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A writer at the movies.

New York Times film critic Wilkinson focuses on the connection to movies, celebrity, and Hollywood that shaped Didion’s “cool-eyed views of societal collapse, cultural foolishness, personal anxiety, and political strife.” Growing up in the 1940s, the young Didion was enamored by movies, especially those featuring a heroic John Wayne. Steeped in a spirit of individualism and western grit, Didion saw in him the stability and strength that she admired. Her connection to movies intensified when she became a film critic, writing for Vogue and other venues, and certainly after she and her husband, John Gregory Dunne, moved to Los Angeles to make a career in the film industry. Working on screenplays taught her to write dialogue, and although screenwriting could be frustrating, both she and Dunne found the challenge engrossing and, happily, lucrative. Wilkinson places Didion’s novels and essays, from her earliest magazine pieces to her autobiographical The Year of Magical Thinking and last essay collections, in the context of a host of movies—Bonnie and Clyde, Easy Rider, Jaws, paranoid thrillers—that honed her perspective on the world and her own writing process. Didion began, she said, “with pictures in her mind,” her prose arranged “as you arrange a shot”: As a writer, Wilkinson observes, she was “fully a product of Hollywood.” Describing Hollywood “as if viewing it through binoculars,” she clearly saw how its glitz and glamour “seeped into political campaigning, into media reporting on crime, into how we perceive good, evil, meaning, love, death, and everything else that makes up our lives.” The movies taught that “life would follow a genre and an arc,” that stories would make narrative sense; reality, Didion reported, is far different.

A thoughtful look at a literary star.