Let Me Tell You What I Mean
An Essay Collection
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Narrated by:
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Kimberly Farr
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Hilton Als
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By:
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Joan Didion
About this listen
A New York Times Notable Book of the Year
New York Times best seller
From one of our most iconic and influential writers, the award-winning author of The Year of Magical Thinking: a timeless collection of mostly early pieces that reveal what would become Joan Didion's subjects, including the press, politics, California robber barons, women, and her own self-doubt.
With a forward by Hilton Als, these 12 pieces from 1968 to 2000, never before gathered together, offer an illuminating glimpse into the mind and process of a legendary figure. They showcase Joan Didion's incisive reporting, her empathetic gaze, and her role as "an articulate witness to the most stubborn and intractable truths of our time" (The New York Times Book Review).
Here, Didion touches on topics ranging from newspapers ("the problem is not so much whether one trusts the news as to whether one finds it"), to the fantasy of San Simeon, to not getting into Stanford. In "Why I Write", Didion ponders the act of writing: "I write entirely to find out what I'm thinking, what I'm looking at, what I see and what it means." From her admiration for Hemingway's sentences to her acknowledgment that Martha Stewart's story is one "that has historically encouraged women in this country, even as it has threatened men", these essays are acutely and brilliantly observed. Each piece is classic Didion: incisive, bemused, and stunningly prescient.
©2021 Joan Didion (P)2021 Random House AudioListeners also enjoyed...
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Critic reviews
A New York Times Notable Book of the Year
One of the Best Books of the Year: NPR, Vogue, USA Today, Town & Country, LitHub
"Didion’s remarkable, five decades-long career as a journalist, essayist, novelist, and screen writer has earned her a prominent place in the American literary canon, and the 12 early pieces collected here underscore her singularity. Her musings - whether contemplating 'pretty' Nancy Reagan living out her 'middle-class American woman’s daydream circa 1948' or the power of Ernest Hemingway’s pen - are all unmistakably Didionesque. There will never be another quite like her." (O Magazine)
"[These] essays are at once funny and touching, roving and no-nonsense. They are about humiliation and about notions of rightness. About mythmaking, fiction writing, her 'failed' intellectualism and the syntactic insides of Hemingway’s craft.... From the outset Didion’s nonfiction has shown no obligation to the whopping epiphanic. Realizations occur, but she relates them without splendor, as if she’s extracting a tincture.... Reading newly arranged Didion...feels like reaching that dip in a swimming pool where the shallow end suddenly becomes the deep end. The bottom drops out, and you are forced to kick a little, to tread. This is why we return to her work again and again. But Didion cares less for timelessness than for the evanescence of language, mistrusting pink icing or anything else that might launder truth. Undergirding the entire collection is a regard for ephemerality. Of glory, and of the era when fashion photographers called their spaces 'the studio.' Of fairy tales and failed attempts at quietude, of a child’s memory soup of imagination.... Didion’s pen is like a periscope onto the creative mind - and, as this collection demonstrates, it always has been. These essays offer a direct line to what’s in the offing.” (Durga Chew-Bose, The New York Times Book Review)
“There's plenty of journalistic gold in Let Me Tell You What I Mean.... What's particularly salient is her trademark farsightedness, which is especially striking decades later.... The relevance of her observations in today's fractured world of fringe media is uncannily prescient.” (Heller McAlpin, NPR)
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Over his 30-year career at Condé Nast, Nicholas Coleridge has witnessed it all. From the anxieties of the Princess of Wales to the blazing fury of Mohamed Al-Fayed, his story is also the story of the people who populate the glamorous world of glossy magazines. With relish and astonishing candour, he offers the inside scoop on Tina Brown and Anna Wintour, David Bowie and Philip Green, Kate Moss and Beyonce and a surreal weekend away with Bob Geldof and William Hague.
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A superfun inside look @ world of magazine editors
- By AminaRuhle on 10-05-20
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Fall
- The Mysterious Life and Death of Robert Maxwell, Britain's Most Notorious Media Baron
- By: John Preston
- Narrated by: Simon Bubb
- Length: 11 hrs and 23 mins
- Unabridged
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In February 1991, Robert Maxwell triumphantly sailed into Manhattan harbor on his yacht, the Lady Ghislaine, to buy the ailing New York Daily News. Taxi drivers stopped their cabs to shake his hand, children asked for his autograph, and patrons of the hottest restaurant in Manhattan gave him a standing ovation while he dined. Ten months later, Maxwell disappeared off that same yacht in the middle of the night and was later found dead in the water. As John Preston reveals in this revealing biography, Maxwell’s death was as mysterious as his remarkable life.
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Don't make men like this anymore
- By Sylvia on 04-06-21
By: John Preston
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Careless People
- Murder, Mayhem, and the Invention of the Great Gatsby
- By: Sarah Churchwell
- Narrated by: Kate Reading
- Length: 13 hrs and 12 mins
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Since its publication in 1925, The Great Gatsby has become one of the world's best-loved books, delighting audiences across the world. Careless People tells the true story behind F. Scott Fitzgerald's masterpiece, exploring in newly rich detail the relation of Fitzgerald's classic to the chaotic world he in which he lived. Fitzgerald set his novel in 1922, and Careless People carefully reconstructs the crucial months during which Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald returned to New York in the autumn of 1922.
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Fascinating study of the Fitzgeralds and Jazz Age
- By Sand on 06-11-14
By: Sarah Churchwell
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And So It Goes
- Kurt Vonnegut: A Life
- By: Charles J. Shields
- Narrated by: Fred Berman
- Length: 17 hrs and 30 mins
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New York Times best-selling author and biographer Charles J. Shields crafts this fascinating portrait of literary icon Kurt Vonnegut. The first authorized biography of the influential American writer, And So It Goes examines Vonnegut’s life, from his childhood to his death in 2007, and explores how the author changed the conversation of American literature.
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Probably only for die hard Vonnegut fans
- By Watery M on 12-22-12
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Empire of Self
- A Life of Gore Vidal
- By: Jay Parini
- Narrated by: John Lescault
- Length: 16 hrs and 23 mins
- Unabridged
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The product of 30 years of friendship and conversation, Jay Parini's Empire of Self probes behind the glittering surface of Gore Vidal's colorful life to reveal the complex emotional and sexual truth underlying his celebrity-strewn life. But there is plenty of glittering surface as well - a virtual who's who of the American Century, from Eleanor Roosevelt and Amelia Earhart through the Kennedys, Princess Margaret, and the creme de la creme of Hollywood.
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Well done!
- By Christopher on 03-22-16
By: Jay Parini
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Reading My Father
- A Memoir
- By: Alexandra Styron
- Narrated by: Alexandra Styron
- Length: 10 hrs and 27 mins
- Unabridged
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Alexandra Styron's parents—the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Sophie’s Choice and his political activist wife, Rose—were, for half a century, leading players on the world’s cultural stage. Alexandra was raised under both the halo of her father’s brilliance and the long shadow of his troubled mind. Reading My Father portrays the epic sweep of an American artist’s life. It is also a tale of filial love, beautifully written with humor, compassion, and grace.
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William Styron Ranks...
- By Douglas on 12-22-13
By: Alexandra Styron
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Salinger
- By: David Shields, Shane Salerno
- Narrated by: Peter Friedman, January LaVoy, Robert Petkoff, and others
- Length: 19 hrs and 34 mins
- Unabridged
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Shields and Salerno illuminate most brightly the last 56 years of Salinger’s life: a period that, until now, had remained completely dark to biographers. Provided unprecedented access to diaries, letters, legal records, and secret documents, listeners will feel they have, for the first time, gotten beyond Salinger’s meticulously built-up wall. The result is the definitive portrait of one of the most fascinating figures of the 20th century.
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Ingenious novel or biography? Hard to tell....
- By Melinda on 09-05-13
By: David Shields, and others
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Tony Hillerman
- A Life
- By: James McGrath Morris
- Narrated by: George Guidall
- Length: 10 hrs and 50 mins
- Unabridged
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The author of 18 spellbinding detective novels set on the Navajo Nation, Tony Hillerman simultaneously transformed a traditional genre and unlocked the mysteries of the Navajo culture to an audience of millions. His best-selling novels added Navajo Tribal Police detectives Joe Leaphorn and Jim Chee to the pantheon of American fictional detectives.
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Well written biography of an American legend.
- By Kevin McFarlane on 02-05-22
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Ted Hughes
- The Unauthorized Life
- By: Jonathan Bate
- Narrated by: Mike Grady
- Length: 25 hrs and 33 mins
- Unabridged
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Ted Hughes, poet laureate, was one of the greatest writers of the 20th century. With an equal gift for poetry and prose, and with a soul as capacious as any poet in history, he was also a prolific children's writer and has been hailed as the greatest English letter writer since John Keats. His magnetic personality and insatiable appetite for friendship, love, and life also attracted more scandal than any poet since Lord Byron.
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Phenomenal thanks to narrator!
- By equinox14 on 06-26-16
By: Jonathan Bate
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Myrna Loy
- Being and Becoming
- By: James Kotsilibas-Davis, Myrna Loy
- Narrated by: Holly Palance
- Length: 15 hrs and 44 mins
- Unabridged
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The actress recalls her long, rich, and varied career in Hollywood, on the stage, and as a political activist.
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Great actress, great person, great book.
- By MikeEC on 10-15-20
By: James Kotsilibas-Davis, and others
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The Memoir Project
- A Thoroughly Non-Standardized Text For Writing & Life
- By: Marion Roach Smith
- Narrated by: Marion Roach Smith
- Length: 3 hrs and 34 mins
- Unabridged
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Whether or not one has lived an exceptional or dramatic life, we inherently understand that writing memoir—whether it’s a book, blog, or just a letter to a child - is the single greatest portal to self-examination. Stop treading water in writing exercises or hiding behind “writer’s block” and learn how to write with intent. Marion Roach Smith’s disarmingly frank but wildly fun tactics offer you simple and effective guidelines that work. Your legacy beings now.
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amazing what you can learn from brevity
- By Schwartz-Burrill on 09-15-11
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The Stephen King Companion
- Four Decades of Fear from the Master of Horror
- By: George Beahm
- Narrated by: Fleet Cooper, Claire Christie
- Length: 24 hrs and 21 mins
- Unabridged
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The Stephen King Companion is an authoritative look at horror author King's personal life and professional career, from Carrie to The Bazaar of Bad Dreams. King expert George Beahm, who has published extensively about Maine's main author, is your seasoned guide to the imaginative world of Stephen King, covering his varied and prodigious output: juvenalia, short fiction, limited edition books, best-selling novels, and film adaptations.
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A Kingopedia: Books, Movies, Bio and Art
- By tru britty on 02-28-16
By: George Beahm
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City Boy
- My Life in New York During the 1960s and '70s
- By: Edmund White
- Narrated by: Robert Blumenfeld
- Length: 9 hrs and 31 mins
- Unabridged
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In the New York of the 1970s, in the wake of Stonewall and in the midst of economic collapse, you might find the likes of Jasper Johns and William Burroughs at the next cocktail party, and you were as likely to be caught arguing Marx at the New York City Ballet as cruising for sex in the warehouses and parked trucks along the Hudson. This is the New York that Edmund White portrays in City Boy: a place of enormous intrigue and artistic tumult.
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Pretense upon pretense.
- By Shalin Desai on 06-01-15
By: Edmund White
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Letters
- By: C. S. Lewis
- Narrated by: Ralph Cosham
- Length: 37 mins
- Unabridged
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This volume of short essays and other pieces by C. S. Lewis is part of a larger collection, C. S. Lewis: Essay Collection and Other Short Pieces. In addition to his many books, letters, and poems, C. S. Lewis wrote a great number of essays and shorter pieces on various subjects. He wrote extensively on Christian theology and the defense of faith but also on ethical issues and the nature of literature and storytelling. Within this audiobook is a treasure trove of Lewis' reflections on diverse topics.
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Just Lewis
- By William on 02-07-21
By: C. S. Lewis
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More than perhaps any other book, this collection by one of the most distinctive prose stylists of our era captures the unique time and place of Joan Didion’s focus, exploring subjects such as John Wayne and Howard Hughes, growing up in California and the nature of good and evil in a Death Valley motel room, and, especially, the essence of San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury, the heart of the counterculture.
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Mesmerizing
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"Life changes fast....You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends." These were among the first words Joan Didion wrote in January 2004. Her daughter was lying unconscious in an intensive care unit, a victim of pneumonia and septic shock. Her husband, John Gregory Dunne, was dead. The night before New Year's Eve, while they were sitting down to dinner, he suffered a massive and fatal coronary. The two had lived and worked side by side for nearly 40 years.
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Great book to Read, but I didn’t like it
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By: Joan Didion
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Play It as It Lays
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A ruthless dissection of American life in the late 1960s, Joan Didion's Play It as It Lays captures the mood of an entire generation, the ennui of contemporary society reflected in spare prose that blisters and haunts the listener. Set in a place beyond good and evil—literally in Hollywood, Las Vegas, and the barren wastes of the Mojave Desert, but figuratively in the landscape of an arid soul—it remains more than three decades after its original publication a profoundly disturbing novel, riveting in its exploration of a woman and a society in crisis.
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For every woman who’s been told to be the good wife
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Where I Was From
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In her moving and insightful new book, Joan Didion reassesses parts of her life, her work, her history and ours. A native Californian, Didion applies her scalpel-like intelligence to the state’s ethic of ruthless self-sufficiency in order to examine that ethic’s often tenuous relationship to reality. Combining history and reportage, memoir and literary criticism, Where I Was From explores California’s romances with land and water; its unacknowledged debts to railroads, aerospace, and big government; the disjunction between its code of individualism and its fetish for prisons.
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California belongs to Joan Didion.
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The White Album
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Mesmerizing
- By Thomas Mink on 11-25-24
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The Year of Magical Thinking
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"Life changes fast....You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends." These were among the first words Joan Didion wrote in January 2004. Her daughter was lying unconscious in an intensive care unit, a victim of pneumonia and septic shock. Her husband, John Gregory Dunne, was dead. The night before New Year's Eve, while they were sitting down to dinner, he suffered a massive and fatal coronary. The two had lived and worked side by side for nearly 40 years.
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Great book to Read, but I didn’t like it
- By Michael on 05-08-15
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Joan Didion has always kept notebooks: of overheard dialogue, observations, interviews, drafts of essays and articles—and here is one such draft that traces a road trip she took with her husband, John Gregory Dunne, in June 1970, through Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama. She interviews prominent local figures, describes motels, diners, a deserted reptile farm, a visit with Walker Percy, a ladies' brunch at the Mississippi Broadcasters' Convention.
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"Notes" Are Not a Book
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Joyce Carol Oates called Joan Didion "an articulate witness to the most stubborn and intractable truths of our time." Ms. Didion is the author of the novels Play It as It Lays and The Last Thing He Wanted, the essay collections Slouching Toward Bethlehem and The White Album, and the memoirs Where I Was From and The Year of Magical Thinking.
By: Joan Didion
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The Last Love Song
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Joan Didion lived a life in the public and private eye with her late husband, writer John Gregory Dunne, whom she met while the two were working in New York City, when Didion was at Vogue and Dunne was writing for Time. They became wildly successful writing partners when they moved to Los Angeles and cowrote screenplays and adaptations together. Didion is well known for her literary journalistic style in both fiction and nonfiction.
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Riveted for 1591 miles
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By: Tracy Daugherty
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Democracy
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Inez Victor knows that the major casualty of the political life is memory. But the people around Inez have made careers out of losing track. Her senator husband wants to forget the failure of his last bid for the presidency. Her husband's handler would like the press to forget that Inez's father is a murderer. And, in 1975, the year in which much of this bitterly funny novel is set, America is doing its best to lose track of its one-time client, the lethally hemorrhaging republic of South Vietnam.
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Exquisite
- By Adam Burke on 04-17-23
By: Joan Didion
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The World According to Joan Didion
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Joan Didion was a writer’s writer; not only a groundbreaking journalist, essayist, novelist and screenwriter, but a keen observer who honed her sights on life’s telling details. Her insights continue to influence creatives and admirers, encouraging them to become close observers of the world, unsentimental critics, and meticulous stylists. The World According to Joan Didion is a meditation on the people, places, and objects that propelled Didion’s prose and an invitation to journalists, storytellers, and life adventurers to “throw themselves into the convulsions of the world,” as she said.
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Woke, revisionist retelling of Didion's life and work.
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The Best American Essays 2023
- Best American
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In her introduction to this year’s The Best American Essays, guest editor Vivian Gornick states that her selections “contribute materially to the long and honorable history of the personal essay by way of the value they place on lived experience.” Provocative, daring, and honest at a time when many writers are deliberately silencing themselves in the face of authoritarian and populist censorship movements, the twenty-one essays collected here reflect their authors’ unapologetic observations of the world around them.
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Loved It
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By: Vivian Gornick, and others
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The Year of Magical Thinking
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When celebrated writer Joan Didion’s life was altered forever, she wrote a new chapter. In this adaptation of her iconic memoir, Didion transforms the story of the shattering loss of her husband and their daughter into a one-woman play performed by Tony Award winner Vanessa Redgrave, who originated the role on Broadway in 2007.
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Difficult story, but worth it
- By Maya on 08-07-20
By: Joan Didion
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Reborn
- Journals and Notebooks, 1947-1963
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"I intend to do everything...I shall anticipate pleasure everywhere and find it too, for it is everywhere! I shall involve myself wholly...everything matters!" This first selection from Susan Sontag's diaries (from 1947-1963) takes us from early adolescence through to when Sontag was in her early 30s. It is an astonishingly affecting and honest self-portrait which is also a fascinating, revealing account of an artist and critic being born. We see Sontag honing her skills and fashioning herself, by a supreme act of will, into an intellectual force.
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Performed well. But...
- By S. BAKER on 05-17-15
By: Susan Sontag
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Salvador
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The place is El Salvador in 1982, at the ghastly height of its civil war. The writer is Joan Didion, who delivers an anatomy of that country's particular brand of terror - its mechanisms, rationales, and intimate relation to United States foreign policy. As ash travels from battlefields to body dumps, interviews a puppet president, and considers the distinctly Salvadoran grammar of the verb "to disappear," Didion gives us a book that is germane to any country in which bloodshed has become a standard tool of politics.
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Didion writes like an orthopedic surgeon cuts
- By Darwin8u on 01-29-14
By: Joan Didion
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Run, River
- By: Joan Didion
- Narrated by: Holly Cate
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- Unabridged
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Joan Didion's electrifying first novel is a haunting portrait of a marriage whose wrong turns and betrayals are at once absolutely idiosyncratic and a razor-sharp commentary on the history of California. Everett McClellan and his wife, Lily, are the great-grandchildren of pioneers, and what happens to them is a tragic epilogue to the pioneer experience, a story of murder and betrayal that only Didion could tell with such nuance, sympathy, and suspense.
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Thought-provoking, riveting, memorable
- By Avalon on 08-23-13
By: Joan Didion
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Bad Feminist
- Essays
- By: Roxane Gay
- Narrated by: Bahni Turpin
- Length: 11 hrs and 46 mins
- Unabridged
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A collection of essays spanning politics, criticism, and feminism from one of the most-watched young cultural observers of her generation, Roxane Gay. In these funny and insightful essays, Roxane Gay takes us through the journey of her evolution as a woman ( Sweet Valley High) of color ( The Help) while also taking listeners on a ride through culture of the last few years ( Girls, Django in Chains) and commenting on the state of feminism today (abortion, Chris Brown).
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"I am a mess of contradictions" - RG
- By Cynthia on 12-27-15
By: Roxane Gay
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Didion and Babitz
- By: Lili Anolik
- Narrated by: Lili Anolik, Emma Roberts
- Length: 12 hrs and 34 mins
- Unabridged
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Could you write what you write if you weren’t so tiny, Joan? —Eve Babitz, in a letter to Joan Didion, 1972. Joan Didion, revealed at last… Eve Babitz died on December 17, 2021. Found in the wrack, ruin, and filth of her apartment, a stack of boxes packed by her mother decades before. The boxes were pristine, the seals of duct tape unbroken. Inside, a lost world. This world turned for a certain number of years in the late sixties and early seventies, and centered on a two-story rental in a down-at-heel section of Hollywood.
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I’m still Team Joan
- By Dorothy L. Lipman on 11-16-24
By: Lili Anolik
What listeners say about Let Me Tell You What I Mean
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- Etoile NEOhio
- 05-26-23
An interesting anthology
An interesting anthology of essays about people. I found the one about Hemmingway particularly insightful, especially her take on his posthumously published work. Next I liked her insights on Mapplethorpe. Fair warning, the last chapter is about Martha Stewart, I'm curious how fans and critics of Martha will react.
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- Greatbuttons
- 02-02-21
SUCH A FUN LISTEN
The author’s words were so much enhanced by the narrator I would love more of both.
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- Carrie Cameron
- 04-19-21
Hilton Als’ foreword alone is worth the price
Hilton Als’ foreword, an essay really, is outstanding. The stories in the book are okay but not Didion’s best work. Unfortunately the narrator is hopelessly miscast, reading “with expression” like a 2nd grade teacher at storytime, absolutely not Didion’s dry, sophisticated style.
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- Amazon Customer
- 03-27-21
My thoughts on “Let Me Tell You What I Mean”
Joan Didion and I, also a 5th generation Californian, grew up in the same environment, the Sacramento Valley, and share the same history. I read everything she writes and am, constantly amazed, at the ideas we share. My favorite will always be “Run River” which so perfectly captures this area I love. Nan Cook
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- xEricMichael
- 02-22-21
Yes! But...
Kimberly did a great job, however, her tone is off for Didion. Hilton Als did (and would continue to do) more justice to Joan in the introduction to the other works.
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- Amazon Customer
- 06-22-23
Goodbye, Joan Didion. See you soon.
Joan Didion, an iconic figure in American literature, returns from the afterlife to give us a collection of essays. This compilation, comprising twelve previously uncollected pieces showcases Didion’s distinctive voice and unyielding exploration of society and culture. I love this book even though it doesn’t deliver any groundbreaking ideas. It is a valuable bookend to a fantastic and complete career. What sets it apart is her ability to dissect her journey as a writer and her own writing style. She offers the reader into a fresh glimpse into her process.
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- Pamela
- 02-03-21
Didion deserves a better narrator
I adore Joan Didion and have read all of her work. It’s wonderful to have these previously uncollected pieces. But this narrator doesn’t do her justice. She sounds too chirpy and unserious — the opposite of Joan Didion. I’ve listened to other books she’s narrated and will avoid them in the future. Also, I have to wonder why Didion included the last essay, about Martha Stewart, as it predates her downfall for insider trader. It sounds strangely incomplete, and it’s odd to hear Didion defend someone who, in the end, does not deserve it.
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- AMG
- 01-19-23
Skip The Forward
Kimberly Farr as the main narrator, did an excellent job. However, Hilton Al’s forward does an injustice.
His more-bored-than-thou molasses intonation is as dull as Didion’s writing is perceptive. So, do yourself a favor and skip it.
After being saturated with the stories of Ernest Hemingway in high school by male teachers who offered the writings of suicidal women as fair barter for the neurological real estate in our young, impressionable minds, I took great pains to avoid it thereafter.
What we received for every completed Hemingway novel were a few poems by Anne Sexton or Sylvia Plath which hardly comprises any kind of reciprocity or even sound judgment.
Didion has done the remarkable in one very personal regard: she has made me curious about Hemingway, specifically, “Hills Like White Elephants.”
Isn’t that indicative of her true generosity; the fact that she makes her reader more curious?
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- Silverthorne
- 03-08-21
Feels like the party’s over
Listening to this book made me sad. The old pieces seemed so over, the references so likely to be mysterious to anyone under the age of 50. And the encomium to Martha Stewart , a brave attempt, felt embarrassing. I think it’s just time for Didion to hang up her quill.
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- Kristin
- 12-22-21
Horrible voice. Can't stand it. Als was lovely.
Horrible voice. Can't stand it. Als was lovely in the Intro.
Why do you do that? Jusy hire tolerable voices.
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