New York Times film critic Alissa Wilkinson examines Joan Didion's influence through the lens of American mythmaking. As a young girl, Didion was infatuated with John Wayne and his on-screen bravado, and was fascinated by her California pioneer ancestry and the infamous Donner Party. The mythos that preoccupied her early years continued to influence her work as a magazine writer and film critic in New York, offering glimmers of the many stories Didion told herself that would come to unravel over the course of her career. But out west, show business beckoned.
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.
