Let Me Tell You What I Mean

This collection gathers 12 essays by Joan Didion, spanning from 1968 to 2000. The pieces range from cultural reportage and personal reflection to literary criticism, unified by Didion's preoccupations with writing, the gap between surfaces and underlying realities, and the ways American institutions and mythologies shape individual experience.

In "Alicia and the Underground Press" (1968), Didion argues that mainstream American newspapers fail to communicate directly with readers, deadened by a pretense of objectivity that obscures the writer's bias. She concedes that underground papers like the Los Angeles Free Press are amateurish and low on information but insists they are not boring. She highlights a reader named Alicia whose three-line analysis of Ann Arbor in the Free Press captures an entire university community, and criticizes establishment journalists for functioning as confidants of power rather than adversaries.

"Getting Serenity" (1968) recounts Didion's visit to a Gamblers Anonymous meeting in Gardena, California, the draw-poker capital of Los Angeles County. She observes the members' fanatical tracking of milestones, their borrowed therapeutic language, and the Twelve Steps' reinforcement of passivity. The essay climaxes when a member named Frank L. celebrates one year without gambling; his cake reads "MIRACLES STILL HAPPEN." Didion flees, explaining that "serenity" is a word she associates with death, and that for days afterward she wants only to be in brightly lit places where no one counts days.

In "A Trip to Xanadu" (1968), Didion revisits San Simeon, the estate that newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst built on the California coast. As a child, she glimpsed its towers from Highway 1, and the sight confirmed for her the boundless promise of California. Since Hearst's death in 1951, the estate has become a state monument, physically preserved but spiritually flattened. Civil-service guides in khaki recite facts, visitors speculate about heating costs, and staff hold discussion groups on "The Generation Gap." Didion concludes that making a place available to the eyes renders it no longer available to the imagination.

"On Being Unchosen by the College of One's Choice" (1968) centers on a rejection letter from Stanford that Didion has kept since 1952. She recalls the afternoon she opened it: She retreated upstairs, cried, and briefly contemplated swallowing codeine tablets. She did not take them. She spent the spring in mild rebellion, fell in love with someone who wanted to be a golf pro, and eventually transferred to the University of California at Berkeley. She contrasts her experience, set in what she calls the benign world of country California, with the intensified pressure she observes on contemporary children, and criticizes parents who merge their children's admissions outcomes with their own ambitions.

In "Pretty Nancy" (1968), Didion profiles Nancy Reagan, wife of California Governor Ronald Reagan, at the rented Sacramento house serving as the governor's residence. A television crew arrives simultaneously, and the morning quickly becomes staged: A newsman suggests Nancy pick rhododendrons, and a cameraman instructs her to "fake the nip" of a bud. Didion describes Nancy as projecting the smile of a good wife playing out a middle-class daydream circa 1948. The essay's closing scene revolves around Nancy's 10-year-old son Ronnie arriving from school; the exchange is minimal. Nancy smiles and declares, "I don't believe in being an absentee mother" (37), a line Didion presents without commentary in a context that frames it as performative.

"Fathers, Sons, Screaming Eagles" (1968) follows Didion to the 23rd annual reunion of the 101st Airborne Division Association, a group of World War II veterans, at the Stardust Hotel in Las Vegas. She meets Skip Skivington, who fought at Bastogne in 1944 and whose son has been missing in Vietnam since Mother's Day. Speeches draw parallels between the veterans' war and Vietnam, but Didion identifies the unspoken tension: These men had their essential adventure at 19 and 20, and now their sons face a conflict that may not carry the same moral clarity. She closes with Walter Davis, who jumped into Holland in 1944 and now sees things differently with a 14-year-old son who may have to serve. Walter breaks open a roll, butters it, and sets it down untouched.

"Why I Write" (1976) is a lecture in which Didion explains that writing is inherently aggressive, an imposition of the writer's sensibility on the reader. She describes her inability to think abstractly at Berkeley, where her attention returned always to the tangible: a flowering pear tree, the lights in the Bevatron (a particle accelerator on the campus hill). She identifies herself as a writer because of this limitation: She writes to discover what she is thinking. She introduces her concept of mental "pictures" that "shimmer around the edges" (50), illustrating with her novels Play It as It Lays (1970) and A Book of Common Prayer (1977), both of which began as images that dictated their form.

In "Telling Stories" (1978), Didion traces three formative stages: Professor Mark Schorer's writing workshop at Berkeley in 1954, where she sat paralyzed and wrote no fiction for 10 years afterward; her years writing copy at Vogue, where the discipline of fitting prose into 27-character caption lines taught her to treat words as tools; and the evening notes that became her first novel, Run River (1963), which revealed her true subject to be not New York but California.

"Some Women" (1989) examines the photography of Robert Mapplethorpe. In his portraits of women, Didion finds not modern subjects but 19th-century motifs: domination and submission, doomed virgins, intimations of mortality. She argues that Mapplethorpe's strength derived from the shock of the old rather than the new, rooted in a fixed moral universe of light and dark and the imposition of classical form on transgressive images.

"The Long-Distance Runner" (1993) introduces the memoir of filmmaker Tony Richardson, Didion's close friend, who died of AIDS in November 1991. She characterizes Richardson as someone who loved making things above all else, bringing the same intensity to community theater as to major productions. Richardson had dismissed his memoir as "worthless," but a completed manuscript was discovered and given to his daughters on the afternoon he died.

"Last Words" (1998) opens with a close reading of the first paragraph of Ernest Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms and argues that Hemingway's grammar constituted a worldview: "a way of looking but not joining, a way of moving through but not attaching" (103). Didion documents Hemingway's explicit wish that his unfinished work not be published, then traces how his widow, Mary Welsh Hemingway, violated those wishes after Hemingway died by suicide in 1961, authorizing posthumous publications including Islands in the Stream and The Garden of Eden. She argues that publishing unfinished work denies the idea that a writer's role is to make the work.

The collection closes with "Everywoman.com" (2000), in which Didion examines Martha Stewart as a cultural phenomenon. She catalogs the scope of Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia at its 1999 initial public offering and argues that critics who see Stewart as promoting impossible domestic perfection misread her appeal. Stewart's message, Didion contends, is that domestic competence translates to professional power. She identifies Stewart's story as the enduring American narrative of female self-invention, in which the woman sits down at the table with the men, still in her apron, and walks away with the chips.