kind of intellectual biography of Joan Didion, the ur-literary It Girl of the latter portion of the 20th century, called We Tell Ourselves Stories, which draws from the opening line of Didion's The White Album. The refrain has become a clichéd mantra for a certain type of female urbanite and often faux sophisticate (lately I heard Masha Gessen quoting it).

Didion fans and aspiring writers are working furiously to bury us in books on Didion in the wake of her passing, and the opening up of her literary archive. Thus, Wilkinson avers to offer a fresh angle, a psychological exploration of Didion in conversation with an industry with which she was closely associated, Hollywood. Little is made of her personal connections to stars (e.g. Harrison Ford) and power players, which is a favorite subject of more gossipy takes (thinking of you Lili Anolik). Instead, Wilkinson draws from Didion's work and life to sketch out a trajectory that shows an anchored but evolving Didion. Didion's anchor is the power of narrative to respond to chaotic and traumatic realities while she matures from being an ingenue who credulously accepts myths of heroism and individual accomplishment to a gimlet-eyed skeptic of mythmakers and posers.

The trajectory that Wilkinson would like to impose on Didion indulges a bit of liberal hagiography. Didion is an icon who must be protected at all costs after all. We can't let her get lumped in with the reactionaries (even though she definitely said she wished she could've voted Goldwater for president in every election since 1964).

Thus, the Didion post-Nixon transformation is a story Wilkinson tells herself, if you will, because Wilkinson and other mostly left-of-center fan girlies would like to believe that despite Didion's laconic, evasive yet obvious hippie punching and reverence for order and moral clarity that she did, at least, eventually come around to their worldview. And she came around because she recognized the "pernicious nostalgia" embedded in the myths she and other Americans absorbed from the screen illuminated by Hollywood dream-weavers (John Wayne machismo and rugged individualism) and how the methods of this machine were appropriated by self-serving, power-hungry politicians (read Republican presidents like "The Gipper"). Wilkinson doesn't stop to consider that Didion was a shrewd operator whose primary aim was professional advancement. She was quite adept at letting her readers tell just the stories they wanted to hear about her. To me, this seems precisely why Didion was almost never overtly polemical on political topics, reserving her most poisoned barbs for rivals like Pauline Kael as well as mogging other LA It Girls (Eve Babitz). It is also why, as liberal cultural dominance crept to the fore, Didion's overt political viewpoints become shrouded behind a steely visage and raised cigarette. However, her tone and the attention of her cold gaze did shift some with the winds, becoming more compatible with the liberal mood.

This possible misreading of Joan doesn't ruin this book. Wilkinson, despite reifying it, is aware of the falsity of that narrative. There is plenty here for those familiar with Didion and conversant in upper-middle brow 20th century intellectual culture to think about. Wilkinson invests a lot in Didion's interest in John Wayne, film criticism, and screenplay work. Wilkinson is perhaps a bit deflated by Didion's taste, which revealed a desire to be entertained by the silver screen rather than edified or challenged by it. Wilkinson also glosses over Didion's professional struggles in the 80s and 90s, opting to focus lightly on her personal struggles and their ambiguous relationship with her fiction. Altogether Wilkinson helps make Didion a bit less inscrutable to those who are new to her work but have read her, and this makes for worthwhile reading.

[Joshua Johnson · Rating 5 out of 5]

Brilliant and insightful. It’s fascinating.

[Adam Wilburn · Rating 4 out of 5]

Well written. Entertaining and interesting read. I very much enjoyed it.

[Rachel · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a beautifully written story about Joan Didion and how the stories we tell ourselves affect the way we view culture, politics, and our lives. Wilkinson's style reminds me a lot of Didion, clear and sharp. I know I will be reading this book again.

[Trevor Seigler · Rating 4 out of 5]

Discovering Joan Didion was one of the best parts of my reading year last year, and I've exhausted my local library's supply of her work as well as "The World According To Joan Didion," a work of biography and critical appraisal. And so this book, in a similar vein, examines Didion's life and work in a more straightforward way, but is no less effective on the whole.

"We Tell Ourselve Stories," by Alissa Wilkinson, uses Didion's famous first line from "The White Album" to introduce us to the way that Didion wrote about the world and, ultimately, herself. Far from being an inspirational quote, Wilkinson argues that the full line ("We tell ourselves stories in order to live") is more of a warning, a notice that we construct narratives out of the chaos of ordinary life in order to imbue it with meaning that we project onto it. We tell ourselves stories in order to justify deporting legal citizens to foreign jails because a power-mad toddler is president, for instance. Or we tell ourselves stories about how terrorists are the real threat to our way of life when violence is usually visited upon us by more home-grown, gun-crazy forces.

Wilkinson goes thru Didion's life and work to show how the views she had changed as her life unfolded. Born in California to descendents of the pioneers, Didion early on embraced a view of the world that she only gradually realized was false. Enamored with John Wayne as a child, she voted for Goldwater in '64 but became disgusted with the path that the Republican Party began to take as the decade unfolded. Eventually she would see through the facade of Ronald Reagan, a b-movie actor who took to politics as if it were a film production (much as the current occupant views his administration as a TV show). Her work in Hollywood, alongside hee husband John Gregory Dunne, would help her crystallize her views of celebrity and power as time wore on, and the double blow of losing him and their adult daughter within the span of two years would inform her later work.

For anyone familiar with Didion's biography, there isn't a lot here that is new (I say this after having read *one* book about Didion beforehand, though), but it's an interesting look at her work life and how she came to be "Joan Didion," one of the most celebrated writers of her era. Wilkinson shines when she uses Didion's work to highlight the culture shift in the wake of the Sixties and Seventies, and to show why our current moment is dominated by the need for attention and "clicks." She also shoes that Didion warned us all against the most dangerous drug of all, nostalgia (America was never great to begin with, and Didion would argue that saying that we would go back to a time when it was is naive at best and genocidal at worst. After all, when exactly was this time? Because odds are, it wasn't great for everyone). "We Tell Ourselves Stories" is a very good look at a writer who saw America not as it wanted to be, but as it was and is.

[Hannah Madden]

I loved this book! This is the type of cultural analysis that is necessary when considering an author’s body of work. The film industry & Didion’s involvement in it shape American culture and how we tell stories.

My favorite parts were about John Wayne the person morphing into John Wayne the character. Wilkinson covers how he lives on in the memory of American people and Republican presidents, apparently. I am also pondering the post-9/11 desire to create meaning and symbolism alongside the desire for a hero that ushered in a wave of superhero movies aka Spiderman!

“What we get when we depend on myths to explain the present, rather than on history forthrightly told no matter how we come off in the story, is, simply, magical thinking. When we break factual chains of causality, then we generate new ones. We see the rain, and link it to the death of brave men who tried to save lives. People who attack a country do it simply because they are evil, and not as a result of a long line of political and cultural decisions we may have had some hand in. The solutions spring from invention, from myth— we are acting on God's side, fighting a holy war. It makes for a better story, Didion saw. The problem is that it's not a complete story.”

[Theanoe Christos · Rating 4 out of 5]

I love the story telling and the analytical aspects of this book. I learned a lot about Didion herself and of the veneer of politics and Hollywood.

[Greg Talbot · Rating 4 out of 5]

Andy Warhol archly quipped, “if you want to know about Andy Warhol, just look at the surface of my paintings”. It’s droll but prophetic of our times. We skirt the surfaces of screens. Any knowledge we pull is temporal. We never arrive, but flail until we meet exhaustion.. Our physical and emotional selves are distanced from our projected social media identities. The ascent of AI might have us question the famous Didion quote - our stories are generated, and we live in the era of a distributed self. But we are different machines - biological, conscious - and meaning makers.

In the 1960s, the period where Didion was cemented as a greater writer, the American ideal of "freedom" was on trial. From Civil Rights to drafting young men into the Vietnam war, the great American myth of "self determination", freedom to be become what you want, and free to do as you choose looked empty. The freedom from war, from injustice, and maybe even consciosuness was on full display, and cameras from news stations and studios took notice. Few could see it as well as Didion. Didion always seem to stand psychologically outside of the moment - an observerer, a witness, a documentarian.

“The White Album” blew my mind. Beneath Didion’s studied coolness and self-distancing from the reader, fragments of the revolutionary 1960s were weaves and pressed together. “The Doors”, “The Black Panthers”, “Vietnam protests”, “the death of RFK”, Didion writes on all of this - and brings the reader close to the edge of the national breakdown. We feel the danger of nihilistic revolution brought on by the Manson Murders, and the weighty meaningless of the collective numbing from tragedy. It almost feels like the media of the 1960s brought an existential crisis to our nation - the wars streamed in from overseas to our bedrooms, Hendrix’s acidified star-spangled banner the clarion call of a turned-on generation, and the violence from conventions to presidential limousines. No writer could see through the dream machine phantasmagoria quite like Didion.

Reading this book gave me an appreciation for the worldview of Didion that synthesized politics and the entertainment industry. She writes on the power of myth, sometimes being taken into its sweeping visions by celluloid stars like John Wayne. She also had an ability to strip off the gauze, and be a revealer of the mass illusions. The camera-centric brinkmanship of the Republican party, with Gingrich and Buchanan’s scorched-earth screeds feels quaint compared to the nauseatingly contempt of the Trump Administration. The “pernicious nostalgia” Didion wrote about appears to be responsible for the toxic sludge of our political leadership. Like a spinning plate, Didion would write stories with characters and worldview that suggested our fragility could shatter The American myth of self-relying pioneers is a beautiful thing to pay a ticket for, but as Didion’s career reveals - there is always a distance between the reality and the fantasy.

Although Didion remains something of a mystery, Wilkinson does an excellent job of charting her ambitions. We see how the literary start from “Mademoiselle” was only the beginning of charting her career as a worldly writer. From screen writing to political journalism, there is this sense I had reading the book that Didion, like anyone else, was just trying to stay afloat, and find work where she could. There is a cross-pollination across magazines, biographies, films, politics and theater in her life, she seems to be a traveler across all the experiences of culture’s transmissions. One of the reasons “The Year of Magical Thinking” (2003) is so brilliant is that Didion adroitly navigates sharing the most personal and authentic experiences through her very controlled writing. One of trick’s Didion does better than anyone is to maintain a distance and emotional numbness, while also letting to the madness and craziness around her. "What I aim for is total control" (p.117), she famously said. In her non-fiction book, about the loss of her husband, we see cracks in the facade. Didion maintains control, and chic composure, but there is no denying mortality’s finale say. It remains a beautiful and stunning tribute to her husband.

This is a great book to read for anyone who loves Didion's writing, and wants to better understand her career and influence as a literary luminary. Few writers are able to understand and be playful in understanding the movement of culture the weay Didion did. I'd start with her work first, since it approachable, and it is beautiful, but this is a great book to build out a deeper understanding of who Joan Didion was.

[Bookreporter.com Biography & Memoir · Rating 4 out of 5]

In WE TELL OURSELVES STORIES, Alissa Wilkinson has used one of the most quoted lines from Joan Didion’s writings as part of the title. She explains that the years Didion spent in California, notably Los Angeles, were the years that the American Dream was being decided by the movies. She believes that Hollywood is still making those decisions.

Although the book is not a detailed biography, Wilkinson follows Didion from LA in 1934, the year she was born, to New York City in 1955, when she was the guest editor in fiction at Mademoiselle magazine. She came back to Sacramento to finish her education, but she longed to return to the unfrozen world of New York, where things changed and dreams materialized. She won a job offer at Vogue and was back in the Big Apple the next year. She and John Gregory Dunne, a writer for Time magazine, were married in 1964, and they headed west to Hollywood, following the American Dream Machine. They learned, lived, and wrote about how lives are influenced.

Each piece of Didion’s work is placed in a time and location frame, as well as the context of what is occurring nationally. Wilkinson shows how Didion wrote again and again of the tight hold that Hollywood maintains on who we are. One early piece, “John Wayne: A Love Song,” reveals that Didion had quite a crush on John Wayne. It was an unlikely match, but the many qualities he exhibited and his stable of B movies were exceptionally attuned to America at that time. Didion’s fascination with films and Hollywood glamour is indicative of her awareness that she and Dunne knew “how the sausage was made.” They understood the impact of movies, how they were received, and the connection to our American culture.

Another example of Didion’s impact is that her analysis and criticism are layered with references to social realism, McCarthyism and “stunningly predictable” Sarah Lawrence graduates. It is all America, all the language of the big cities. Her review of J.D. Salinger’s FRANNY AND ZOOEY in The National Review was so scorching that one needed to cool one’s fingers after turning the page. Didion faulted Salinger for giving advice to his readers about living well, while she had little use for people who needed instructions on living. From her privilege of education, placement and employment, she already knew.

One last nod to this interestingly important sentence: “The White Album,” an essay credited with taking Didion from “ingenue to the voice of a generation, at least a literary generation,” is explicated by Wilkinson:

We --- the collective we
Tell Ourselves --- we talk things through individually and as a group
Stories --- a logical order of events
In order to live --- though not sure why

Wilkinson says that Didion meant the line to be more like “an opening parry,” not a motto for life. This explanation seems accurate enough as the events and headlines from the late 1960s traumatized not only Didion, but all of America.

Please read WE TELL OURSELVES STORIES, but only if you are a solid Didion fan. Or only if you read a few of her essays in college and remember the exquisite language and references. Or only if you know the name Joan Didion and want to see if she’s worth reading. She is.

Reviewed by Jane T. Krebs

[Glen Helfand · Rating 4 out of 5]

Joan Didion is a character. We know a lot about her because she told us things, and we have seen photographs of her as an icon. Thin, cigarette smoking, a diminutive powerhouse. We have thoughts about her demeanor, her influence, her exacting perspectives. Alissa Wilkinson's book views Didion's life and work from the perspective of cinema and it is an angle that makes sense. From the start, much is made of Didion's adoration of John Wayne, an idolatry that reveals an uncomfortable truth about her conservatism. It is his strength that is most appealing to her, as her early essay on the actor isn't steeped in erotics. We tend to forget that Didion had a life as a film critic-- though there are essays in *Slouching Towards Bethlehem* that reveal her interest in movies. It, too, seems a little conservative. Part of what makes Didion such a compelling character is that she's thorny, not entirely likable, but wholly herself. Wilkinson addresses Didion's career as a screenwriter, a kind of day job that nonetheless had an influence. Her rooting in mythic aspects of California, north and south, in New York, in the land of politics, and then grief. All of which are choreographed takes on real life. This book tracks Didion's view of politics as its intersection with Hollywood was really taking off-- the election of Ronald Reagan as California governor and then you know what. (This discussion seems incredibly timely as the US has entered full on reality television mode.) Stories fuel fiction and cinema, and here they serve as a critical lens on an important American artist.

[Jansen Lee · Rating 4 out of 5]

We all had a Joan Didion phase where we sped through her works with the awe and wonder that someone out there said the things we've all been thinking. Didion had an eagle-eyed view of culture and politics and she was able to muse on them over the course of her life. Readers were able to watch her opinions and observations ebb and flow over time.
In 'We Tell Ourselves Stories,' Wilkinson weaves biographical elements of Didion's life and passages of her writing in with a larger commentary on the narratives we've had sold to us and the narratives we sell ourselves.
Currently, the American political climate is in shambles. This book felt cathartic in a way that I wasn't able to fully explain. The discussions, especially surrounding Reagan and John Wayne, about making life more like the movies and poisoning the well of reality by making everything feel like a facsimile of a prewritten script with heroes and villains resonated deeply. It explained some of the phenomena that we're watching play out right now just as it's been playing out for years. Joan clocked it back in the 1960s, 70s, 80s, 90s, 00s.
This was interesting and poignant--especially right now. If you're a fan of Joan Didion or even just the narratives we've created to make the myth of the great American dream, I highly recommend.
Thank you so much to W.W. Norton & Co and NetGalley for providing me with an eARC in exchange for an honest review.

[Hank Stuever · Rating 4 out of 5]

I find myself more and more able to resist the books about Joan Didion -- which are coming at a steady clip now that enough years have passed since her death in 2021. Some of these recent works seem more enlightening than others. Now that her papers have come available at the New York Public Library, there are sure to be a lot more.

I'm glad, with this one, to see that we seem to be moving on from worship to analysis, part of a necessary process to determining whether her work will last the ages, or just our age. (One does root for "forever," but AI and an era of post-printed-word/post-"writing" literacy may have other ideas.) Alissa Wilkinson has advanced the form, for readers who are always willing to see Didion's work in contextual light. The thinking here, the interpretations, the research -- it's all pretty shipshape. (I found some spots where a touch more more line editing, and copy editing, could have gotten it closer to perfect.)

And I'm not entirely immune to anything with Didion's picture or name on it: I still bought the recent release of the notes Didion typed up from her visits to a psychologist -- a sure sign that there's not much of her work that is left unpublished; it will fall to sharp minds, like Wilkinson's, to carry the legacy forward.

[Justin Hairston · Rating 5 out of 5]

I can’t be impartial here, considering I took an incredibly helpful writing workshop from Alissa Wilkinson last fall, one of the many joys of which was hearing her talk at length about the process of writing this book.

But even given that predisposition to liking it, I loved it. It’s not quite a unified theory of Hollywood history, and not quite a unified theory of Joan Didion, but something like a twinned theory of the two, using one to explain the other and vice versa. By charting Didion’s life and work as it followed (consciously and not) the deep grooves movies carved into our national psyche, Wilkinson paints a compelling picture of Didion as a truth-sayer trying to pull America out of the cinematic cave to see what the real world looks like—only to slowly realize she wasn’t so sure herself.

In other words, it’s sort of a biography as socio/psycho-logical portrait, with Joan’s bigger than life visage superimposed across the country she wrote so probingly about. It’s fascinating stuff, and perhaps the highest compliment I can pay my one-time teacher is that her writing evokes Didion’s style without ever feeling like it’s trying to—which is another way of saying it’s simply sharp, smart, and good. So’s her book.

[Bernadette · Rating 4 out of 5]

Alissa Wilkinson, film and culture critic for the past two decades, has written a fascinating, well-researched reflection/study of the writing and life of literary icon Joan Didion. Her thesis is that Didion consistently viewed the world through the lens of Hollywood and filmmaking, trying to understand how this influence came to dominate American politics and life in general. The theme runs through Didion's novels, essays on culture and politics and film projects that she collaborated on with her writer husband John Dunne. Didion had something to say about most of the major events in America since the 1960s. People didn't necessarily agree, but they wanted to know what Didion thought. Didion's evolution from California conservative to more liberal leaning surprised me. I've read two of her books, Coming Home, and The Year of Magical Thinking. Wilkinson's book encourages me to read much more. Listening to Wilkinson narrate her book, there were so many times I wanted to stop and take notes -- fascinating ideas from Didion on language and writing that I wanted to capture.

[Marsha Rafalski · Rating 4 out of 5]

(3.5 rounded to 4.0)

Joan Didion had a career spanning 60 years. Her legacy is a testament to the life of a particular woman in a particular place and time. She has written on politics, society, the places range from New York City to Los Angeles and Hollywood. Wilkerson is a fresh voice to telling Didion’s story. Wilkerson used the medium of film to frame Didion’s writing. Although there has been a flood of writing about her life and career since her death in 2021. Much of her writing on grief and loss occurred in this period after her lifetime partner, John Dunne’s death in 2003. Wilkerson captured the essence of who Joan Didion was with this homage. It was definitely an interesting read and I learned much from Wilkerson’s research.

Recommend to readers of nonfiction, biography, history, literary criticism, culture, politics, film and books-about-books.

[Sally · Rating 5 out of 5]

I would have enjoyed this book more if I had read more of Didion's earlier works. Being most familiar with the sad memoirs (The Year of Magical Thinking, Blue Nights), I read about Didion's life through an interesting lens.

I was not a fan, but I'm not sure why. I suppose I assumed she was a liberal that I would have a hard time agreeing with. It was a surprise to find out that she was conservative early on and wrote for National Review.

She is known for her cool perspective on the world and issues, yet the books I know her by are anything but that, as she reels from loss and grief. This book gives me a more balanced understanding of her as a person and how current events affected her perspective and writing.

[George Crofts · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book was totally unexpected. I stumbled on it doing a search on audible books ithat were available on Libby. Joan Didion is a feminist icon from the 1970s. I didn’t know anything about her except her name and the titles of some of her books.


In addition to being a biography of Joan, the book describes her essays, and her books in the context of the 60s.

The title of the book comes from one of Joan Didion’s more famous aphorisms : “ The stories we tell ourselves in order to keep on living”.

And the stories we tell ourselves are mostly through movies. In addition to being an essayist and author Joan Didion was a film critic, script writer, and movie producer. Her writing is visual like films. She saw politics and contemporary events like a film.

[Chris Wharton · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wow—I had nod idea how involved Joan Didion was with screenwriting and the Hollywood “industry” (her word, and theirs). Mine was not much of a movie-going family, nor was I in college. So I never saw many of the famous movies of the late 1960s and ’70s she critiqued as harbingers of US social and cultural change (Bonne and Clyde, Easy Rider, Annie Hall etc) with the notable exception of The Deer Hunter, in which I was an extra in a crowd scene filmed in Bangkok. Her early nonfiction anthologies, such as Slouching Towards Bethlehem,(which I gave only 3 stars in 2011??), A Book of Common Prayer, and The White Album (5 stars each) and novels (Play It As It Lays, Democracy, and The Last Thing He Wanted (also all 5s) get prominent treatment in the early chapters of the book.

[Sara Wang · Rating 2 out of 5]

If you don't know who Joan Didion is, this book is not going to interest you. It was difficult to read at times because there are so many different characters (real-life characters, book characters, movie characters). There's also some places where I think the author is trying to find meaning where there is none - for example, bringing up some of what Didion wrote in the late 1960s while in the chapter set right after 9/11.

Unless you are a huge Didion fan, this book just won't be worth spending time on.

[Anna · Rating 3 out of 5]

this book seemed to make light of Joan Didions intellect. also, it skimmed over her sex life.
and, i was disappointed when the author wrote that Joan went shopping for her wedding dress on Nov. 23 1963. it was then that she heard of President Kennedys’ assassination. i thought everyone knew that the President was assassinated on November 22, 1963. i couldn’t take the book seriously after that.

[Jodie Toresdahl · Rating 5 out of 5]

I finished this book two days ago and can't stop thinking about it. I am a fan of Joan Didion's writing, but you certainly don't have to be a fan of hers, or even have read much of her work, to still appreciate this book. Alissa Wilkinson uses the cultural scene of Hollywood and the political scene of the United States throughout Didion's life to show how each inspired and affected her writing. It is especially interesting to read now, in 2025, and to see how much the weaving of narratives between Hollywood & politics has come to fruition in our current cultural & political climate.

[Mattschratz · Rating 4 out of 5]

Pretty good guide through most of Didion's writing, with good thematic connections to her interest in images of different types. This made me want to go back and read or re-read a lot of Didion, which I imagine is the point of something like this. I spent a solid hour yesterday just looking out the window trying to remember if I had read Didion's novel Democracy or just read so much about it that I more or less had; I guess I will read it now whether I've read it before or not.

[Tate Moyer · Rating 4 out of 5]

As a Didion fan, this book was a must for me. Wilkinson’s writing in this was incredible, as she manages to provide an in-depth look into Didion's career and personal life, while also providing context on the larger cultural shifts and transitions unfolding in both the film industry and the literary landscape during the latter half of the 20th century. I'd strongly recommend to anyone looking for a deeper glimpse into the political, social and cultural happenings of this bygone era.

[Judith · Rating 3 out of 5]

I really like this author's biographical writing--she is able to link world events with changing views and times. I'm trying really hard to like Joan Didion, to get on board with her story, and this book helped me to do so. People are the product of their times, and I needed this pointed out to me in order to understand much of Didion's writing and screenplays. This author mines the chronology of writers in Hollywood many decades ago and that provides a real glimpse into Didion's motivations.

[Annabelle · Rating 5 out of 5]

SO good and smart and thoughtful. felt like i was enrolled in a class in american cultural, political, and film history taught by alissa wilkinson using only readings by joan didion, which is sort of my dream class. learned a lot, enjoyed the writing a lot, and ordered two didion books i’ve never read. sure

[Eric · Rating 3 out of 5]

I am not clear now on whether I ought to pursue a number of Didion's works, but it could be a good bet that I might enjoy some of what I might find. I had hoped that this work might be a bit more of how we all apprehend story, generally, but I suspect I will only get that from Didion's "We Tell Ourselves in Order to Live" - maybe place in my queue for the near future.

[Byron · Rating 5 out of 5]

A gorgeously conceived and written book from start to finish. I've long been a Didion fan but you don't need to be one to appreciate Wilkinson's wonderful book about the decades, places and people Joan wrote about. I didn't want this book to end.

[Lisa Beth Hutchins · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'm glad that I read some Didion before reading this. Her life gave me a lot of insight into the late '60s, the '70s, and the '80s. I'm going to read some of her fiction and The Year of Magical Thinking next.