"Let Me Tell You What I Mean" by Joan Didion

Awhile back I started Didion’s much-lauded memoir, The Year of Magical Thinking, about the horrific year following her husband’s death and her daughter’s severe illness. I abandoned the book early, though I wanted to like it more. Given Didion’s fame as an essayist—and having now read Let Me Tell You What I Mean— I think I should have started with her preferred art form.

Didion’s newest book is a collection of essays, most from early in her career (the late ‘60s), with the most recent from over twenty years ago. The essays are presented without theme or introductions (even the year published is saved for the end of each essay)—the point seems simply to be, “Didion is great. Here are some things she wrote.” Fortunately it's an apt assessment.

Organizationally, the lack of any preface to the pieces works both for and against the book. Some pieces, like “Why I Write” (the only included essay I’d read previously), are certainly timeless. Another, “On Being Unchosen by the College of One’s Choice,” about the feverish competition for college admittance, works effectively without context primarily because of the shock of learning it was published in 1968. The same piece could be published today; fifty plus years later, the process is only worse. In the book's final piece, about the power of Martha Stewart as a brand (“Everywoman.com”), Didion references an IPO concerned with what would happen if "Martha Stewart's public image or reputation were to be tarnished" (130). The piece receives some unintended dramatic irony by being published only a few years before her arrest.

Other pieces feel untethered without context. The first, “Alicia and the Underground Press,” criticizing newspapers, might have been improved with information about the political reality to which Didion was responding. A later essay, “The Long-Distance Runner,” appears to be an introduction to a book by a late director (whom I’d never heard of). Background on him and his work would have benefitted me as a reader.

Nonetheless, organization aside, I discovered how much I enjoyed Didion’s writing. She’s a master of the personal essay, able to weave personal observation and experience into broader meditations. Several of the pieces are about writing—the aforementioned “Why I Write,” another about Didion’s challenge with short stories (“Telling Stories”), and a third criticizing decisions to publish Hemingway’s unfinished work posthumously (“Last Words”). The essays suggest Didion as a person consumed by the author's relationship to the written word. Though intensely personal in many ways, the essays don't feel confessional--instead, they seem to reveal greater truths about art. 

Perhaps because it was last, or longest, the Martha Stewart essay stands out most in my mind. She challenges the notion that Stewart's brand reinforces traditional female domesticity. Instead, Didion argues that Stewart's enormous success as a businesswoman reflects a way of female style succeeding in a man's world--not getting ahead by emulating masculine traits, but by embracing femininity and power.

Perhaps that's true of Didion too. She came to success at an early stage of noted female essayists, not by replicating the work of men who had come before, but by embracing her own style and focus.