![]() ![]() ![]() 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.” ![]()
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