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.

Let Me Tell You What I Mean collects 12 pieces written between 1968 and 2000.

... the impression one gets is that of reading a magazine made up of all ledes and kickers.

Let Me Tell You What I Mean arrives with the uncommon weight of expectation, and not a little bit of fear — in the purely morbid sense that this could be her last, yes (at 86, she's only mortal), but also that her legendary instincts might have faltered, a late-game blot on her legacy.

The story Didion tells about her development as a writer in the new collection Let Me Tell You What I Mean is a story of naïve craftmanship: Didion as a 'collector of verbs,' a scavenger of images, innocent of their meaning. She is not 'an intellectual.' Not political. Of course, she is both.

Slim and elegant as Didion’s public persona remains at age 86.

... calling this a 'new' book may be somewhat misleading, as it serves as more of an 'odds and ends' release, compiling a series of never-before-collected short essays written between 1968 and 2000; one might think of this as a B-Side album, if you will. But Didion is one of our few living writers who can truthfully be said to have achieved iconic status, one who counts both casual readers and esteemed authors among her devoted audience, and even her 'B-Sides' ring with the authority of her distinctive voice.

The collection – expansively introduced by Hilton Als – touches on many of the themes that run through Didion’s work: the power of illusion [...] the unspoken dynamics of makeshift, often precarious communities; the dangerous thrill of pursuing dreams.

Witty, heartfelt, and insightful, the writing in Let Me Tell You What I Mean is always incisive and shows Didion as a perennial chronicler and keen observer obsessed with the present, the palpable, the real.

Through her work, Didion has conjured a culture that’s dazzling and dangerous, mythic and mundane.

Let Me Tell You What I Mean features 12 of those previously uncollected pieces that together foreshadow Didion's distinctive style and the considerable range of her interests.

Didion’s essays can be treated as companions to novels including Run River (1961) and A Book of Common Prayer (1977), or as a series of dazzling linked short stories, with a narrator who waxes and wanes, sometimes violently, in her awareness of the role played by her own perspective in mediating experiences and generating reactions.

The clarity of Didion’s vision and the precision with which she sets it down do indeed feel uncanny. Her writing has often revealed what was previously hidden, parsed what was unconscious, be it the miasmic unease of the late 1960s or the subterranean structures of national politics. Reading her now, she does seem prophetic.

For an author as obsessed with meaning as Didion, that title is a revealing double entendre, and one that seems to hang on that moment at Berkeley in 1975. She is telling us what she means, as she told that standing-room-only audience. And she is also telling us what she means, here in 2021, after decades of being one of America’s most admired, most argued-over writers.

As a group, these essays are wide-ranging in subject, yet each displays the distinctive voice Didion has honed with precision. Whether she is profiling the studied perfection of then-first lady of California Nancy Reagan or the cultural significance of Martha Stewart on the cusp of her historic initial public offering, Didion allows her subjects to speak for themselves, inviting us to read between the lines and draw our own conclusions.

Let Me Tell You What I Mean is being marketed as a collection of “early” Didion essays, though its contents were first published between the late sixties and the new millennium. It is certainly further evidence of what Hilton Als, in his foreword, calls Didion’s 'feeling for the uncanny,' but whether it’s a coherent addition to the Didion corpus is another matter.

Didion’s critique seems more prescient than ever.

Those of us who eagerly await any of her writing are very excited to read this collection. Why are we so eagerly awaiting any of her books? Didion’s powers of observation and succinct writing style are masterful. Like many journalists turned novelists, she has learned to perfectly convey a mood, attitude, or cultural shift in a shorthand developed through painstaking craft. All of the essays in this volume are relevant and interesting. The foreword, written by Hilton Als, is a perfect summation of Didion’s relevancy and power..

... the subject on which [Didon] writes most compellingly is her own craft.

Both [Didon's] sharp authority and cool intuition are abundantly displayed in this gathering of excellent previously uncollected odds and ends.

... likely to be her swan song. It is a matter of regret that she is not still at the height of her powers, the better for her skillful prose to rebuke an age when one can hardly find a glossy-magazine feature that doesn’t have its share of malapropisms, the better for her hard skeptical intelligence to serve as a corrective to a media establishment growing ever more brazen in its political activism and ever less nuanced in its presentation of stories. That she long ago put her own stamp on American rhythms of speech and thought is unquestionable, but the line of succession—from Hemingway to Didion to whom?—is unclear..

Didion, perhaps more than any other contemporary American writer, grasps the sadness in the deluded idea of the good life and Let Me Tell You What I Mean is a reminder, if one was needed, of her perspicacity.

The subject matter is eclectic, the themes diffuse but the prose style hits the same consistent effortless tempo and polished tone 12 times in a row.

... something of a grab bag.

Not much unifies the twelve pieces in Let Me Tell You What I Mean, which treat everything from underground newspapers to a reunion for Second World War veterans, except their glossy style – and the fact that they have all gone previously uncollected.

... engrossing, memorable, and delightful.

Didion in an essence, elegantly dismantling assumptions and stating discomfiting truths. In Why I Write, another of the dozen arresting, mind-tuning, previously uncollected essays in this exhilarating and instructive gathering spanning several decades, she states that writing is 'an aggressive, even a hostile act.' It is also a voyage of discovery for Didion, conducted via meticulous observation and assiduous questioning of what she thinks and how her investigations make her feel.

The 'energy and shimmer' of her prose are fully evident in this volume of previously uncollected pieces, written from 1968 to 2000. Although Didion portrays herself as a diffident, unconfident writer as a college student, she learned 'a kind of ease with words' when working at Vogue, where she was assigned to write punchy, concise copy.

This wide-ranging essay collection from Didion showcases her strengths as a short form writer. As always, the writing is captivating. Didion fans new and old will be delighted..