Hollywood is — or was, once — famously a destroyer of souls. In her 1964 essay “I Can’t Get That Monster Out of My Mind,” Joan Didion wrote, “The American motion-picture industry still represents a ...

In her new book, We Tell Ourselves Stories: Joan Didion and the American Dream Machine (out March 11 from Liveright), film critic Alissa Wilkinson floats an idea: To truly understand Didion, one must ...

If Joan Didion had an overarching preoccupation as a journalist and novelist, it was to find interstices where truth and myth blend into each other. In many of the essays that were collected in the ...

In 2021, shortly after Joan Didion’s death, her literary trustees found 46 journal entries stashed in an unlabeled folder in her desk (per The New York Times). The legendary journalist and ...

JOAN DIDION and her husband, John Gregory Dunne, came to L.A. from New York in the summer of 1964. Both had worked as journalists. (She for Vogue; he for Time.) Both wanted to write books. (She her ...

Since her death, Didion has become a literary subject as popular for her image and writing as for the fascination she inspired for almost half a century. By Casey Schwartz It’s still bright afternoon ...

A new book by Alissa Wilkinson argues that the iconic writer’s imagination and signature style were profoundly shaped by Hollywood. By Charles Finch Charles Finch is the author, most recently, of ...