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Let Me Tell You What I Mean
- Narrated by: Kimberly Farr
- Length: 4 hrs and 5 mins
- Unabridged Audiobook
- Categories: Literature & Fiction, Essays
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Summary
Twelve early pieces never before collected that offer an illuminating glimpse into the mind and process of Joan Didion.
Mostly drawn from the earliest part of her astonishing five-decade career, the wide-ranging pieces in this collection include Didion writing about a Gamblers Anonymous meeting, a visit to San Simeon and a reunion of WWII veterans in Las Vegas and about topics ranging from Nancy Reagan to Robert Mapplethorpe to Martha Stewart.
Here are subjects Didion has long written about—the press, politics, California robber baronsac, women, the act of writing and her own self-doubt. Each piece is classic Didion: incisive and, in new light, stunningly prescient.
Critic reviews
"The peripheral, the specific, the tangible – or, as the writer Hilton Als notes in his foreword, 'the Didion gaze', the penetrating prose of a reporter who writes with a scalpel – is by far the most compelling theme in Didion’s latest collection of essays." (Vogue)
"She writes with a razor." (New York Times)
"A pioneer of New Journalism, she brilliantly chronicled America’s cultural and political life." (Guardian)
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What listeners say about Let Me Tell You What I Mean
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Overall
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- Nick Rodrigues
- 26-04-21
Not a cohesive book
The writing is brilliant, but it doesn't hold together as a book. The topics are too many and they not always fit together. It feels as if this book is forcibly made of great essays but the result is not great.
1 person found this helpful