It’s that particular uncovering motion that feels important to us, and the brushing away of debris and what is not important. I panic! If it’s all like sand on a beach, this huge expanse of tiny indistinguishable grains of all that has ever happened to us, we’ll try to rustle the sand around until we feel for some pipeline beneath it, some traceable thread, encasing meaning in a linear way. When we consider that phantasmagoria-the overwhelming little particles of our everything-it is natural to panic. 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. 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. I began to understand the idea’s context: that meaning is, mostly, an invention.įrom her book The White Album, the rest of the passage goes like this: I came back around to this concept-we tell ourself stories in order to live-not through another reading, but through a realization of my own, and it came back to me in life like a chant.

It’s funny to me how I seemingly missed all the rest of what that idea contained.

“Yeah! Stories rock! Woo! Yeah JD, I love books, too.” I thought it was a simple ode to literature, a nod to storytelling as an important cultural pastime. It’s one of writer Joan Didion’s most famous quotes, but when I read it in context for the first time, I didn’t recognize its fullness. “We tell ourselves stories in order to live.”

Joan didion stories we tell ourselves