{"id":12188,"date":"2025-11-12T17:27:58","date_gmt":"2025-11-12T17:27:58","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/farefwd.com\/?p=12188"},"modified":"2025-12-18T22:39:05","modified_gmt":"2025-12-18T22:39:05","slug":"we-tell-ourselves-stories","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/farefwd.com\/index.php\/2025\/11\/12\/we-tell-ourselves-stories\/","title":{"rendered":"We Tell Ourselves Stories"},"content":{"rendered":"\t\t
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Stories, True Stories, and FabricationS<\/h2>\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t
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Alissa Wilkinson takes up the baton for the truth Joan Didion always tried to surface: the stories we tell shape who we are\u2014so be aware of what stories you\u2019re telling.<\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t

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Review by Sara Holston<\/em><\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t

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We tell ourselves stories in order to live.\u201d\u00a0<\/i>Film critic Alissa Wilkinson uses the first part of this, Joan Didion\u2019s most famous quote, as the title of her recent book on Didion\u2019s relationship with the movies, and how that relationship influenced Didion\u2019s writing. Since I\u2019d never actually read Didion before, it was precisely that title that motivated me to pick up the book. I\u2019ve 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\u2019s, \u201cI can only answer the question \u2018What am I to do?\u2019 if I can answer the prior question, \u2018Of what story or stories do I find myself a part?\u2019\u201d I thought perhaps Didion might be another author unpacking and exploring the power of narrative.<\/span><\/p>

And I was right\u2014though not in the way I expected. As Wilkinson calls out, everyone seems to assume Didion meant the aphorism as I understood it. It\u2019s 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\u2019s most famous quote would be better described as a famous misquote. Didion wasn\u2019t trying to communicate some romantic vision of the place of stories in our collective humanity, but rather making a haunting observation that \u201c[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\u2014which is our actual experience.\u201d<\/p>

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\u2019ve 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?<\/p>

Wilkinson\u2019s 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\u2014sharp in every sense of the word. She told stories like Fitzgerald\u2019s in a style like Hemingway\u2019s and, as Wilkinson reveals,<\/em> she had her pulse on the powerful and sometimes insidious forces at work in America. A big part of this stems from Didion\u2019s recognition of the way we use narrative, and from her intimate familiarity with America\u2019s greatest generator of stories: Hollywood.<\/p>

Putting together Didion\u2019s film criticism and her political commentary, Wilkinson illuminates how Didion diagnosed a sort of cross-pollination. Politics began to invade the movies, as \u201cAmerica read its own stories into\u201d 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<\/em> actors (a trend that reached its pinnacle with the presidential election of Ronald Reagan).<\/p>

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\u2014which then raises the question of which tales we should choose to tell. Wilkinson describes the world Didion saw, where \u201cmovie logic was everywhere,\u201d and \u201cwithout knowing what story to live in, we were choosing the ones we were collectively dreaming together on screen.\u201d Didion watched as the logic of Hollywood began to tangle with the logic of politics, leaving reality a difficult thing to grasp. \u201c\u2018The revelation,\u2019 Didion wrote, foreshadowing her most famous statement, was \u2018that the dream was teaching the dreamers how to live.\u2019\u201d At least when we tell ourselves stories, Didion seemed to think, we were the ones interpreting events around us. As Hollywood\u2019s influence crept wider, it swept the masses along in the stories that the movies\u2014or the politician-actors\u2014were constructing.<\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t

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Wilkinson\u2019s book reclaims\u2014and proclaims\u2014the real Didion: less inspirational than penetrating, not just relatable but prophetic.<\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t

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Wilkinson notes that her book \u201cis not a biography of Joan Didion,\u201d nor is it \u201can exhaustive chronicle of Didion\u2019s time in Hollywood.\u201d Rather, she writes, \u201cthis is a story.\u201d It\u2019s an accurate characterization. A biography of Didion would center her as the subject matter; here, she the protagonist in the tale Wilkinson weaves. Wilkinson\u2019s true subject matter is the same phenomenon Didion tracked throughout her career.<\/p>

This makes Wilkinson less chronicler of Didion\u2019s life and work than partner in it. And we need someone to carry that baton forward, because Didion\u2019s astute observations have only become more relevant today. In a talk celebrating the launch of We Tell Ourselves Stories, <\/em>Wilkinson reflected that if Didion were to comment on our present moment, she might have something to say about how we\u2019ve slid from movies-are-president, to tv-is-president, and now to reality-tv-is-president. There are consequences, Wilkinson added, to letting virality be the fulcrum point around which politics spins.<\/p>

All of this is not to say that Didion wants us to wake up to this reality so we can do something to change it. Didion didn\u2019t particularly care for telling people how to live, because she had little patience for people who needed to be told. In a recently rediscovered commencement address from 1975, she concluded by disclaiming, \u201cI\u2019m not telling you to make the world a better place, because I don\u2019t think that progress is necessarily part of the package. I\u2019m just telling you to live in it…. To try to get the picture.\u201d As Wilkinson concludes, Didion \u201cwas being descriptive, not prescriptive.\u201d<\/p>

Reading some of Didion\u2019s other work with this in mind, I felt like she pulled back the curtain to help me see how quickly our thoughtlessly constructed narratives can start to crumble\u2014and how destructive that can be. The novel Play It as It Lays <\/em>includes scenes that made me feel<\/em> the characters\u2019 visceral distress. I\u2019ve experienced the hollowness of a tragic ending and the swell of a heartwarming moment; Didion turned me inside out with the vicarious desperation of those who realize that everything is coming apart.<\/p>

So we do ourselves a disservice by remembering Didion primarily as the inspirational writer who penned that most misunderstood line: \u201cWe tell ourselves stories in order to live.\u201d Wilkinson\u2019s book reclaims\u2014and proclaims\u2014the real Didion: less inspirational than penetrating, not just relatable but prophetic. We should strive to see what Didion saw\u2014as Wilkinson puts it, that \u201c[i]n our mobile, pluralistic world, stories collide and coexist. People… read meaning where there is none or, sometimes, ignore meaning that doesn\u2019t fit into the story they\u2019re telling themselves…. Didion\u2019s great insight was simply to question those stories, an insight from someone who deeply understood how an elision, a cut, an edit, an angle can change the meaning of everything.\u201d Didion may not have been telling her readers how to live better lives, but by showing us how to question the narratives around us, her work can help us do what MacIntyre proposed. We can begin to identify and build on the solid rock of stories of which we\u2019re really a part, rather than the shifting sand of our collective imagination of what we wish we could be.<\/p><\/div>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t

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Sara Holston<\/strong> is a student at HLS and the current Managing Editor of Fare Forward.<\/em><\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t

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We Tell Ourselves Stories: Joan Didion and the American Dream Machine<\/strong><\/em> was published by Liveright on March 11, 2025. Fare Forward<\/em> appreciates their provision of a review copy. You can purchase your own copy from the publisher here<\/a>.\u00a0<\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Alissa Wilkinson takes up the baton for the truth Joan Didion always tried to surface: the stories we tell shape who we are\u2014so be aware of what stories you\u2019re telling. 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