Confronted by the late novels Hemingway did not want published she is horrified to read that Mary – his fourth wife – allowed their release under the titles Islands in the Stream and The Garden of Eden. Like Hemingway, words truly matter for her, all of them. She feels too the “power of a paragraph”. She notices where Hem puts his commas and his use of ‘the’ and ‘and’: their rhythm. She writes here of her hero’s “deceptively simple sentences”: when she first reads him aged “twelve or thirteen” she counts the number of words he uses for best effect. Its continued existence, she concludes, reflects the idiocy of idolising the rich.ĭidion’s sentences have been worked and reworked as much as Hemingway’s. Any putative happiness that once resided in this ludicrous Xanadu she sees as a tragic illusion. Visiting William Randolph Hearst’s castle at San Simeon she reviews the proposition that “all the pleasures of infinity are to be found in the here and now’ and promptly finds evidence to the contrary. Didion, perhaps more than any other contemporary American writer, grasps the sadness in the deluded idea of the good life and Let Me Tell You What I Mean is a reminder, if one was needed, of her perspicacity.ĭidion has long delighted in shattering delusions. It’s 2021 and entirely appropriate to be nervous now. Joan doesn’t do serenity: she’s been proven right in her anxieties for decades. Didion balks at that: she associates serenity with death.

A penitent says their ideal, the aim of the programme, is “getting serenity”. Here’s Joan Didion on roving reporter mode at a Gamblers Anonymous meeting in Gardenia, the draw-poker capital of Los Angeles County.

Let me tell you what i mean joan didion