Book Review: Let Me Tell You What I Mean, by Joan Didion (2021)

 

The front cover of Let Me Tell You What I Mean, by Joan Didion, 2021. (Photo by Mark C. Taylor)

Back cover of Let Me Tell You What I Mean, by Joan Didion, 2021. (Photo by Mark C. Taylor)

Let Me Tell You What I Mean is a collection of Joan Didion essays that have never appeared in book form before. It’s not recent work: 6 of the 12 essays date from 1968, and the most recent essay is from 2000. As much as I like Joan Didion’s writing, I have to say, there doesn’t seem to be a compelling reason for Let Me Tell You What I Mean to exist as a standalone book. It’s a collection of leftovers, essays that easily could have been included in previous Didion collections like We Tell Ourselves Stories in Order to Live: Collected Nonfiction, or the Library of America collections of Didion’s work. But publishing Let Me Tell What I Mean as a standalone book certainly gives these essays higher visibility than they would enjoy as part of a larger collection.

The design of Let Me Tell You What I Mean gives the game away, that this is a slim volume stretched as far as possible to make it an actual book. First, there’s the size of the book itself: just about 5x7 inches, when a more typical size for a hardcover would be 6x8.5 inches. Because of the book’s small size, there are fewer words per page than usual. The length of the book is expanded by including a whopper of an Introduction by Hilton Als—35 pages long! You might want to read the introduction after reading the essays, since Als excerpts most of the great lines.

There are strong moments in the 6 essays from 1968, which were published in The Saturday Evening Post as a column titled “Points West” that Didion shared with her husband, John Gregory Dunne. In the first essay, “Alicia and the Underground Press,” Didion highlights an issue that is very much with us today: “the inability of all of us to speak to one another in any direct way.” (p.3)

“Pretty Nancy” is a withering takedown of Nancy Reagan, then First Lady of California. It’s a great example of the New Journalism technique of close observation. Didion doesn’t intrude into the story, but she makes it clear that she thinks Nancy is an empty vessel.

“Fathers, Sons, Screaming Eagles,” is a look at the annual reunion of the 101^st Airborne, and presents the reader with a glimpse of men who fought in World War II, and whose sons were then fighting in Vietnam. It’s a poignant examination of loss, and probably my favorite of the 1968 essays.

For me, the highlights of the book are the 3 essays that deal with writing: “Why I Write,” “Telling Stories,” and “Last Words.” Didion writes very well about the mysteries of writing fiction. I’d be fascinated to read her thoughts about writing non-fiction, but she doesn’t discuss that here.

“Last Words” is a 1998 essay about Ernest Hemingway, and it’s clear that Didion is a studied devotee of his “less is more” style. “The very grammar of a Hemingway sentence dictated, or was dictated by, a certain way of looking at the world, a way of looking but not joining, a way of moving through but not attaching, a kind of romantic individualism distinctly adapted to its time and source. If we bought into those sentences, we would see the troops marching along the road, but we would not necessarily march with them. We would report, but not join.” (p.103) This seems to be a maxim of Didion’s as well, as it exemplifies the kind of cool detachment that she brings to so many of her essays.

Let Me Tell You What I Mean is a good example of Didion’s style, but I wouldn’t recommend it as an introduction to her work—read Slouching Towards Bethlehem or The White Album first.