Thoughtful, perceptive ... Has lots of excellent details like this for the dedicated Didion fan. But its strongest sections are the ones that question rather than venerate her. Wilkinson is superb at dissecting the overlap of film and politics in Didion’s worldview ... Wilkinson seems to start out adulating Didion before moving uneasily into a more realistic diagnosis of her, as a rattled declinist ... Searching, conscientious.
Though Wilkinson’s insightful and generous study offers a way of reading the overlapping and contradictory desires that inform Didion’s writing in her differing modes and across her various career stages, there is a critical absence in We Tell Ourselves Stories that gave me some unease of my own. With the exception of a riff on the differences between Didion’s film criticism and Pauline Kael’s, Wilkinson fails to put Didion in conversation with her literary contemporaries or agemates ... Useful.
She starts out strong ... Details how one of our most important writers lived in the shadow of the movies, how they possessed her imagination and, far more crucially, how that imagination worked both within and upon Hollywood. The problem, perhaps, is that Didion may have been ideally situated...to soak up the industry’s complexities, but she seems less suited, temperamentally and otherwise, to have translated or even understood them properly. Which puts Wilkinson’s book in a bind ... On firmer ground when Wilkinson’s own ample critical intelligence asserts itself with sharp, if brief, readings of various films and texts.
Deftly researched, this book is a thought-provoking look at postwar American culture and how Didion’s work serves as both solace and warning about the power of the stories we tell.
