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It’s Time To Retire Joan Didion’s Most Famous Line
You see it on T-shirts, hoodies, tote bags, and mouse pads — but does anybody know what it means?
I bow to no one in my admiration for Joan Didion. She’s one of my literary heroines. By my lights she might have won a Nobel Prize in literature if those throwbacks at the Swedish Academy had kept up with the rest of the world in taking nonfiction as seriously as fiction.
But I’ve had enough of Didion’s most famous quote, “We tell ourselves stories in order to live.”
It’s the first line of her essay “The White Album” and the title of a collection of her work, and it’s taken on a commercial life far beyond those honorable origins. You find the quote on T-shirts, hoodies, stickers, posters, coffee mugs, throw pillows, mouse pads, phone cases, and more.
No doubt aided by a Netflix documentary about Didion, who died in 2021, “We tell ourselves stories in order to live” became a cliché before its time.
What does that quote even mean?
