![]() ![]() The opening essay, "Alicia and the Underground Press," flags "the inability of all of us to speak to one another in any direct way, the failure of American newspapers to 'get through.'" One of the things Didion appreciates about papers like the East Village Other and the Los Angeles Free Press is that they don't even make a pretense of objectivity: "When a writer for an underground paper approves or disapproves of something, he says so, quite often in lieu of who, what, where, when, how," she writes. Half the pieces date from 1968 and first appeared in the Saturday Evening Post. ![]() ![]() What's particularly salient is her trademark farsightedness, which is especially striking decades later. There's plenty of journalistic gold in Let Me Tell You What I Mean, Didion's new book of 12 previously uncollected essays. Her answer is chilling: "Well, let me tell you, it was gold.You live for moments like that if you're doing a piece, good or bad." The automatic response from most people might be, "I was horrified." But Didion, of course, is not most people. ![]() In The Center Will Not Hold, the 2017 documentary about Joan Didion directed by her nephew Griffin Dunne, he asks what she felt when she saw a 5-year-old tripping on LSD while reporting from Haight-Ashbury for her 1967 essay, "Slouching Towards Bethlehem." Let Me Tell You What I Mean, by Joan Didion ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |