Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
We Tell Ourselves Stories: Joan Didion and the American Dream Machine

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

Wilkinson, Alissa

Hardcover

Entertainment & Performing ArtsFilm StudiesGeneral Sociology

Publisher Price: $29.99

ISBN10: 1324092610
ISBN13: 9781324092612
Publisher: Liveright Publishing Corporation
Published: Mar 11 2025
Pages: 272
Weight: 0.99
Height: 0.97 Width: 6.37 Depth: 9.30
Language: English

Joan Didion opened The White Album (1979) with what would become one of the most iconic lines in American literature: 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 rosy: 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.

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