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)