Joan Didion questioned the idea of objective journalism, writes Hilton Als in his Foreword for Didion’s last collection of essays, Let Me Tell You What I Mean. Admit that you have filters, and that “who you are at the time you wrote this” determines what you see. It might be hard to appreciate how radical this idea was in the 1960s when Didion was at the vanguard of a revolution in story-telling that challenged so many assumptions. A new way to understand her work opened this week: an art gallery in Los Angeles (curated by Hilton Als) tells her story.
Als, Hilton. Foreword. Let Me Tell You What I Mean, by Joan Didion, Vintage International, 2021, p. x.