In ‘We Tell Ourselves Stories,’ Alissa Wilkinson Explores Joan Didion’s Time in Hollywood: ‘It’s a New Framework to Look at Her Work’

variety.com:

Abigail Lee In 2020, film critic Alissa Wilkinson started working on a book project about Joan Didion. She wanted to explore the iconic essayist, reporter, novelist and playwright through an angle that hadn’t been considered much before — Didion’s connection to the film industry.

That became the book, “We Tell Ourselves Stories: Joan Didion and the American Dream Machine.” Wilkinson, who has been a critic at The New York Times since 2023 and wrote for Vox before that, was not interested in delving into Didion’s “persona or her celebrity, as much as what ties all her work together.” “I came up with this notion of writing about her through the lens of Hollywood, both because she worked in Hollywood and wrote movies that have been produced and that we still watch today, but also because she wrote about Hollywood,” Wilkinson told Variety in a recent phone interview. “We Tell Ourselves Stories,” which was published Tuesday, arrives just a few weeks before Didion’s archival materials, along with those of her husband John Gregory Dunne, become newly accessible to the public through the New York Public Library on March 26 (Wilkinson will appear there for a book event that same day).

The archives contain Didion and Dunne’s script drafts, providing another avenue to learn about Didion’s work in film. Wilkinson argues that Hollywood was often a vehicle that Didion used to explore a crucial idea: how narratives and storytelling function in our daily lives.

The heart of the book is Didion’s eventual wariness of the impulse to create easy narratives about one’s life, about other people and about major political and cultural shifts — an inclination which can result in overly sentimental or nostalgic conclusions.