Let Me Tell You What I Mean
Joan Didion

Exactly – These 12 essays, published over 32 years, have not appeared in any previous Didion collection – and there are some real gems here. Brief takes from 1968 (how newspapers inform and don’t inform their readers, a glaring look at twelve-step programs, a picture-perfect profile of picture-perfect Nancy Reagan, then First Lady of California) lead to slightly longer essays from the 1970s on writing, which lead to reflections on Tony Richardson, Ernest Hemingway and Martha Stewart from the 1990s and 2000. For several decades now, no writer has prized or presented exactitude as intensely as Joan Didion.