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Alissa Wilkinson

Biography

Alissa Wilkinson

Alissa Wilkinson is a writer and teacher living in New York City. She’s a movie critic at the New York Times, and her latest book is WE TELL OURSELVES STORIES: Joan Didion and the American Dream Machine. Alissa has taught courses in creative nonfiction writing and the humanities since 2009. She writes about pop culture, media, technology, religion and history --- and, especially, where they all intersect.

Alissa Wilkinson

Books by Alissa Wilkinson

We Tell Ourselves Stories: Joan Didion and the American Dream Machine
by Alissa Wilkinson - Biography, Cultural Studies, Nonfiction

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.