What’s so remarkable about Didion is her constant newness, even when the essays date back to the sixties. Didion knows that just as Mapplethorpe’s photographs told us more about Mapplethorpe than they told us about his subjects, so will anything Didion writes about Mapplethorpe tell us more about Didion than anything else. “The business of the subject is tricky.” And indeed it is. When Didion writes about Robert Mapplethorpe in 1989, she is writing about his death, but also not writing about death. The pear is a pear, but it is also the fact of the pear as it fits into the narrative of the specific that makes Didion’s descriptions work. When Didion writes about a photographer, she is not writing about photography or even really about the photographer himself, but about a particular kind of truth a photographer can tell. Truth is often elusive, and so we write stories to chase the truth, as if it can be found in the finality of a period, or in the process of a clause unfolding. At least, as a writer, I have used storytelling to uncover what truths I can. Joan Didion’s newest book, “Let Me Tell You What I Mean,” like all non-fiction, searches for a kind of truth that exists outside the thing itself.
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