My attention veered inexorably back to the specific, to the tangible, to what was generally considered, by everyone I knew then and for that matter have known since, the peripheral. All I knew then was what I wasn’t, and it took me some years to discover what I was.
During the years when I was an undergraduate at Berkeley I tried, with a kind of hopeless late-adolescent energy, to buy some temporary visa into the world of ideas, to forge for myself a mind that could deal with the abstract. I am not in the least an intellectual, which is not to say that when I hear the word “intellectual” I reach for my gun, but only to say that I do not think in abstracts. I may have other interests: I am “interested,” for example, in marine biology, but I don’t flatter myself that you would come out to hear me talk about it. I can bring you no reports from any other front. Like many writers I have only this one “subject,” this one “area”: the act of writing.
”'One of the most celebrated, influential and pioneering writers of the past 60 years.I stole the title not only because the words sounded right but because they seemed to sum up, in a no-nonsense way, all I have to tell you. ”'The slighter these pieces are, the more remarkable they seem: they’re so deft and enigmatic … A sentence by Didion, whether it sticks to 39 characters or articulates possibilities in multiple dependent clauses, is always a marvel of magical thinking” - Observer This is an essential read that reminds us of her magic” - i Paper ”'Didion’s dogged pursuit of the truth in her writing is more vital than ever in our era of fake news, echo chambers and political turmoil. Perhaps those iconic sunglasses were really X-ray specs” - Independent ”'The clarity of Didion's vision and the precision with which she sets it down do indeed feel uncanny … Reading her now, she does seem prophetic, as manifested, for instance, in her concerns in 1968 about the weaknesses of the 'traditional press', whose unspoken attitudes and 'quite factitious 'objectivity’' come 'between the page and the reader like so much marsh gas'. ”'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 Praise for Let Me Tell You What I Mean:.
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