Get the latest gossip
In ‘We Tell Ourselves Stories,’ Alissa Wilkinson Explores Joan Didion’s Time in Hollywood: ‘It’s a New Framework to Look at Her Work’
Alissa Wilkinson's book explores Joan Didion's work as a film critic and screenwriter and what she understood about Hollywood and American politics.
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. Wilkinson follows Didion’s childhood growing up with John Wayne movies to her early career in New York writing for Vogue, her stint as a film critic who once had a column with Pauline Kael, to her and Dunne’s screenwriting careers in Los Angeles (they co-wrote 1971’s “The Panic in Needle Park” and the 1976 version of “A Star is Born”) and additionally, to Didion’s pivot as a political writer whose understanding of Hollywood shaped her observations of figures like the Reagans and Michael Dukakis. I hadn’t thought all that much about the fact that if I wrote this book, I was going to be writing about Ronald Reagan and John Wayne and Barry Goldwater, and how there’s crossover between politics and Hollywood with all of them.
Or read this on Variety