In Let Me Tell You What I Mean, a collection of 12 previously unpublished essays, Joan Didion recounts memories of her own youth and rejection from Stanford, visits to Gamblers Anonymous meetings in Gardena, California, and even moments spent with Nancy Reagan when Ronald Reagan was not yet President of the United States. Didion's writing ranges in subject matter and time period, covering decades of the author's observations and reflections which have enshrined her place in American non-fiction and fiction writing alike. These essays explore themes including the meaning of truth in writing, the relationship between artists and their subjects, the use of literary irony in non-fiction writing, and more.
Study Pack
The Let Me Tell You What I Mean Study Pack contains:
Although she is perhaps best known as a precise and graceful essayist, Joan Didion (born 1934) has also triumphed as a novelist and, with her husband, as a screenwriter.Joan Didion was born December 5...
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Joan Didion was born on 5 December 1934 to Frank Reese and Eduene (Jerrett) Didion, a family whose roots in California's Central Valley go back five generations. She was raised in Sacramento as an Epi...
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Ever since she first appeared on the literary scene in the early 1960s, Joan Didion has been identified as a California writer. Although her heart belongs to the provincial Sacramento of her girlhoo...
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Joan Didion told an interviewer in 1992 that she "started out thinking things were pretty coherent. Then I was surprised when they weren't. I decided I better tell people." Didion tells stories of dis...
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Biography Essay"Things fall apart; the center cannot hold; / Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world." These lines and the William Butler Yeats poem from which they come hold a special fascination for J...
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Joan Didion
Joan Didion