In the early 1960s, when she was learning her craft by turning out promotional and merchandising copy for Vogue (“not unlike training for the Rockettes”), Joan Didion wrote a number of pieces for National Review. That might surprise those who have read her skewering portraits of the Reagans and other conservatives in The New York Review of Books, but as a young woman Didion was an “ardent” Barry Goldwater supporter with an abiding faith in the myths of rugged American individualism. That came with the territory in the staunchly Republican and relatively genteel surroundings of Sacramento, where she was born and grew up. (The details can be found in Where I Was From, a book about leaving those “confusions” behind and one that took her 30 years to write.) For this magazine she reviewed novels by Norman Mailer, Evelyn Waugh, and Graham Greene. She also wrote about the “women’s ‘service’ magazines” she avidly read, dissecting their concerns with female sexual propriety and the conundrums of how faltering marriages might be saved. (Ironically, as a columnist for Life in 1969, she would shock readers by writing about a visit to Hawaii and famously confessing, “We are here on this island in the middle of the Pacific in lieu of getting a divorce.” That column would be repurposed as part of a chapter in The White Album, her paradigmatic 1979 essay collection about life in Southern California “after the Sixties.”)

Didion was for the most part an admirer of the books and authors she reviewed for NR. She is surprisingly enthusiastic about Mailer’s An American Dream. That novel’s incidents of lurid sex and violence and its narrator’s existentialist and vatic pronouncements, left most reviewers and readers at a loss, if not aghast. But it was Mailer’s “deep feeling for the mysteries of power” and “final refusal to sail with the prevailing winds” that appealed to Didion. Like F. Scott Fitzgerald, she argued, Mailer had “an instinct for the essence of things,” the “kind of imagination that makes legend of experience.” She herself, of course, has long insisted that “we tell ourselves stories in order to live.”

Her greatest admiration was for Waugh’s World War II trilogy, Men at War, and especially for Waugh’s “hardness of mind,” a trait Didion believed most Americans, eager to discard the past and focus on promises of a limitless future, find difficult to come to terms with. “Every real American story begins in innocence and never stops mourning the loss of it: the banishment from Eden is our one great tale,” she writes. “Because hardness of mind is antithetical to innocence, it is not only alien to us but generally misapprehended.” Waugh’s American critics saw the trilogy as little more than a brilliant satire, when in reality he had written “a complex elegiac study of the breakdown of a civilization, a great work” about one man’s doomed attempt “to make a social cause a moral cause in a society bereft of moral meaning.”

None of her writing for National Review is included in Let Me Tell You What I Mean, a gathering of Didion’s pre­viously uncollected essays. The author is 86, and this slim volume naturally feels like a valedictory exercise. Many of the pieces were written for The Saturday Evening Post in the late 1960s. Two appeared much later in The New Yorker. One New Yorker piece is a ruminative examination of the appeal and success of Martha Stewart (“She has branded herself not as Superwoman but as Everywoman, a distinction that seems to remain unclear to her critics”). The other is a penetrating appreciation of Ernest Hemingway’s writing. Didion’s analysis of Hemingway’s attention to punctuation and to every “and” and “the” includes a sharp rebuke of his widow and sons for posthumously publishing writing Hemingway intended never to see the light of day. Nothing of a writer’s work should be published until the author is satisfied he has truly “written it into being,” she pronounces. Drafts, outlines, or notes do not a novel make. Almost as dishonorable, Didion makes clear, is the willingness of Hem­ing­way’s children to profit off something as absurd as the “Ernest Hemingway Collection,” household items available from the International Home Furnish­ings Market in High Point, N.C. To be marketed as a commercial brand is an ignominious fate for a man who “construe[d] words as the manifest expression of personal honor.”

That is a credo Didion herself has tried to live by. The title of this collection is a slightly altered version of a sentence in the essay “Why I Write.” The essay was originally an address given at Berkeley, her alma mater, when she was there for a month in 1976 as a visiting professor. “I am not in the least an intellectual,” she confesses; “I do not think in abstracts.” Instead, her interests and talents are focused on the “specific,” the “tangible,” the “peripheral.” It is what she can “see and taste and touch” that galvanizes her attention. “I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means,” she explains. In the act of writing, what is real and true — “the essence of things” she found in Mailer and Fitzgerald — is in some palpable sense revealed to her. In the act of writing, the “shimmer” in the people, situations, and things she encounters is made manifest. “The arrangement of words matters, and the arrangement you want can be found in the picture in your mind. The picture dictates the arrangement,” she writes. “It tells you. You don’t tell it.”

Critics have used many words to describe Didion and her writing: aloof, neurasthenic, confessional, narcissistic, impressionistic, cinematic, introspective, contrarian. Most agree, however, that at her best there is — to use a phrase she employs to describe Hemingway’s writing — a “liturgical cadence” to her sentences. The repetition of phrases such as “I remember” or “I recall” is a common incantation. Writing, she insists, is about remembering. Raised a church­going Episcopalian, she uses terms such as “transubstantiated” and “sacramental” to evoke the process.

“Will and energy and memory and concentration” are what it takes to get words arranged properly on the page. Most of the essays in this collection evince those qualities. They are also full of sharp opinions. Didion is intensely interested in the world as it is, not as it should be. In this sense, her writing is uncluttered by moral aspiration yet infused with moral judgment. For example, she takes jaundiced views of the mainstream press and the twelve-step program of Gamblers Anonymous in two 1968 pieces for The Saturday Eve­ning Post. In good contrarian fashion, she prefers the alternative or underground weeklies and the Wall Street Journal to the New York or the Los Angeles Times. “The most admired news­papermen are no longer adversaries but confidants, participants,” she complains. At least with the Journal and counterculture journalism you know what the agenda is. “These papers ig­nore the conventional newspaper code, say what they mean. They are strident and brash, but they do not irritate.” The “unspoken attitudes” of the “traditional press” irritate, coming “between the page and reader like so much marsh gas.” As for Gamblers Anonymous, while the desperation of the participants’ efforts to shed addiction was humbling, she balked at their subsequent embrace and celebration of a hard-won “serenity.” “It is a word I associate with death,” she writes, ending the piece by confessing, in a hard-minded way, a longing for the glamour and false promises of time spent in a casino.

Let Me Tell You What I Mean includes the unexpectedly touching essay “On Being Unchosen by the College of One’s Choice.” Didion had longed to go to Stanford, but was rejected while all her friends who had applied were accepted. She was devastated in a way that perhaps only an 18-year-old can be. “We lived then in a big dark Victorian house, and I had a sharp and dolorous image of myself growing old in it, never going to school anywhere, the spinster in Washington Square,” she writes. “I went upstairs to my room and locked the door and for a couple of hours I cried.” Her parents, luckily, were utterly indifferent about which college, if any, she should attend. She got over Stanford’s essentially random judgment, and looks with apprehension at the pressure now placed on children’s college ambitions. “And of course none of it matters very much at all, none of the early successes, early failures,” writes the eventual National Book Award winner.

“Distinctively dolorous by nature” is how Didion characterized herself at the beginning of her Waugh review. There is plenty of evidence in this essay collection of that disposition, as well as of the “hardness of mind” that she admired in Waugh and that she herself is often known for. “I have trouble maintaining the basic notion that keeping promises matters in a world where everything I was taught seems beside the point,” she wrote in The White Album about the romantic expectations she grew up with. But Didion’s voice on the page has always possessed a recognizable American longing for clarity and honesty about the possibilities of life on this cruel yet astonishing continent. She may struggle to keep some of her promises, but as a matter of personal honor she has kept the promises made to readers.