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We Tell Ourselves Stories in Order to Live: Collected Nonfiction

joan didion john leonard

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Joan Didion’s incomparable and distinctive essays and journalism are admired for their acute, incisive observations and their spare, elegant style. Now the seven books of nonfiction that appeared between 1968 and 2003 have been brought together into one thrilling collection.

Slouching Towards Bethlehem captures the counterculture of the sixties, its mood and lifestyle, as symbolized by California, Joan Baez, Haight-Ashbury. The White Album covers the revolutionary politics and the “contemporary wasteland” of the late sixties and early seventies, in pieces on the Manson family, the Black Panthers, and Hollywood. Salvador is a riveting look at the social and political landscape of civil war. Miami exposes the secret role this largely Latin city played in the Cold War, from the Bay of Pigs through Watergate. In After Henry Didion reports on the Reagans, Patty Hearst, and the Central Park jogger case. The eight essays in Political Fictions–on censorship in the media, Gingrich, Clinton, Starr, and “compassionate conservatism,” among others–show us how we got to the political scene of today. And in Where I Was From Didion shows that California was never the land of the golden dream.

1122 pages, Hardcover

First published October 17,2006

This edition

Format
1122 pages, Hardcover
Published
October 17, 2006 by Everyman's Library
ISBN
9780307264879
ASIN
0307264874
Language
English

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About the author

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joan didion

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Joan Didion was an American writer and journalist. She is considered one of the pioneers of New Journalism along with Gay Talese, Hunter S. Thompson, and Tom Wolfe.
Didion's career began in the 1950s after she won an essay contest sponsored by Vogue magazine. Over the course of her career, Didion wrote essays for many magazines, including The Saturday Evening Post, Life, Esquire, The New York Review of Books and The New Yorker. Her writing during the 1960s through the late 1970s engaged audiences in the realities of the counterculture of the 1960s, the Hollywood lifestyle, and the history and culture of California. Didion's political writing in the 1980s and 1990s often concentrated on the subtext of political rhetoric and the United States's foreign policy in Latin America. In 1991, she wrote the earliest mainstream media article to suggest the Central Park Five had been wrongfully convicted. In 2005, Didion won the National Book Award for Nonfiction and was a finalist for both the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Pulitzer Prize for The Year of Magical Thinking, a memoir of the year following the death of her husband, writer John Gregory Dunne. She later adapted the book into a play that premiered on Broadway in 2007. In 2013, she was awarded the National Humanities Medal by president Barack Obama. Didion was profiled in the Netflix documentary The Center Will Not Hold, directed by her nephew Griffin Dunne, in 2017.

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Community Reviews

Rating(3.9 / 5.0, 99 votes)
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99 reviews All reviews
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GorillApeMan
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
March 26,2025
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I spent four & a half months trudging through this collection...there were entire months where I didn't even glance at it. While some of Didion's nonfiction essays & stories were fantastic, others left me unimpressed. Overall, a mixed bag. Proceed with caution, or read Didion's A Year of Magical Thinking instead!
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potato_critic
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
March 26,2025
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Lucid, brave writing from a "reporter of life" who has never hesitated to tackle the toughest stories - even her own.
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JayKayxd
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
March 26,2025
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By way of commentary, I can do no better than to direct everyone to this piece from The New Yorker, "Out of Bethlehem: The Radicalization of Joan Didion" by Louis Menand. Ostensibly a review of Tracy Daugherty’s "The Last Love Song" (St. Martin’s), a biography of Joan Didion, this article is really an overview of Didion's career and the evolution of her world view. http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/201...

The only thing I would like to add is this quote from John Leonard in his introduction to this collection: "...I have been trying forever to figure out why her sentences are better than mine and yours ... something about cadence. They come at you, if not from ambush, then in gnomic haikus, icepick laser beams, or waves. Even the space on the page around these sentences is more interesting than it ought to be, as if to square a sandbox for a Sphinx." Yes! This is what makes her prose so compelling. Even in the early pieces that make me distinctly uncomfortable, like her sensationalized portrayal of the counterculture, or the Black Panthers, or her (especially) wrong headed dismissal of radical feminism, I find it hard to shake off that prose and certainly will not forget it. Of course, this makes it all the more delicious when she turned her focus to the emptiness behind the traditional picture of the American Dream (especially California Style), to the dissection of US foreign policy in Central America, and to dismantling the Political Class in America and their media sycophants. It is the quality of her prose style that places her among the greats of the New Journalism, along side Hunter S. Thompson; it also makes me want to find the time to read some of her fiction.
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Tiny_Ducc
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
March 26,2025
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I read Play It as It Lays as a younger woman and really liked it. Joan Didion seems to be newly-admired by a certain cool segment of a younger population. She is very cool that is for sure. Cold. The famous scene where she talks to the kindergartner in Haight-Ashbury who has been given LSD. And that is just one of the most obvious examples. Are we just supposed to admire the random beauty of the words. I just kept telling myself reassuringly "You are smart enough to get this." How did she evoke that thought in me? Or do some smart people enjoy the testing?
Is it reductive for me to wonder where all this coldness ended up in the author? Of course we know from her more recent books. To be fair, I could reread them and it might make me more kind and understanding but I still would not enjoy this book.
Maybe it is the past year of a pandemic but I find this extremely wearying. The manipulation without meaning. The performance. I need something more.
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zlood
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
March 26,2025
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Leyendo a Wolfe, Thompson y Capote me he venido enamorando del non fiction. Finalmente llegué a Joan Didion y no he podido superar su trabajo. Me obsesiona la forma en la que escribe, su estilo, lo fino y trabajado, lo desapegada y a la vez intimista que me resulta su prosa. Hay libros que me han hecho replantearme las cosas que quiero hacer, este definitivamente es uno de ellos.
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Filmers
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
March 26,2025
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I'm a fan of Didion. This compilation of all (?) of her books is only tedious in the detail describing some of the recent past events she covered as a journalist. Maybe the history is too recent to engage me as much as the length of her writing commands. In other words, I like the stuff about her personal life more than the stuff about Miami, more than her disapproval of Bill Clinton's campaigning. (I've been there and I don't care to read any more beating of Bill. On today's political playing field, even criticism from 15 years ago, when we were comparatively blissfully ignorant, is best left on the shelf.)
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catt0s
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
March 26,2025
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De titel in het Engels is: We Tell Ourselves Stories in Order to Live.
Die zegt alles.
Fabuleuze verhalenverteller van onze tijd.
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JackJCB
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
March 26,2025
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The type is way too small but I struggled through because she is such an excellent writer! I wish I had read every single one of these when they were first published. Loved her take on LA and NYC. Loved her take on politics and El Salvador. All if it rings so exactly true. Every page I would just shake my head at her insight. I definitely need the large print version. I learned way too much about Miami - yikes.
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