View the archive of my 90-minute class and discover the Five Things I’ve Learned about how we develop our personal mythologies by studying and writing about Joan Didion.

My name is Alissa Wilkinson, and I’m an author, a professor, and a movie critic at the New York Times. I’m so excited for you to join me in discovering what I’ve learned about myth-making from studying and writing about Joan Didion — the power, the peril, the mysteries of it all.

Didion is one of those writers that readers and writers alike love. We often talk about the beauty of her sentences, the incisiveness of her insights, and the incredibly chic image that she projected in famous photographs (like that one taken in front of her Corvette Stingray, or the Celine campaign she shot when she was 80!). She shows up on tote bags and baseball caps, magnets and posters, and of course, there’s all those books. Joan Didion passed away in 2021, but it’s clear she’s an icon, in the truest sense of the word: someone who’s seen as a representative symbol — in this case, of cool intelligence mixed with fragility — and venerated for it.

In my years of work on my recent book, We Tell Ourselves Stories: Joan Didion and the American Dream Machine, I came to see that this was all purposeful. Myth-making, on a personal and communal level, defines her work and life. It’s the topic she was obsessed with, stemming mostly from a life shaped by the biggest mythmaking apparatus of them all: Hollywood and show business. She loved movies and worshipped movie stars, then became a screenwriter (with credits including “The Panic in Needle Park,” “Up Close and Personal,” and the Barbra Streisand version of “A Star Is Born”), and eventually applied what she’d learned in show business to her writings on politics and culture. And through it all, she managed to be both shy and reserved and an active participant in developing her own mythology.

I find all of this fascinating. It’s a great way to understand Didion’s work, but more than that, it’s a great lens through which to examine our own lives and figure out how we got to this moment in history. What Didion wrote about, and lived out, has direct application to how we live today, in a time when we’re all creating our own personal mythologies and often living through the lenses that we’ve picked up from entertainment.

In this 90-minute class we’ll explore five things I’ve learned about myth-making from Joan Didion, and what it means for us. We’ll think about what she can teach us about these topics:

  • The stories our families and cultures give us to live by
  • How imagery is powerful in myth-making
  • The way that Hollywood, in particular, has shaped how we understand the world
  • How celebrities from John Wayne to Martha Stewart create a mythology for themselves, and why we love it
  • How writing about mythologies unlocks the stories behind our stories

Whether you’re a Didion aficionado or haven’t read any of her work, I hope you’ll join me to discover what she has to say, and get a new perspective from her on our current cultural moment. Plus, you’ll come away with a fabulous introduction to the life and work of one of her generation’s greatest writers.

– Alissa Wilkinson