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Maybe someday
36
/100
I Index Overall Rating
Readers
29/100Critics
44/100Scholars
Author:
Joan Didion
Publisher:
Knopf
Date:
January 26, 2021
Twelve early pieces never before collected offer an illuminating glimpse into the mind and process of the iconic author.
What The Reviewers Say
In five decades’ worth of essays, reportage and criticism, Didion has documented the charade implicit in how things are, in a first-person, observational style that is not sacrosanct but common-sensical. Seeing as a way of extrapolating hypocrisy, disingenuousness and doubt, she’ll notice the hydrangeas are plastic and mention it once, in passing, sorting the scene. Her gaze, like a sentry on the page, permanently trained on what is being disguised.
Reading Let Me Tell You What I Mean with an eye toward the shimmer, I believe it is possible to identify which pictures, crystalline and resonant, drew Didion closer and compelled her to string words together until the molecules manifested a new truth..
There's plenty of journalistic gold in Let Me Tell You What I Mean, Didion's new book of 12 previously uncollected essays. What's particularly salient is her trademark farsightedness, which is especially striking decades later.
... less a selected essays than a rejected essays, a director’s un-cut of her older work. Traditionally, this is the sort of collection squeezed out by itchy heirs after an author’s death.
