Latest news with #WeTellOurselvesStories
CBS News
21-03-2025
- Entertainment
- CBS News
New book explores Joan Didion's impact on American literature: "We Tell Ourselves Stories"
SACRAMENTO – An extraordinary woman with deep Sacramento roots is being celebrated in a new book. "I think she's undefinable, kind of by design. She's just a very brilliant writer in different mediums," said New York Times Film Critic Alissa Wilkinson. Wilkinson is the author of "We Tell Ourselves Stories". The book and title pay tribute to acclaimed writer and Sacramento native Joan Didion. "Often, she's really good at seeing how media and political and social culture have come together in American life," Wilkinson said. Three years after her death, Didion is still recognized for her ability to observe the world and write honestly about it. "Part of the reason her writing about Hollywood is so powerful, and later her writing about political culture as Hollywood seeps into it … is she really knows what she's talking about. She's been there," Wilkinson said. Didion was born in Sacramento in 1934 and often said her childhood home on 22nd and T streets shaped her life. "She writes a lot about the stories she believed about California," Wilkinson said. Didion attended McClatchy High School and Sacramento City College before graduating from UC Berkeley. She landed her first job in Manhattan – and would then meet her future husband. Some of Didion's most influential writing can be found in her personal memoirs. "When we talk about mortality we're talking about our children," Didion wrote in her memoir "Blue Nights." As for Wilkinson, she takes her readers on a journey of new discoveries about the fifth-generation Sacramentan. "[It] started out as a book about Joan Didion in Hollywood and kind of became something bigger as I started writing it," Wilkinson said. "We Tell Ourselves Stories" is out in bookstores now.
Los Angeles Times
11-03-2025
- Entertainment
- Los Angeles Times
Joan Didion made her mark on L.A. Here are 10 places she knew and loved
Joan Didion haunts Los Angeles. In January, as catastrophic fires ripped through the Pacific Palisades and Altadena, Didion's name became an echo on social media timelines as Angelenos shared and reshared her famous quotes about the Santa Ana winds. So much so that local literary critic Katie Kadue was moved to tweet , wryly, 'I think I speak for everyone here in Los Angeles when I say we desperately need a link to that Mike Davis article, or even just a Joan Didion quote. Every little bit helps.' Didion looms so large in the literary world that, even in death, her work is getting published. In April, Knopf will release an edited collection of her journal entries that she wrote for her husband, John Gregory Dunne, transcribing intimate sessions she had with a psychiatrist in the 1990s. And whether she intended to or not, Didion has become known as one of Los Angeles' foremost mythmakers — a conceit that is central to yet another new Didion book, a cultural biography, 'We Tell Ourselves Stories,' by New York Times film critic Alissa Wilkinson. 'She's so tied to Los Angeles in the imagination, even though arguably other parts of California are more formative for her,' says Wilkinson. Didion was born and raised in Sacramento and died in 2021 in New York, where she'd spent the last several decades of her life. But her 20 years in Los Angeles left a lasting mark on both her and the city. The Los Angeles that Didion describes in her books — and specifically 'The White Album,' from which Wilkinson borrows her book's title — isn't as tangible as the Los Angeles described by her frequently invoked counterpart, Eve Babitz. Though both women were socialites, Babitz's writing was set in glam restaurants and glitzy hotels. Didion's Los Angeles often took place in the imagination. 'She's interested in very specific aspects of the geography and of the weather and the water and the fires and the winds and she writes about all that stuff, but for her California is an idea that governed her life,' Wilkinson says of Didion. 'And it is the idea that kind of wraps up with American expansion and Western pioneers and courage and John Wayne and all of that stuff.' Even as she wrote about Los Angeles with detachment, Didion's prose showed affection. 'What is striking about Los Angeles after a period away from it is how well it works,' she wrote in a 1988 essay for the New Yorker about real estate in Hollywood . 'The famous freeways work, the supermarkets work (a visit to, say, the Pacific Palisades Gelson's, where the aisles are wide and the shelves full and checkout is fast and free of attitude, elevates grocery shopping to a form of zazen), the beaches work.' For reasons both quotidian and tragic, much of the Los Angeles that Didion described in her writing is gone — or at the very least unrecognizably altered. The Pacific Palisades Gelson's was reduced to ashes in January. The Trancas Market she mentions in 'The White Album' is now the Starbucks at Trancas Country Market. I. Magnin, the department store where she bought a dress for Manson family member Linda Kasabian to wear to court on her first day on the stand, is now a Saks Fifth Avenue. Ma Maison, where Didion often dined with her husband — which also became central to a feud between the couple and Dunne's brother, Dominick, whose daughter was murdered by the sous chef there — closed in 1985 and its location on Melrose Avenue remains vacant. And, of course, the Malibu that was once her home is now irrevocably changed by both time and fire. But as much as things have changed, they also have stayed the same, and if you search real hard you can still experience Joan Didion's Los Angeles — which is not just a place but a vibe. Here are our suggestions on how to do just that.
