One of her most famous lines is “We tell ourselves stories in order to live.”Įven in something as prosaic or bureaucratic as a water board meeting in California, or the background information of the Getty Museum, she stands there with her ear to the ground, listening for the rumble of the other story, the one beneath it all.

She is interested in the narrative beneath the narrative. Didion is interested in reality, yes, but I think that interest is secondary for her. She picks up on behavioral nuances nobody else thinks are worth mentioning. That’s why she’s so good at reporting political campaigns. Didion is great at describing the no-man’s-land of an in-between time, a mood she captures in a lot of her essays: the strange alienation and yet also coming-together that can happen during out-of-the-ordinary circumstances. When Didion visited the set in Mexico, she entered the mainly male world of camaraderie, joshing, and total unreality that characterizes a movie set.

Henry Hathaway directed Katie Elder and Wayne and Dean Martin starred. It was hard to remember that Wayne was mortal. The news rattled a lot of people, Didion included. Wayne had been diagnosed with cancer (or “the big C” as he called it) in 1964. It’s not just an essay about who he was as an actor, or his biography – although it is that, too, but it’s a Didion mix of personal recollections (“What John Wayne Means To Me”), as well as her visit to the crazy set in Mexico of The Sons of Katie Elder in 1965. This is one of the best things written about John Wayne. Slouching Towards Bethlehem: Essays (FSG Classics), by Joan Didion A second excerpt from the essay collection:

Slouching towards bethlehem sparknotes