Most Anticipated Books of 2025: Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, W Magazine, The Millions
Best Books of Spring 2025 • Oprah Daily, Town & Country
We Tell Ourselves Stories: Joan Didion and the American Dream Machine is a cultural history of American myth-making in Hollywood, and one writer who saw and lived it all.
With bylines spanning six decades, Joan Didion’s legacy towers over the landscape of American letters. Although she launched her career in New York City, she soon struck out for Los Angeles, where the nation’s dreams were manufactured—and every aspect of her work reflected what she saw there, whether she was writing on politics, society, or herself.
We Tell Ourselves Stories is a fresh perspective on Didion’s career as a novelist, critic, and screenwriter deeply embroiled in the grit and glamour of Hollywood. I chart how Didion became intimately acquainted with power players of the Los Angeles elite, arriving in the twilight of the old studio system in time to see lines between the industry and public life blur. I dissect the motifs and machinations that informed Didion’s writing—and how her writing, ultimately, demonstrated Hollywood’s addictive grasp on American identity.
Read excerpts in The New York Times and Insider Hook.
Reviews for We Tell Ourselves Stories
"[A] thoughtful, perceptive new study of Didion and her relationship to movies.... For all her legendary cool, the controlling emotion of [Didion's] 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. We Tell Ourselves Stories has lots of excellent details.... But its strongest sections are the ones that question rather than venerate [Didion]. Wilkinson is superb at dissecting the overlap of film and politics in Didion’s worldview.... 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."
― Charles Finch, New York Times Book Review
"We Tell Ourselves Stories 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."
― Matthew Specktor, Washington Post
"Wilkinson floats an idea: to truly understand Didion, one must look ‘through the lens of American mythmaking in Hollywood.’… Wilkinson’s book got me curious enough about Didion and Dunne’s collaborations to visit or revisit all seven of their produced scripts. As I boned up on the couple’s wildly eclectic scripted output―projects all over the map in tone, scale, quality, prestige, and ambition―I found my answer: about their status as screenwriters, Didion and Dunne cared a lot."
― Nell Beram, Vogue
"Insightful and generous.... A way of reading the overlapping and contradictory desires that inform Didion’s writing in her differing modes and across her various career stages. Our lives now depend on creating a mature, inclusive, and visionary national culture and politics that refuses Hollywood game show dreams. We Tell Ourselves Stories will be useful in preparing for that cultural remaking."
― Walton Muyumba, Boston Globe
"Even if you’re not a fan of Didion―or if you think you already know everything about the obsessively chronicled star―you will uncover the literary evolution of her work in this prescient and propulsive read."
― Mandie Montes, Oprah Daily
"Please read We Tell Ourselves Stories."
― Book Reporter
"Amid a spate of new books about Joan Didion published since her death in 2021, this entry by Wilkinson (one of my favorite critics working today) stands out for its approach, which centers Hollywood―and its meaning-making apparatus―as an essential key to understanding Didion’s life and work."
― The Millions, "Most Anticipated Books of Winter 2025"
"Of the numerous books on Didion released after her death in 2021, this ranks near the top."
― Publishers Weekly
"Rather than offer a biography of Joan Didion and her enduring legacy in our internet age, New York Times film critic Wilkinson gives us a cultural case study of the country Didion wrote about. 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."
― Courtney Eathorne, Booklist
Salty: Lessons on Eating, Drinking, and Living from Revolutionary Women
In Salty, I explore nine fascinating women from the 20th century who rooted their art, activism, and lives in their relationship to drink, food, and other forms of sustenance. It’s a book about hope in dark times.
Published by Broadleaf in June 2022.
Read excerpts:
How to Survive the Apocalypse: Zombies, Cylons, Faith, and Politics at the End of the World
Robert Joustra and I explore the lessons of apocalyptic popular culture — from Game of Thrones and The Walking Dead to Mad Men and Breaking Bad — through the lens of Charles Taylor’s work on modernity.
Published by Eerdmans in May 2016.
Read excerpts in RogerEbert.com and Christianity Today.