You can disguise its aggressiveness all you want with veils of subordinate clauses and qualifiers and tentative subjunctives, with ellipses and evasions-with the whole manner of intimating rather than claiming, of alluding rather than stating-but there’s no getting around the fact that setting words on paper is the tactic of a secret bully, an invasion, an imposition of the writer’s sensibility on the reader’s most private space.”

“In many ways,” she acknowledges in “Why I Write,” “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. For her, everything, perhaps most especially narrative, is conditional, a construction: not least the voice, the character, of the first-person narrator. As the pages progressed it occurred to me that their actual subject was not children after all, at least not children per se, at least not children qua children: their actual subject was this refusal even to engage in such contemplation, this failure to confront the certainties of aging, illness, death.”ĭidion’s presence in those sentences-the way she interrogates not only her intentions but also the very act of writing-is what makes her work so vivid. “When I began writing these pages,” she confides, “I believed their subject to be children, the ones we have and the ones we wish we had….

There, she reflects on the death of her daughter, Quintana, and her own process of aging. Now 86, she has produced no substantial work since her memoir Blue Nights was published in 2011. This makes sense, for Didion is at the summing-up part of her career. In that regard, the book has more in common with South and West (2017), which brought together two unfinished pieces from the 1970s, than it does with the collections Slouching Towards Bethlehem and The White Album, which remain among the most necessary of her works. Of the 12 essays gathered here, half come from the Points West column she and her husband, John Gregory Dunne, shared for the Saturday Evening Post from 1964 to 1969 the others appeared between 19.

Like many retrospectives, Joan Didion’s Let Me Tell You What I Mean is something of a grab bag.

Let me tell you what i mean book