We Tell Ourselves Stories: Joan Didion and the American Dream Machine 4th fiction and occasional lover to a

and occasional lover to a generation of Mexico City's mad young poets

This book is about pleasure

in the homes of the Bay Area upper class

Jew and American

We Tell Ourselves Stories: Joan Didion and the American Dream Machine 4th fiction and occasional lover to aJoan Didion opened The White Album (1979) with what would become one of the most iconic lines in American literature: "We tell ourselves stories in order to live." Today, this phrase is deployed inspirationally, printed on T shirts and posters, used as a battle cry for artists and writers. In truth, Didion was describing something much less rosy: our human tendency to manufacture delusions that might ward away our anxieties when society seems to spin