Joan Didion (1934-2021) wrote two justifiably celebrated grief memoirs: The Year of Magical Thinking (2005), prompted by the 2003 death of her husband, writer John Gregory Dunne, and its tragic companion, Blue Nights (2011), about the 2005 death of their daughter. I Write to Find Out What I Am Thinking packages those memoirs with two lesser-known titles, fusing the last four books Didion published in her lifetime into one meaty compendium.
South and West: From a Notebook (2017) features two pieces no less interesting for their incompleteness. "Notes on the South" offers Didion's observations gathered during a 1970 road trip around the southern United States ("The Civil War was yesterday, but 1960 is spoken of as if it were about three hundred years ago"). "California Notes" collects her 1976 jottings about fellow Golden State daughter Patty Hearst; these abandoned notes would seed Didion's 2003 memoir, Where I Was From.
Let Me Tell You What I Mean (2021) is manna for fans of Journalist Joan. The book's 12 essays include two pieces written decades apart that capture the evolution of Didion's profile work. Whereas stalactite-sharp objectivity guides 1968's "Pretty Nancy," about then first lady of California Nancy Reagan, Didion plays her hand in 2000's "Everywoman.com," about another much-mocked public figure: Martha Stewart "has branded herself not as Superwoman but as Everywoman, a distinction that seems to remain unclear to her critics."
Only one thing links the thematically disparate books bundled here: Didion's exacting sentences, so well preserved that they seem to have been set on ice. --Nell Beram, author and freelance writer