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Podcast: Commonwealth Club of California Podcast
Episode: Alissa Wilkinson: Joan Didion and the American Dream Machine
Description: Joan Didion opened The White Album (1979) with what would become an iconic line: “We tell ourselves stories in order to live.” Today this phrase is deployed inspirationally, printed on T-shirts and posters, and used as a battle cry for artists and writers. But Didion had something much less rosy in mind: our tendency to manufacture delusions to ward away our anxieties whenever society seems to be spinning off its axis. And nowhere was this collective hallucination more effectively crafted than in Hollywood.Alissa Wilkinson examines Joan Didion’s influence through the lens of American myth-m...