Let Me Tell You What I Mean

A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK OF THE YEAR  • ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: NPR, Vogue, *USA Today, Town & Country,  LitHub • A Most Anticipated Book from *Vogue, TIME, Bustle, The New York Times, and many more.

"Didion’s remarkable, five decades-long career as a journalist, essayist, novelist, and screen writer has earned her a prominent place in the American literary canon, and the twelve early pieces collected here underscore her singularity. Her musings—whether contemplating “pretty” Nancy Reagan living out her “middle-class American woman’s daydream circa 1948” or the power of Ernest Hemingway’s pen—are all unmistakably Didionesque. There will never be another quite like her." —*O Magazine

“[These] essays are at once funny and touching, roving and no-nonsense. They are about humiliation and about notions of rightness. About mythmaking, fiction writing, her “failed” intellectualism and the syntactic insides of Hemingway’s craft. . . . From the outset Didion’s nonfiction has shown no obligation to the whopping epiphanic. Realizations occur, but she relates them without splendor, as if she’s extracting a tincture. . . . Reading newly arranged Didion [. . .] feels like reaching that dip in a swimming pool where the shallow end suddenly becomes the deep end. The bottom drops out, and you are forced to kick a little, to tread. This is why we return to her work again and again. But Didion cares less for timelessness than for the evanescence of language, mistrusting pink icing or anything else that might launder truth. Undergirding the entire collection is a regard for ephemerality. Of glory, and of the era when fashion photographers called their spaces “the studio.” Of fairy tales and failed attempts at quietude, of a child’s memory soup of imagination. . . . Didion’s pen is like a periscope onto the creative mind — and, as this collection demonstrates, it always has been. These essays offer a direct line to what’s in the offing.” --Durga Chew-Bose, *The New York Times Book Review

• • “The book traces her journey and development as a writer of magisterial (a word she would never use) command and finely measured style. She brought new eyes to the American scene, whether charting the disconnect between traditional and hippie media or with piercing observations of boldfaced names including Ernest Hemingway, Nancy Reagan and Martha Stewart. She intuited the fragmentation that would breed an internet world, and she sensed danger in the shallow myth-making of celebrity journalism. . . . The incomparable journalism and self-reflection that accompanied every stage of her success would build her legacy. . . . The new book captures the essence of Didion in countless lapidary sentences, especially in the 1998 essay “Last Words,” which deconstructs the lean, “deceptively simple” opening paragraph of Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms. . . . She would come to match that economy with unwavering vision, setting a standard for those who have inhaled Didion not just as a writer’s writer, but also as a soul – still-centered, self-haunted – of modern experience.”  --Matt Damsker, USA Today (★★★★ out of four)

“There's plenty of journalistic gold in Let Me Tell You What I Mean. . . . What's particularly salient is her trademark farsightedness, which is especially striking decades later. . . . The relevance of her observations in today's fractured world of fringe media is uncannily prescient.” --Heller McAlpin, NPR
 
“[This collection] brings together previously uncollected pieces in a prismatic retrospective; the critic Hilton Als charts the arc of her career in a rich foreword. . . . As usual, Didion exceeds our expectations. . . . [The essays] follow the chronology of Didion’s publication in journals and magazines, but it shifts back and forth in time as she contemplates the thread of her own life against the tapestry of postwar America. . . . She jars us beyond the comfort zones of platitudes and groupthink. . . . Didion the literary critic is a marvel: Her dissection of Hemingway’s opening sentence in A Farewell to Arms is a masterpiece in its own right. . . . The Didion of Let Me Tell You What I Mean is [. . .] a revelation, as the woman behind the curtain steps forward, more intimate somehow, with flashes of feminist feeling.” --Hamilton Cain, O Magazine
 
“Didion’s decades-long attempt to chronicle the images around her is now indelible, both for shifting the literary canon’s idea of what personal reportage could be, and for the snapshots of a particular American experience captured in her prose. With her newest collection of earlier published essays, Let Me Tell You What I Mean, Didion’s ever-expanding influence is worth reconsidering. . . . It’s surprisingly easy to find oneself in Didion’s sway, even unintentionally. Her range is varied but returns again and again to certain tropes and topics: laconic aloofness, the female heroine as distanced observer, the futility of meaning, the myth of narrative cohesion, grief, Los Angeles, New York, foreign reporting, political conventions, the wounded woman, the post-wounded woman. For contemporary authors, touching on any of these puts one in conversation with Didion [but]. . . . those making the Didion comparisons often misunderstand her—her style is not as easily copied as some might think. Her apparent passivity has a specific intention that goes beyond listlessness.” --Antonia Hitchens, The Wall Street Journal
 
“Let Me Tell You What I Mean works like a skeleton key to unlock Didion’s continued significance in American culture. What has made her so lasting and important to so many? Why are we still talking about her and reading her and teaching her writing in classrooms? The book unpacks this legacy subtly, in a way as twofold as its title: Because she means things, and because she means something. . . .  She is the writer who can practically disembowel a politician or pundit’s bad reasoning, take apart a brainless movie or book, or reduce a pompous public figure to a hollow shell, and that’s why writers love her or fear her. Words are her scalpels.” --Alissa Wilkinson, Vox
 
“Joan Didion’s prose remains peerless. . . . Reading [her new collection], you’re once again reminded that the observations and subjects might not be unique, but that the angles from which Didion looked at everything are totally different from anyone else’s.” --Bret Easton Ellis, The Los Angeles Magazine

“How does Joan Didion do it? Her words are still weapons, but the diamond-encrusted kind, as beautiful as they are deadly, and, more important, they are entirely at her command. Let Me Tell You What I Mean, a collection of essays spanning essentially the last third of the twentieth century, is a tiny jewel box of a book, and you could read it for the prose alone—no one places a so like Joan Didion—but the real magic is that she pulls it off: she tells you what she means, and every injury is on purpose. There is a generosity to that, I think, and it feels like a gift just to understand what someone else meant even if one cannot hope to return the favor.”  --Hasan Altaf, *The Paris Review Daily

*“In this new collection, the famed essayist demonstrates her longstanding mastery of the form. . . . In six decades of reporting with meticulous, nuanced notice, Didion has montaged in words myriad mortals, monuments, and movements. For this book, she …