You can disguise its aggressiveness all you want with veils of subordinate clauses and qualifiers and tentative subjunctives, with ellipses and evasions – with the whole manner of intimating rather than claiming, of alluding rather than stating – but there’s no getting around the fact that setting words on paper is the tactic of a secret bully, an invasion, an imposition of the writer’s sensibility on the reader’s most private space.

In many ways, writing is the art of saying I, of imposing oneself upon other people, of saying “listen to me, see it my way, change your mind.” It’s an aggressive, even a hostile act. There you have three short unambiguous words that share a sound, and the sound they share is this: One reason I stole it was that I like the sound of the words: Why I Write. Of course I stole the title for this talk, from George Orwell. Each one is classic Didion: incisive, bemused, and stunningly prescient. Here too is a 1976 piece from the New York Times magazine on 'Why I Write' a piece about short stories from New West in 1978 and from The New Yorker, a piece on Hemingway from 1998, and on Martha Stewart from 2000.

Here are six pieces written in 1968 from the 'Points West' Saturday Evening Post column Joan Didion shared from 1964 to 1969 with her husband, John Gregory Dunne about: American newspapers a session with Gamblers Anonymous a visit to San Simeon being rejected by Stanford dropping in on Nancy Reagan, wife of the then-governor of California, while a TV crew filmed her at home and an evening at the annual reunion of WWII veterans from the 101st Airborne Association at the Stardust Hotel in Las Vegas. From one of our most iconic and influential writers: 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.

Let me tell you what i mean book review