we tell ourselves stories in order to live meaning

Yeats wrote 60 years before in “The Second Coming.” She wrote that any narrative that had once governed her life had been replaced by a series of flashing images that no longer added up to a comprehensible story. We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images, by the ideas with which we have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience.”ĭidion was writing in 1979 to make sense of an earlier period of her life, a time that included the Manson Family murders in Hollywood, when things had seemed to fall apart in the same sense that the poet W.B. “We interpret what we see, select the most workable of the multiple choices. “We look for the sermon in the suicide, for the social or moral lesson in the murder of five,” she wrote. We tell these stories, she insisted, not just for the sake of the telling, though that’s part of it, but just as importantly, we tell them to ourselves. “We tell ourselves stories in order to live,” she wrote in the title essay in her book, “The White Album.” All human beings, she was suggesting, construct narratives to try to make sense out of the chaos of our lives, out of the jumbled experiences that make up our days. It also helps explain her special relevance in the year 2022 as we all try to make sense of a world that often seems more chaotic with every new headline.

In 1979, she began an essay that would, in many ways, foretell the haunting legacy she’d leave behind at her death, which came 43 years later last Thursday in Manhattan at age 87. Joan Didion was already middle-aged when she wrote her most famous sentence. Joan Didion’s writing during the 1960s and late 1970s explored the realities of the counterculture and Hollywood lifestyle.

We tell ourselves stories in order to live meaning