We Tell Ourselves Stories
Almost every time I visit California, I find myself reading Joan Didion. More than once, I’ve picked up one of her books at an independent bookstore there. I distinctly recall getting my copy of The White Album at Skylight Books over Labor Day weekend in 2018. The next day, in Santa Monica, we sat on the beach and I opened to the book’s iconic first sentence: “We tell ourselves stories in order to live.”
In her new book We Tell Ourselves Stories: Joan Didion and the American Dream Machine (Liveright), Alissa Wilkinson observes that not only is this Didion’s most quoted sentence, it’s also the sentence most frequently misunderstood. “Poke around the Internet and you'll discover it’s been printed on calendars and wall art, tattooed onto forearms, picked up by writers and storytellers as a slogan or battle cry. It’s transmogrified into an inspirational quotation,” Wilkinson writes. “But Didion meant to be anything but inspirational.”
It’s all about context, isn't it? If our earnest friend with the forearm tattoo had bothered to move past the first sentence, he would immediately have been thrust into the bizarre tumult of the 1960s: a caged princess, a sinister man with candy, an unclothed woman on the verge of a bad decision. These examples—pulled directly from headlines and considered by Didion in the essays to come—paint a picture of the chaotic meaninglessness that seemed to characterize the time.
“We look for the sermon in the suicide, for the social or moral lesson in the murder of five,” Didion writes in that stunning first paragraph. “We interpret what we see, select the most workable of the multiple choices. We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images, by the ‘ideas’ with which we have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience.”
So yes, we tell ourselves stories. And no, this particular line from Didion isn’t intended to comfort us. “Far from the inspirational phrase it’s sometimes taken to be, her most famous line is a diagnosis of humanity’s most reflexive survival tactic,” Wilkinson writes. “It is Didion’s key to making sense of the world.”
We Tell Ourselves Stories is a fascinating read—easily one of my favorite books of the year—but it’s a tricky book to encapsulate. In these pages we read of Didion’s ancestral connections to the Donner Party, her early obsession with John Wayne, her magazine writing in New York, her film work (and burgeoning socialite status) after moving back to California, her sense of foreboding that US politics was merging with showbiz.
It’s much more than a biography. As Wilkinson writes, this book is “the tale of a woman watching her country adopt the grammar of its glitzy, glamorous movie industry to explain everything about the world to itself. It’s a narrative about how all of that seeped into political campaigning, into media reporting on crime, into how we perceive good, evil, meaning, love, death, and everything else that makes up our lives.” That’s a lot of ground to cover in a brisk 220-page book.
While she published five novels and multiple memoirs, for many of us our first encounters with Didion came through her essays. With her husband John Gregory Dunne, she also spent much of the 1970s and some of the ’80s in the movie business, writing screenplays including The Panic in Needle Park and A Star Is Born—a significant body of work I didn’t know as much about. So I’m glad that Wilkinson, a film critic at the New York Times (by way of Christianity Today and Vox), chose as her interpretive lens “the story of Hollywood, and an America shaped by Hollywood, and a writer shaped by both.”
Hollywood, of course, isn’t just a place on a map. “It’s a mood, a vibe, and, most importantly, an industry,” Wilkinson writes. And so even when Didion and Dunne left Hollywood the place to return to New York, in some real sense Hollywood the vibe and Hollywood the industry followed them. Hollywood also followed Didion back into her reporting when she turned to political writing for The New York Review of Books, spanning the end of the Reagan era through the Clinton years, all the way to the eve of the contested 2000 presidential election.
“Sentimental Journeys,” one of Didion’s most memorable essays from that era, was published in 1991 following the trials of the teenagers who came to be known as “The Central Park Five.” On the night in question, Trisha Meili had been running in the park when she was assaulted. Five Black and Latino teenagers—Antron McCray, Kevin Richardson, Yusef Salaam, Raymond Santana, and Korey Wise—were interrogated in private and ultimately confessed to the crimes on camera, though the confessions varied and contradicted one another. Four of the suspects quickly retracted their statements, claiming intimidation and harassment by the police. But it was too late. All five were convicted and sent to prison.
(More than ten years later, a different man—Matias Reyes, a convicted serial rapist—confessed to the crime. The wrongful convictions of McCray, Richardson, Salaam, Santana, and Wise were subsequently vacated and they were released from prison.)
In her essay, Didion focused less on the crime and the trial than on the public spectacle of it all, and most importantly, what it might mean. She saw the hysteria—represented in, and fueled by, an inflammatory newspaper ad—as evidence of a culture in crisis, permeated by what she called a “pernicious nostalgia.”
Nostalgia, in Wilkinson’s definition, is “a wistful, sentimental, backwards casting of one’s gaze towards a prior era,” prone to idealize the past and to denigrate the present. As she goes on to note, Didion herself was no stranger to nostalgia. She knew its gravitational force, and in her writing it was a recurring theme—all the way back to her earlier obsession with the larger-than-life John Wayne and his movie character who woos a woman by promising to build her a house “beyond the bend in the river.”
In her condemnation of “pernicious nostalgia,” then, Didion seems to be preaching to herself as much as to anyone. But the word pernicious—implying something with a harmful, corrosive effect—is crucial here. “She had never really proposed that the country go backwards, just that it had lost something it once had—but now she questioned those sentimental narratives,” Wilkinson writes. “When she looked around her, she saw the effects of a culture that had become so accustomed to telling itself stories about a golden past and a present, one that looked like the movies, that it had forgotten how to face reality.”
Didion died two days before Christmas in 2021. Years earlier she had buried her husband and daughter, and both times had written her way through the grief. Writing, she once said, is how she figures out “what I'm thinking, what I'm looking at, what I see and what it means.”
It’s true: writers are meaning-making creatures, and as Wilkinson notes, “any writer who does that is not just figuring things out for themselves.” Rather, writers seek to be of use, offering readers a filter, a mirror, a lens. Which, to state the obvious, is risky business through and through.
It also brings us, in closing, back to Hollywood. Wilkinson writes:
Similar to the movies and the industry around them, Didion’s writing and her persona formed a mirror to reflect our own anxieties back to us, filtered through her anxieties. In our mobile, pluralistic world, stories collide and coexist. People interpret the same events in radically different ways. They read meaning where there is none or, sometimes, ignore meaning that doesn’t fit into the story they’re telling themselves. Facts are made to fit the narrative, not the other way around.
Didion’s famous line about telling ourselves stories? It was never meant to inspire us. But that’s OK: inspiration isn’t the only thing writers are good for. Sometimes they help us feel less crazy, less alone. They offer clues to the meaning behind or beyond the headlines. And sometimes, as with Joan Didion, they issue warnings borne of their own misadventures. At which point it’s on us—as readers—to respond.
