Joan Didion commands the essay form in ‘Let Me Tell You What I Mean’

A collection of Didion's work showcases her evolution as a young writer and exhibits her preoccupation with understanding the world through writing.

Joan Didion began her career more than six decades ago writing captions for Vogue. “It is easy to make light of this kind of ‘writing,’” she notes before going on to do exactly the opposite – expounding the ways in which the Vogue job helped her develop the direct, controlled style for which she is justly renowned. “I learned a kind of ease with words,” she recalls, “a way of regarding words not as mirrors of my own inadequacy but as tools, toys, weapons to be deployed strategically on a page.”

Didion’s assessment of her time at the fashion magazine – which she contrasts with a dread-inducing writing seminar at the University of California, Berkeley, during which she “despaired of ever knowing” what her worldlier classmates did – appears in the 1978 essay “Telling Stories.” It’s one of 12 pieces featured in the illuminating new collection “Let Me Tell You What I Mean.” Fully half of the selections are from one year, 1968, illustrating some of Didion’s preoccupations as a young writer and her early command of the short form.

In addition to “Telling Stories,” “Why I Write” is explicitly concerned with Didion’s craft. “In many ways, writing is the act of saying I,” she asserts, “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.” In this piece, first published in The New York Times Magazine in 1976, Didion notes that she is not an abstract thinker, that her attention has always been drawn to physical and tangible reality. Writing, for her, is a way of making sense of that reality. “I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means,” she explains.

Other entries in the collection concern the literary process, albeit in less overt ways. In 1998’s “Last Words,” Didion focuses on the moral dimensions of writing. The essay considers the posthumous publication of Ernest Hemingway’s final novel “True at First Light”; Didion condemns the decision made by Hemingway’s son, Patrick, to publish an edited and greatly condensed version of the book decades after the author’s 1961 suicide. She argues that “the publication of unfinished work is a denial of the idea that the role of the writer in his or her work is to make it.” And she further suggests that for a writer as precise as Hemingway, there is a violence inherent in any edits made to his text, even those regarded as minor ones. “You care about the punctuation or you don’t, and Hemingway did. You care about the ‘ands’ and the ‘buts’ or you don’t, and Hemingway did,” she writes.

True to her statement that writing means “saying I,” Didion herself figures prominently in these essays. “Last Words,” for instance, begins with her description of Hemingway’s profound influence upon her as a young reader. She writes to find out what she’s thinking, as she says, and even in her reportorial pieces, she doesn’t withhold that discovery from the reader. In 1968’s “Getting Serenity,” Didion covers a Gamblers Anonymous meeting in Gardena, California, featuring the “confessions” of the various attendees. When three gambling addicts speak successively of finding serenity, Didion discloses her distaste for the proceedings in the most personal of terms. “I got out fast then,” she writes, “before anyone could say ‘serenity’ again, for it 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, now in her 80s, achieved the status of cultural icon long ago. She also holds a secure place in the literary canon, especially since the 2005 publication of “The Year of Magical Thinking” – a memoir of her mourning period following the death of her husband, the writer John Gregory Dunne. That book was followed by “Blue Nights” in 2011, an account of her adult daughter Quintana’s death. The essays in “Let Me Tell You,” of course, predate those losses. They give us an earlier Didion, one not yet linked with suffering and sorrow.