Name: Let Me Tell You What I Mean
ISBN: 9780008451752

Joan Didion

Let Me Tell You What I Mean

Elijah Roderos

I admire objectivity very much indeed, but I fail to see how it can be achieved if the reader does not understand the writer's particular bias. For the writer to pretend that he has none lends the venture a mendacity that has never infected The Wall Street Journal and does not yet infect the underground press. When a writer for an under- ground paper approves or disapproves of something, he says so, quite often in lieu of who, what, where, when, how.

MIRACLES STILL HAPPEN, the cake read. "It hasn't been easy," Frank L. said, surrounded by his wife, his children, and his wife's parents. "But in the last three, four weeks we ve gotten a. . .a serenity at home." Well, there it was. I got out fast then, before anyone could say "serenity" again, for it is a word I associate with death, and for several days after that meeting I wanted only to be in places where the lights were bright and no one counted days.

All writing is generated by a certain minimum of ego: you must assume a position of authority in saying that the way I'm writing it is the only way it happened. Writer's block, for example, is simply a failure of ego.

Let Me Tell You What I Mean

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