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.

Best Books I Read in 2019

A collage of the Best Books I read in 2019.

I read 30 books in 2019, nearly all of which I’ve reviewed on this blog. Here are my eight favorite books that I read this year. The links will take you to my full review of the book. 

The Secret Agent, by Joseph Conrad, 1907. Conrad’s examination of terrorism is a terrific psychological thriller, one that will send chills up your spine 112 years after it was first published. It highlights what an astute writer Conrad was. 

Voyage in the Dark, by Jean Rhys, 1934. Jean Rhys, the pen name of Ella Williams, was a terrific modernist writer whose novels mostly languished in obscurity until the publication of her novel Wide Sargasso Sea in 1966. Voyage in the Dark was her third novel. Written in the first person, it is an evocative trip through the mind of Anna Morgan, an 18-year-old chorus girl. It’s a bleak book, but not without moments of beauty. 

Becoming, by Michelle Obama, 2018. Surely the most personal book ever written by a First Lady, Becoming sheds a lot of light on Michelle Obama’s life before she became First Lady. It’s a fantastic book that everyone should go out and read, if you haven’t already done so. 

Burn Baby Burn, by Meg Medina, 2016. A young adult novel that is set in Queens in 1977, one of the worst years in New York City’s history. The city was on the verge of bankruptcy, a 25-hour blackout on one of the hottest days of the year sparked rampant looting and arson, residents were terrorized by the serial killer eventually known as Son of Sam, and the Mets traded their ace pitcher Tom Seaver to the Reds. All these events play a part in Burn Baby Burn, which tells the story of Nora Lopez, a bright girl who is ready to leave high school behind but isn’t quite sure what the future will bring for her. Medina’s evocative writing brings a strong sense of place and history to this novel. 

Some Sort of Epic Grandeur: The Life of F. Scott Fitzgerald, by Matthew J. Bruccoli, 1981, Second Revised Edition 2002. Well, there has to be at least one book related to Fitzgerald on this list, old sport. Matthew J. Bruccoli was the leading expert on the life and career of F. Scott Fitzgerald, and he wrote or edited over 30 books related to Fitzgerald. Some Sort of Epic Grandeur is the most comprehensive biography of Fitzgerald. Some readers may be put off by Bruccoli’s habit of including seemingly every fact he can find about Fitzgerald, but for Fitzgerald devotees there is a lot of great insight here. Do you want to know Scott’s grades at Princeton, and an explanation of the complicated grading system that was used when Fitzgerald was a student there? Then you’ve found the right book! One quote from Fitzgerald to whet your appetite—in an April, 1934 letter to H.L. Mencken, Fitzgerald wrote: “It is simply that having once found the intensity of art, nothing else that can happen in life can ever again seem as important as the creative process.” (p.368)

I Am Charlotte Simmons, by Tom Wolfe, 2004. Tom Wolfe takes on college life at the turn of the millennium! Yesss! Heeeeyyyyaaaa! He breaks it all down for you—why does the school café have such crummy food?? What’s the best time to get snacks at the Gizmo?? The man in the white suit fills you in!! The novel follows Charlotte Simmons, a nice young girl from Sparta, North Carolina, who ends up attending the prestigious, and fictional, Dupont University. The novel follows Charlotte through her first semester of freshman year, as she makes the difficult adjustment to life away from home. Wolfe’s ability to convincingly write about characters fifty years younger than himself is amazing. I attended college during the time Wolfe was writing his novel, and although the school I went to was very different from Dupont, Wolfe hits the nail right on the head often. 

The White Album, by Joan Didion, 1979. “We tell ourselves stories in order to live” is the first sentence of The White Album. Boom, Joan Didion has thrown down the gauntlet. The White Album is her second collection of essays, and it’s superb. Joan Didion has many obsessions. Shopping malls, orchids, the Santa Ana winds, traffic, dams. We learn about many of these obsessions in The White Album. The book’s centerpiece is the title essay, a 35-page sprawl through the tense paranoia that was California in the late 1960’s. The White Album is one of Didion’s signature works, and deservedly so. 

Dick Tracy: The Official Biography, by Jay Maeder, 1990. This book is just a fun one, as it’s the history of one of my favorite comic strips, Dick Tracy. Maeder’s book is a deep dive into the first 46 years of Dick Tracy, from 1931 to 1977, when it was written and illustrated by Chester Gould. Dick Tracy was a fascinating comic strip, as it presented the square-jawed titular hero, grotesque villains, and a ton of action and violence. A continuing theme of the strip is Gould’s keen interest in technology—Dick Tracy’s two-way wrist radio, first introduced in 1946, is basically a prototype of an Apple Watch. 

I’m pleased with the books I read in 2019, and I’m looking forward to adding more books to my list in 2020.

Book Review: The White Album, by Joan Didion (1979)

Joan Didion with her Corvette on a paperback cover of The White Album, first released in 1979.

Joan Didion’s 1979 essay collection The White Album starts with a bang. “We tell ourselves stories in order to live,” Didion writes. That’s become probably Didion’s most famous quotation, one that you can find in every corner of the internet. It’s perhaps a simple statement, but no one before Didion had said it so bluntly. 

Joan Didion has many obsessions. Shopping malls, orchids, the Santa Ana winds, traffic, dams. We learn about many of these obsessions in The White Album. The book’s centerpiece is the title essay, a 35-page sprawl through the tense paranoia that was California in the late 1960’s. Didion encounters strange people at her door, Didion encounters the Doors at a recording session. Didion meets Huey Newton and Eldridge Cleaver, and sees campus unrest at San Francisco State College.

Didion writes about the Charles Manson murders, and the shockwaves they sent through the Hollywood community: “Many people I know in Los Angeles believe that the Sixties ended abruptly on August 9, 1969, ended at the exact moment when word of the murders on Cielo Drive traveled like brushfire through the community, and in a sense this is true. The tension broke that day. The paranoia was fulfilled.” (p.47) I think Didion makes an excellent point here. In many ways, the hippie dream of the 1960’s ended with the violent apocalyptic visions of Charles Manson. 

The essay “Holy Water” details Didion’s fascinations with water and dams, a subject that is quite obviously still near and dear to the hearts of Californians today, forty-two years after Didion’s essay was written. Didion visits the Operations Control Center for the California State Water Project, where water flow for many areas is controlled. 

“Many Mansions” details the travails of the California Governor’s Mansion. The original mansion, built in 1877, housed the state’s governors from 1903 until 1967. Then Ronald Reagan’s friends and benefactors built a giant new house in the suburb of Carmichael. This house wasn’t finished when Reagan left office, and at the time Didion wrote her essay, the house was gathering dust as then-Governor Jerry Brown refused to live in it. (The state eventually sold the house in 1982.) Didion contrasts the styles of the two houses, much preferring the old Second Empire-Italianate mansion in downtown Sacramento. (It helps that Didion was friends with Earl Warren’s daughter, so she occasionally visited the house.) In the kitchen of that old mansion is a pastry marble, and we get to see some of Didion’s snobbery when she takes a public tour of the mansion and no one knows what a pastry marble is used for! Shock! Horror! Didion writes, “It occurred to me that we had finally evolved a society in which knowledge of a pastry marble, like a taste for stairs and closed doors, could be construed as ‘elitist.’” (p.72) Well, knowledge of a pastry marble doesn’t necessarily make you elitist, but if you have one in your house, it’s definitely a luxury item. 

I’m not going to say anything about Didion’s controversial 1972 essay “The Women’s Movement.” Suffice it to say, Didion was not running to the barricades with Gloria Steinem. You can read it and judge for yourself. 

The White Album is an excellent collection, and I enjoyed it more than Slouching Towards Bethlehem. Didion’s voice seems more developed by the time she wrote The White Album, so even the shortest pieces in the book still capture the reader’s interest and contain great writing. 

Throughout The White Album we learn more about Joan Didion. She gets migraines. She was obsessed with shopping malls for a time: “I recall staying late in my pale-blue office on the twentieth floor of the Graybar Building to memorize David D. Bohannon’s parking ratios.” (p.182) She’s haunted by the image of the Hoover Dam: “Since the afternoon in 1967 when I first saw Hoover Dam, its image has never been entirely absent from my inner eye.” (p.198) She writes of moving to Malibu: “I had not before 1971 and will probably not again live in a place with a Chevrolet named after it.” (p.209) Well, not unless she moves to Bel Air. 

Joan Didion is something of an enigma, a contradiction. She writes so much about her own fragility: she is incapacitated by migraines, she tells us how she doesn’t have a watch with her when she’s traveling for an assignment, which keeps her constantly calling down to the front desk to ask them the time. When she’s called the front desk too many times, she calls her husband at home to ask him the time. She is afraid of driving her rental car over the Carquinez Bridge spanning the San Francisco Bay. (Didion incorrectly spells it “Carquinas,” a misspelling that persists in the 2009 edition of The White Album.) She gives us more than a page from her own psychiatric report. 

And yet, for all this talk of fragility, I can’t help but feel that Joan Didion must be a very strong person to have made a living as a freelance writer for the last sixty years. I wonder if she isn’t hiding her strength behind her fragility.