Six of those early essays, all from 1968, are the short-form gems of the new collection, pioneering a coolly detached, analytic tone that shimmered – ironically – with subjectivity. After an apprenticeship at Vogue magazine, where writing photo captions influenced her less-is-more style, Didion found her voice quickly at the Saturday Evening Post, via the “Points West” column she shared with her husband and screenwriting partner, John Gregory Dunne.

“I remember each other member of the class as older and wiser than I had hope of ever being,” she writes, “more possessed of an exotic past: marriages and the breakup of marriages, money and the lack of it, sex and politics and the Adriatic seen at dawn.”īut the American icon who would declare, in her most famous sentence, “We tell ourselves stories in order to live” (from the classic essay, and subsequent book, “The White Album”) wasted no time telling the world what she saw.

Settling for University of California, Berkeley, she felt lost in her first writing workshop – without ideas, stories, worldliness. 'The Doctors Blackwell' review: Two remarkable sisters transformed American medicineĭidion came to literature as an army brat Californian, bred from Sacramento’s cultural aridity, whose greatest adolescent trauma was not getting into Stanford. She intuited the fragmentation that would breed an internet world, and she sensed danger in the shallow myth-making of celebrity journalism. She brought new eyes to the American scene, whether charting the disconnect between traditional and hippie media – in the book’s opener, “Alicia and the Underground Press” – or with piercing observations of boldfaced names including Ernest Hemingway, Nancy Reagan and Martha Stewart. Slim and elegant as Didion’s public persona remains at age 86, the book traces her journey and development as a writer of magisterial (a word she would never use) command and finely measured style.

Didion’s latest volume, “Let Me Tell You What I Mean” (Knopf, 192 pp., ★★★★ out of four), makes that case easily with a dozen previously uncollected pieces from 1968 to 2000. Thompson, but the lower-key voice of Joan Didion has outlasted, and outperformed, those swaggering peers. The tide of “New Journalism” that flooded the late 1960s and ’70s may have been dominated by the exclamation marks, manic italics and machismo of Tom Wolfe, Norman Mailer, or Hunter S. Watch Video: Priyanka Chopra Jonas fought for involvement in 'The White Tiger'

Let me tell you what i mean didion