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

In WE TELL OURSELVES STORIES, Alissa Wilkinson has used one of the most quoted lines from Joan Didion’s writings as part of the title. She explains that the years Didion spent in California, notably Los Angeles, were the years that the American Dream was being decided by the movies. She believes that Hollywood is still making those decisions.

Although the book is not a detailed biography, Wilkinson follows Didion from LA in 1934, the year she was born, to New York City in 1955, when she was the guest editor in fiction at Mademoiselle magazine. She came back to Sacramento to finish her education, but she longed to return to the unfrozen world of New York, where things changed and dreams materialized. She won a job offer at Vogue and was back in the Big Apple the next year. She and John Gregory Dunne, a writer for Time magazine, were married in 1964, and they headed west to Hollywood, following the American Dream Machine. They learned, lived, and wrote about how lives are influenced.

"Please read WE TELL OURSELVES STORIES, but only if you are a solid Didion fan. Or only if you read a few of her essays in college and remember the exquisite language and references. Or only if you know the name Joan Didion and want to see if she’s worth reading. She is."

Each piece of Didion’s work is placed in a time and location frame, as well as the context of what is occurring nationally. Wilkinson shows how Didion wrote again and again of the tight hold that Hollywood maintains on who we are. One early piece, “John Wayne: A Love Song,” reveals that Didion had quite a crush on John Wayne. It was an unlikely match, but the many qualities he exhibited and his stable of B movies were exceptionally attuned to America at that time. Didion’s fascination with films and Hollywood glamour is indicative of her awareness that she and Dunne knew “how the sausage was made.” They understood the impact of movies, how they were received, and the connection to our American culture.

Another example of Didion’s impact is that her analysis and criticism are layered with references to social realism, McCarthyism and “stunningly predictable” Sarah Lawrence graduates. It is all America, all the language of the big cities. Her review of J.D. Salinger’s FRANNY AND ZOOEY in The National Review was so scorching that one needed to cool one’s fingers after turning the page. Didion faulted Salinger for giving advice to his readers about living well, while she had little use for people who needed instructions on living. From her privilege of education, placement and employment, she already knew.

One last nod to this interestingly important sentence: “The White Album,” an essay credited with taking Didion from “ingenue to the voice of a generation, at least a literary generation,” is explicated by Wilkinson:

We --- the collective we
Tell Ourselves --- we talk things through individually and as a group
Stories --- a logical order of events
In order to live --- though not sure why

Wilkinson says that Didion meant the line to be more like “an opening parry,” not a motto for life. This explanation seems accurate enough as the events and headlines from the late 1960s traumatized not only Didion, but all of America.

Please read WE TELL OURSELVES STORIES, but only if you are a solid Didion fan. Or only if you read a few of her essays in college and remember the exquisite language and references. Or only if you know the name Joan Didion and want to see if she’s worth reading. She is.