Book Review: "Let Me Tell You What I Mean" by Joan Didion

Joan Didion is the author of many books, essays and pieces of difference and criticism. She has been appreciated far and wide as one of the forerunners of literature in the 1960s and onwards - writing her experiences and essays on womanhood for all to relate to and read. Her books "The White Album" and "The Year of Magical Thinking" have been amongst my favourites by her, especially the latter in which she describes what life was like after the death of her husband. It was so heartfelt and filled with all these memories which you, as a reader, could feel were very realistic. I love her writing and this book is absolutely no exception to that rule. She is a genius of life writing, memory writing, nonfiction and critical analysis. Despite gaining a lot of attention for her writing, she is still massively underappreciated in her work. "Let Me Tell You What I Mean" is a collection of her beliefs, her attributes and her best works rolled into one. It is a great testament to her long and exciting career in the world of womanhood in the changing mid-20th century.

"Let Me Tell You What I Mean" is a great achievement of time and place. Discussing everything from not getting into the university of her choice all the way to meeting her husband and getting her first publications through the door, Joan Didion has had one hell of a life in literature. She discusses it deeper into her writing when we look at the chapter entitled "Why I Write" where she states:

"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 and change your mind. It's an aggressive, even a hostile act. 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."

Whilst she does discuss her writing in detail, she also lets us know about how long it took her to get to where she is. In odd phrases such as "finding one's role at seventeen is problem enough without being handed somebody else's script..." Joan Didion makes it the subject of her writing that things did not always turn out the straight and narrow way they should for her - sometimes, she got lost along the way and had to rearrange her plans. It brings her back to earth a bit now that her status is somewhere above the clouds.

One of my favourite chapters was about her not getting to go to the university she wanted to and aside from that, it was the one that used Xanadu as some sort of metaphor when talking about William Hearst, Sam Simeon and others. There is something hyper-realistic about Joan Didion's writing especially when she talks about the people who did not want the average man to rise above. She has this way with stories that never really makes it feel like a story at all - instead, it puts you in the middle of the scene as if you are the one that is about to make a judgement on these people.

In conclusion, I really do hope that this is not Joan Didion’s last work and that there are more anthology essay books to come. It has been a wild ride reading this one and I will probably read it again in good time. But my favourite will always remain to be “The Year of Magical Thinking”.