Review by Booklist Review
Rather than offer a biography of Joan Didion and her enduring legacy in our internet age, New York Times film critic Wilkinson (Salty, 2022) here gives us a cultural case study of the country Didion wrote about. Wilkinson follows Didion's life chronologically and explores the politics and events that inspired her writing, starting with her childhood in Sacramento amidst the bootstraps-pulling, California ethos of frontier spirit. This dominating narrative of John Wayne and the savior cowboy, Wilkinson argues, is where Joan Didion begins. Didion's career and young adulthood move quickly into the turmoil of the 1960s, when she starts questioning whether it is possible to make sense of senseless violence. Didion wrote intimately of Hollywood and the film industry's role in responding to (and creating) American fear; as her career matured, she observed Washington "go Hollywood" too. The impact of dramatized political narratives ushers in the world we now inhabit. Is it Didion's mysterious tone, dark curiosity, or proximity to stardom that makes her so interesting even after her death? 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.
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
New York Times film critic Wilkinson (Salty) serves up a perceptive study of Hollywood's influence on Joan Didion's outlook and literary sensibilities. Didion's childhood fascination with John Wayne taught her the seductiveness of myth, Wilkinson argues, suggesting that her early admiration for the pioneer spirit of Wayne's westerns later gave way to disillusionment with the notion that settling the frontier "tended to the greater good." Wilkinson suggests that as Didion successfully strived to break into the film industry in the late 1960s, her transformation from Goldwater Republican to iconoclast mirrored broader changes in Hollywood, with her ambivalence over hippies and the women's movement reflecting the schism between the conservative Motion Picture Academy and the rebellious New Hollywood. Contending that Didion demonstrated a prescient understanding that "politics and Hollywood are more similar than different," Wilkinson discusses Didion's argument in her 2001 essay collection Political Fictions that the "concocted nostalgia" peddled by the Bill Clinton and George W. Bush campaigns resembled in substance and perniciousness the patriotic myths purveyed in John Wayne's films. Wilkinson's penetrating analysis uncovers the profundity of Didion's famous assertion that "we tell ourselves stories in order to live," cleverly using the writer's biography to explore how narratives shape reality. Of the numerous books on Didion released after her death in 2021, this ranks near the top. Agent: Laura Mazer, Wendy Sherman Assoc. (Mar.)
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Review by Kirkus Book Review
A writer at the movies.New York Times film critic Wilkinson focuses on the connection to movies, celebrity, and Hollywood that shaped Didion's "cool-eyed views of societal collapse, cultural foolishness, personal anxiety, and political strife." Growing up in the 1940s, the young Didion was enamored by movies, especially those featuring a heroic John Wayne. Steeped in a spirit of individualism and western grit, Didion saw in him the stability and strength that she admired. Her connection to movies intensified when she became a film critic, writing forVogue and other venues, and certainly after she and her husband, John Gregory Dunne, moved to Los Angeles to make a career in the film industry. Working on screenplays taught her to write dialogue, and although screenwriting could be frustrating, both she and Dunne found the challenge engrossing and, happily, lucrative. Wilkinson places Didion's novels and essays, from her earliest magazine pieces to her autobiographicalThe Year of Magical Thinking and last essay collections, in the context of a host of movies--Bonnie and Clyde,Easy Rider,Jaws, paranoid thrillers--that honed her perspective on the world and her own writing process. Didion began, she said, "with pictures in her mind," her prose arranged "as you arrange a shot": As a writer, Wilkinson observes, she was "fully a product of Hollywood." Describing Hollywood "as if viewing it through binoculars," she clearly saw how its glitz and glamour "seeped into political campaigning, into media reporting on crime, into how we perceive good, evil, meaning, love, death, and everything else that makes up our lives." The movies taught that "life would follow a genre and an arc," that stories would make narrative sense; reality, Didion reported, is far different. A thoughtful look at a literary star. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
