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From KQBD in San Francisco, I'm Mina Kim.

Coming up on forum, writer Joan Didion famously chronicled California's culture and mythology,

and her relationship with Hollywood is what film critic Alyssa Wilkinson

explores in a new book called We Tell Ourselves Stories. You can't fully understand Diddyan's

later political reporting, Wilkinson says, without thinking in terms of her experience with the

business with Hollywood. We'll talk to Wilkinson about Diddian's concerns with an American political landscape

that was molding itself after the movies.

Join us.

Welcome to Forum. I'm Mina Kim. When the Los Angeles fires burn this year, many shared Joan Didion quotes or turned to her writings for solace, like Blue Nights, where she noted the season when the fire comes, or her essay on the Santa Ana Wins, the weather of catastrophe, of apocalypse.

Diddian, who died in New York in 2021, was a Californian, Sacramento-born, Berkeley-educated,

and a longtime resident of Los Angeles, who often wrote of the landscape and mythology of the state.

But Didion came to see Hollywood Enchantment as an insidious force, especially when adopted by politics, as Alyssa Wilkinson argues in her new book called We Tell Ourselves

...