WE TELL OURSELVES STORIES: Joan Didion and the American Dream Machine, by Alissa Wilkinson

We go on needing Joan Didion. The aloof gaze; the Scotch and cigarette chic; the crestfallen scrutiny of America, of life. Whatever combined in her, we seek it over and over, in a way that seems only to be intensifying since her death in 2021. She has become one of the things she was most suspicious of: a myth. One of the stories we tell ourselves in order to live.

This is the famous line that provides the title for “We Tell Ourselves Stories: Joan Didion and the American Dream Machine,” Alissa Wilkinson’s thoughtful, perceptive new study of Didion and her relationship to movies. It’s one of those books that apprehend their thesis on the very last page. “The movies,” Wilkinson, a film critic for The New York Times, writes, “shaped us — shaped her — to believe life would follow a genre and an arc, with rising action, climax and resolution. It would make narrative sense. The reality is quite different.”

This passage identifies exactly the fracture from which Didion wrote; for all her legendary cool, the controlling emotion of her work is almost always dismay. How could the world be like this? The dream from which she fell into that disillusionment, Wilkinson convincingly suggests, was the silver screen.

Didion knew this herself, to some degree. Born in Sacramento in 1934, she was a daughter of both the West and the western. “When John Wayne rode through my childhood, and perhaps through yours, he determined forever the shape of certain of our dreams,” she wrote in “Slouching Towards Bethlehem,” her landmark 1968 book of essays. In her senior year at Berkeley, she won an essay contest sponsored by Vogue and moved to New York.

Her success thereafter was never really in doubt. She was, as they say on sports radio, a generational talent — so brilliant that in the genre at which she was second best by some distance, fiction, she produced, in “Play It as It Lays,” from 1970, a classic whose influence is still reverberating through contemporary fiction.

After returning to California with her husband, John Gregory Dunne, in 1964, she tried to break into Hollywood. Her story there was that of so many great writers before and after her: failure, more or less. Her mind was perhaps too intricate for a medium that rewards ingenious simplicity. (“It’s not writing, but it can be fun,” Dunne wrote of screenplays.) To be sure, the pair got some credits, perhaps most famously for “The Panic in Needle Park” (1971), which, Wilkinson writes, portrays “what’s believed to be the first real drug injection shown in a feature film.”

Maybe just as important to Didion and Dunne, the couple went to a lot of great parties. Their daughter, Quintana Roo, played in a cage with Barbra Streisand’s pet lion cub. Many years later, when Quintana Roo was sick, Didion flew back to L.A. on the private jet of her former carpenter, Harrison Ford.

“We Tell Ourselves Stories” 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. She grew up as a conservative, and was a proud Goldwater supporter: “At dinner parties, she’d announce that she was voting for him, sometimes shocking her fellow diners.” When she wrote, “The center was not holding,” at the start of “Slouching Towards Bethlehem,” her most famous essay, she was not talking about Vietnam or Jim Crow. She was talking about hippies.

Conservatism is the shadow side of romanticism; the ideal is in the past, rather than the future, but they share an aspirational unreality. Didion was too shrewd to keep believing in movies or the G.O.P. very far into adulthood: John Wayne was a phony tough guy and a John Bircher. But she never got over her heartbreak about the loss of those entwined beliefs. When they merged, in the Reagans, she was horrified, in Wilkinson’s words, at their “vapidity, a fixation on image to the exclusion of anything else.” Even then, she started calling herself a libertarian.

Wilkinson seems to start out adulating Didion before moving uneasily into a more realistic diagnosis of her, as a rattled declinist. “Didion had been trafficking in some kind of nostalgia all her life,” she writes late in the book, in the tone of a realization. It’s a disquieting trait to find in a great writer, especially when camouflaged, like Hemingway’s sentimentality, behind acerbic rigor.

Yet it’s also probably why Didion keeps growing larger in our minds: Her fatalism seems prescient, not melodramatic. Have you checked in on the center lately? Is it holding? We tell ourselves stories in order to live. This searching, conscientious book leaves us with the question of what happens when everyone stops believing them at once.

WE TELL OURSELVES STORIES: Joan Didion and the American Dream Machine | By Alissa Wilkinson | Liveright | 250 pp. | $29.99