Several of the pieces, including "Why I Write" and "Telling Stories," address Didion's development as a writer, from honing her craft by turning out crisp copy for Vogue in the 1950s ("not unlike training with the Rockettes") to learning to use the first person. It is the genius of these papers that they talk directly to their readers." More than 50 years after she wrote these words, the relevance of her observations in today's fractured world of fringe media is uncannily prescient.
She points out that these publications are often "strident and brash," and then adds, "But to think that these papers are read for 'facts' is to misapprehend their appeal. The opening essay, "Alicia and the Underground Press," flags "the inability of all of us to speak to one another in any direct way, the failure of American newspapers to 'get through.'" One of the things Didion appreciates about papers like the East Village Other and the Los Angeles Free Press is that they don't even make a pretense of objectivity: "When a writer for an underground paper approves or disapproves of something, he says so, quite often in lieu of who, what, where, when, how," she writes. Half the pieces date from 1968 and first appeared in the Saturday Evening Post. What's particularly salient is her trademark farsightedness, which is especially striking decades later. There's plenty of journalistic gold in Let Me Tell You What I Mean, Didion's new book of 12 previously uncollected essays.
Her answer is chilling: "Well, let me tell you, it was gold.You live for moments like that if you're doing a piece, good or bad."
The automatic response from most people might be, "I was horrified." But Didion, of course, is not most people. In The Center Will Not Hold, the 2017 documentary about Joan Didion directed by her nephew Griffin Dunne, he asks what she felt when she saw a 5-year-old tripping on LSD while reporting from Haight-Ashbury for her 1967 essay, "Slouching Towards Bethlehem." Let Me Tell You What I Mean, by Joan Didion
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