In her column, she excoriated the clubby, politically timid journalism exemplified by the magazine itself: “newspapermen are no longer adversaries but are confidants” of powerful men. Editorial experimentation borne of financial desperation, according to biographer Tracy Dougherty, gave Didion a surprising degree of free reign. By the sixties, it was struggling, its brand of middlebrow sentimentalism increasingly losing cultural ground. The magazine, famous for Norman Rockwell’s cover illustrations of domestic tranquility, had reached its apogee in the early postwar years. Besides the statements on writing, the collection includes several essays originally published in Didion’s Saturday Evening Post column in the 1960s. Didion’s early writing reflected not only her stylistic innovation but her search for an alternative to what she considered the compromised ethic of her era’s mainstream press. She is not “ an intellectual.” Not political. The story Didion tells about her development as a writer in the new collection Let Me Tell You What I Mean is a story of naïve craftmanship: Didion as a “collector of verbs,” a scavenger of images, innocent of their meaning. Like all episodes in the Didion mythos-the pioneer ancestors who parted ways with the Donner Party on the trail, the girlhood crush on John Wayne, the attacks of vertigo and nausea in the summer of ’68-the memory is precise, perfectly crafted, and not to be entirely trusted.
She was not, she assured her audience, thinking about the military-industrial complex, but simply “wondering if the lights were on.” In seminars, she said, she struggled to concentrate on Paradise Lost and “the Hegelian dialectic,” finding her mind wandering instead to the Bevatron laboratory she could see from her classroom window.
In a lecture she gave at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1976, Joan Didion recalled her own undergraduate days at the school. Let Me Tell You What I Mean by Joan Didion
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