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

New York Times film critic Wilkinson (Salty) serves up a perceptive study of Hollywood’s influence on Joan Didion’s outlook and literary sensibilities. Didion’s childhood fascination with John Wayne taught her the seductiveness of myth, Wilkinson argues, suggesting that her early admiration for the pioneer spirit of Wayne’s westerns later gave way to disillusionment with the notion that settling the frontier “tended to the greater good.” Wilkinson suggests that as Didion successfully strived to break into the film industry in the late 1960s, her transformation from Goldwater Republican to iconoclast mirrored broader changes in Hollywood, with her ambivalence over hippies and the women’s movement reflecting the schism between the conservative Motion Picture Academy and the rebellious New Hollywood. Contending that Didion demonstrated a prescient understanding that “politics and Hollywood are more similar than different,” Wilkinson discusses Didion’s argument in her 2001 essay collection Political Fictions that the “concocted nostalgia” peddled by the Bill Clinton and George W. Bush campaigns resembled in substance and perniciousness the patriotic myths purveyed in John Wayne’s films. Wilkinson’s penetrating analysis uncovers the profundity of Didion’s famous assertion that “we tell ourselves stories in order to live,” cleverly using the writer’s biography to explore how narratives shape reality. Of the numerous books on Didion released after her death in 2021, this ranks near the top. Agent: Laura Mazer, Wendy Sherman Assoc. (Mar.)