JOAN DIDION DESCRIBED her creative process as an attempt to paint pictures with words. In her 1976 essay “Why I Write,” the journalist, essayist, novelist, playwright and screenwriter said that she saw “pictures in my mind … images that shimmer around the edges.” Her goal was to decipher and document the object in the mist, as if pinning a moth to cardboard: “You don’t talk to many people and you keep your nervous system from shorting out and you try to locate the cat in the shimmer, the grammar in the picture.”
The exhibit “What She Means,” which occupies several rooms at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, tries to recreate the world as the, published in 2021. Exhibit co-curator Hilton Als, a Pulitzer Prize-winning critic at , wrote the introduction to that book and has become one of the most authoritative and vocal champions of Didion’s work. As a Black, queer East Coast intellectual who authored a book called , Als’ notes on the California-born writer are also distinctively situated. He began working on this show in consultation with the author before her death in December 2021. The curator had to finish the tribute without its muse, an undoubtedly emotional task that had Als sweating as he walked journalists around the exhibit on opening night, trying to explain and express the woman who meant so much to him.