Joan Didion’s newest book, “Let Me Tell You What I Mean,” like all non-fiction, searches for a kind of truth that exists outside the thing itself. We tell stories to discover the truth. At least, as a writer, I have used storytelling to uncover what truths I can. Truth is often elusive, and so we write stories to chase the truth, as if it can be found in the finality of a period, or in the process of a clause unfolding. Didion’s truth is a narrative truth. When Didion writes about a photographer, she is not writing about photography or even really about the photographer himself, but about a particular kind of truth a photographer can tell. The pear is a pear, but it is also the fact of the pear as it fits into the narrative of the specific that makes Didion’s descriptions work. When Didion writes about Robert Mapplethorpe in 1989, she is writing about his death, but also not writing about death. “The business of the subject is tricky.” And indeed it is. Didion knows that just as Mapplethorpe’s photographs told us more about Mapplethorpe than they told us about his subjects, so will anything Didion writes about Mapplethorpe tell us more about Didion than anything else.
What’s so remarkable about Didion is her constant newness, even when the essays date back to the sixties. 2021 America may seem light years away from Didion’s 1968 essay about the underground press. But when you see that the book opens with an essay about the 1968 underground press and closes with a 2000 essay about the various unofficial Martha Stewart websites (my favorite: ‘Gothic Martha Stewart’ “which advises teenagers living at home on how they can ‘goth up’ their rooms without alarming their parents”).
When Didion writes about her mistrust about newspapers in 1968, she comments upon the early seeds of distrust in the media that would someday give birth to the full-blown abominations of “fake news.”
Hilton Als, in his introduction to Didion’s “Let Me Tell You What I Mean,” (and I feel like I need to mention Als because his introduction makes up about 20% of the words in this very short book) explains that Didion’s truth is ever-evolving, because in a living writer, the story is ever-evolving. “…if her nonfiction work is synonymous with anything , says Didion in work after work, it is with the idea that the truth is provisional, and the only thing backing it up is who you are at the time you wrote this or that, and that your joys and biases and prejudices are part of writing too.”
Didion’s “Let Me Tell You What I Mean” is a short book. Holding it feels like holding an 8-track, something pulled out of a box that hadn’t been opened since the 70s. And indeed, many of these pieces herald from the late 60s and 70s. The book is new. It presents Didion’s uncollected pieces, but it is old, too. A time capsule, but a unique one, with more recent additions.
Time capsules can be dated things, but Didion’s writing never feels dated. What makes a writer like Herman Melville, Leo Tolstoy, or Virginia Woolf, or Joan Didion feel urgent, even if their work was created in another era? Didion indeed heralds from another era—the era of print, before all this internet. Als notes that it is a writer’s ability to “shed a sort of awful and beautiful light on a world we half see but don’t want to see, one where potential harm is given, the bogeyman may be your father, and hope is a flimsy defense against dread.”
In her essay “A Trip to Xanadu,” Didion writes about William Randolph Hearst’s San Simeon, conjuring Coleridge’s poem, “Kublah Khan” in the process. The essay is about how a rich man might try to build a mansion to avoid facing his own existential dread “the one dark fear we all know about.” Extravagant expenditures of money are “dedicated to the proposition that all the pleasures of infinity are to be found in the here and now.” Didion takes the tour. She listens to the guides tell their legends in “a tone reflecting the idolatry of the rich that so often accompanies the democratization of things, the flattening out.” In a world of Kardashians and Real Housewives, I think Didion’s commentary is worth noting. There’s an Americanness in indulging in material pleasure; it’s perhaps the only real American religion—the idea that immediate pleasure and consumption can erase all human ills. San Simeon is America itself: “The spirit of San Simeon was inhibited by nervous adult distinctions about what was correct and what was not, what was good and what was less good, what was “art” and what not: if William Randolph Hearst liked something he bought it, and brought it to San Simeon.”
The uncanny and the dreadful is embedded in reality itself, in our essential aloneness, in our dread of death, but it is also the truth one discovers in one’s own words. Didion writes: “The peculiarity of being a writer is that the entire enterprise involves the mortal humiliation of seeing one’s own words in print.” I have experienced this particular “mortal humiliation” again and again, and yet somehow I have kept going, kept writing. The fixed nature of the written word is an epitaph. It is one’s own epitaph.
What we write has the power to undo us, to reveal the awful truth, whatever it might be. Didion sits in on a Gambler’s Anonymous meeting in her essay “Getting Serenity” and finds herself troubled by the whole affair, particularly by the way the participants continue to assert their “powerlessness” and then later, their “serenity.” Didion ultimately leaves the room running, writing, “…serenity… is a word I associate with death, and for several days after that meeting I wanted only to be in places where the lights were bright and no one counted days.” Didion constantly seeks life, messy life in all its permutations. But maybe she runs away from the bare frank room where there is no room for American escapism.
There are many delights in Didion’s Let Me Tell You What I Mean. Didion is ahead of her time in so many things: from the unreasonable pressures placed on teenagers to get into the right college, to the wonderful David Foster Wallace-esque moment where Didion, writing about Nancy Reagan, notices the media watching Nancy: “we seemed to be on the verge of exploring certain media frontiers: the television newsman and the two cameramen could watch Nancy Reagan being watched by me, or I could watch Nancy Reagan being watched by the three of them, or one of the cameramen could step back and do a cinema verité study of the rest of us all watching and being watched by one another.”
The writer is always watching, but it is her job to watch more closely than anyone else. It is Didion alone who noticed the noticing cameras, and who also noticed that the revelatory moment of noticing was passed over. The cameramen ultimately agree that the best thing would be to “watch Nancy Reagan picking some flowers in the garden.” And of course, it’s perfect. Nancy needs flowers. Everyone is smiling. Didion notices: “We had all been smiling quite a bit that morning.” And I think back to David Foster Wallace’s long digressions on the particular existential dread he felt when given a professional smile, or worse, when he was denied a professional smile in a retail interaction. And indeed Didion is a step ahead of Wallace here in 1968: “Nancy Reagan has an interested smile, the smile of a good wife, a good mother, a good hostess, the smile of someone who grew up in comfort and went to Smith college and has a father who is a distinguished neurosurgeon.”
Didion’s super power is the power to notice. She notices “there on the coffee table in the living room lie precisely the right magazines for the life being portrayed.” She notices Nancy Reagan, at a time when women like Nancy Reagan were becoming obsolete, even as women were escaping the boundaries of being unnoticeable and joining the workforce.
Als notes that it takes time to tell the truth. The real writer sticks around with the half-formed truths long enough to get them right.
In her masterpiece of a lecture, “Why I Write” Didion notes: “In many ways, writing is the act of saying I, of imposing oneself upon other people, of saying, listen to me, see it my way, change your mind. It’s an aggressive, even a hostile act…there’s no getting around the fact that setting words on paper is the tactic of the secret bully, an invasion, an imposition of the writer’s sensibility on the reader’s most private space.”
Imposition… on private space. This transgression is in the act of writing. It is also an act of intimacy. Many writers struggle to hold normal conversations, saving their real conversations for the page. I know, I hardly talk.
Didion writes that she writes to discover. What’s beautiful about reading Didion’s work is that we get to discover the world right along with her.
About the Writer
Janice Greenwood is a writer, surfer, and poet. She holds an M.F.A. in poetry and creative writing from Columbia University.