We tell ourselves stories in order to live.” Film critic Alissa Wilkinson uses the first part of this, Joan Didion’s most famous quote, as the title of her recent book on Didion’s relationship with the movies, and how that relationship influenced Didion’s writing. Since I’d never actually read Didion before, it was precisely that title that motivated me to pick up the book. I’ve always loved stories and resonated with the idea that storytelling is not just a universal part of the human experience, but an essential one. Indeed, one of my favorite quotes is Alasdair MacIntyre’s, “I can only answer the question ‘What am I to do?’ if I can answer the prior question, ‘Of what story or stories do I find myself a part?’” I thought perhaps Didion might be another author unpacking and exploring the power of narrative.

And I was right—though not in the way I expected. As Wilkinson calls out, everyone seems to assume Didion meant the aphorism as I understood it. It’s been emblazoned on tote bags and needlepoint pillows galore, perhaps to signal some sort of erudite coolness on the part of the bearer, or some uniquely poetic perspective on human nature. But Wilkinson reveals that Didion’s most famous quote would be better described as a famous misquote. Didion wasn’t trying to communicate some romantic vision of the place of stories in our collective humanity, but rather making a haunting observation that “[w]e interpret what we see, select the most workable of the multiple choices. We live entirely… 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.”

Over and over again in her novels and her nonfiction essays, Didion tried to render the aimlessness and despair that result when we inevitably question these self-constructed narratives, and everything starts to crumble around us. We expect our lives to make sense in the same way that stories make sense, with their tidy structures and easily categorized genres (which usually come with clear and predictable rules). When we find ourselves jarred out of the story we’ve been telling, we are forced, maybe just for a moment, to face the truth of our lives as they really are: the shifting phantasmagoria. It is not so easy, after that, to simply fall into a new story. But without one, Didion asks, who are we? What are we to do?

Wilkinson’s book puts this Joan Didion front and center, and very little about her is fit for needlepoint or cutesy literary buttons. Didion was as biting and acerbic as she was insightful—sharp in every sense of the word. She told stories like Fitzgerald’s in a style like Hemingway’s and, as Wilkinson reveals, she had her pulse on the powerful and sometimes insidious forces at work in America. A big part of this stems from Didion’s recognition of the way we use narrative, and from her intimate familiarity with America’s greatest generator of stories: Hollywood.

Putting together Didion’s film criticism and her political commentary, Wilkinson illuminates how Didion diagnosed a sort of cross-pollination. Politics began to invade the movies, as “America read its own stories into” the ones playing out the big screen. Meanwhile, Hollywood was invading politics, as conventions started to play more to the cameras than the audience, the speeches and debates started to sound like film scripts, and some of the most prominently featured players were literally actors (a trend that reached its pinnacle with the presidential election of Ronald Reagan).

Like MacIntyre, then, Didion recognized the power of stories to shape our actions and decisions. But where MacIntyre seemed to think we could accurately divine the true stories in which we are playing a role, Didion believed we choose which narratives to overlay onto the world around us—which then raises the question of which tales we should choose to tell. Wilkinson describes the world Didion saw, where “movie logic was everywhere,” and “without knowing what story to live in, we were choosing the ones we were collectively dreaming together on screen.” Didion watched as the logic of Hollywood began to tangle with the logic of politics, leaving reality a difficult thing to grasp. “‘The revelation,’ Didion wrote, foreshadowing her most famous statement, was ‘that the dream was teaching the dreamers how to live.’” At least when we tell ourselves stories, Didion seemed to think, we were the ones interpreting events around us. As Hollywood’s influence crept wider, it swept the masses along in the stories that the movies—or the politician-actors—were constructing.