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Lemonada. This is Talk Easy. I'm Sam Fregoso. Welcome to the show.

Today, I am joined by writer Hilton Ailes. He won the Pulitzer Prize for criticism in 2017 for his work at The New Yorker,

where he's been on staff since 1994.

In his three decades at the magazine,

he's written seminal profiles of Tony Morrison,

Maggie Nelson,

and the late Andre Leon Talley. Since 2012, he's been the magazine's

lead theater critic. When he's not writing for the New Yorker, he's writing for himself.

He's authored a handful of books, including The Women, White Girls, and his latest My Pinup,

an exploration of desire, sexuality, race,

and prints. He does all that in less than 50 pages in this new novella, and it's fairly characteristic of Hilton's work, which is marked by a kind of expansiveness, entwining memoir with literary criticism.

Hilton has taken these qualities, usually reserved for the page,

and recently brought them to the Hammer Museum,

where he's organized a new exhibition titled Joan Didion, What She Means.

It's a stirring portrait of the late author, featuring more than

200 works of painting, photography, sculpture, video, and footage from a number of films for which

Didion authored screenplays. For today, Hilton and I, of course, unpack these new projects around

...