South and West
From a Notebook
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4.3 • 10 Ratings
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- $15.99
Publisher Description
NATIONAL BESTSELLER • “One of contemporary literature’s most revered essayists revives her raw records from a 1970s road trip across the American southwest ... her acute observations of the country’s culture and history feel particularly resonant today.” —Harper’s Bazaar
Joan Didion, the bestselling, award-winning author of The Year of Magical Thinking and Let Me Tell You What I Mean, has always kept notebooks—of overheard dialogue, interviews, drafts of essays, copies of articles. Here are two extended excerpts from notebooks she kept in the 1970s; read together, they form a piercing view of the American political and cultural landscape.
“Notes on the South” traces a road trip that she and her husband, John Gregory Dunne, took through Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama. Her acute observations about the small towns they pass through, her interviews with local figures, and their preoccupation with race, class, and heritage suggest a South largely unchanged today.
“California Notes” began as an assignment from Rolling Stone on the Patty Hearst trial. Though Didion never wrote the piece, the time she spent watching the trial in San Francisco triggered thoughts about the West and her own upbringing in Sacramento. Here we not only see Didion’s signature irony and imagination in play, we’re also granted an illuminating glimpse into her mind and process.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
Thinking about publishing the contents of one of the many notebooks we’ve filled throughout the years makes us cringe, but it’s a testament to Joan Didion’s talent that her raw, impressionistic records of her 1970 road trip in the American South hum with relevance and ominous foreshadowing. In his introduction to this slim book—which we tore through in one sitting—author Nathaniel Rich summarizes the effect beautifully: “Joan Didion went to the South to understand something about California and she ended up understanding something about America.”
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Even in raw form, Didion's (Blue Nights) voice surpasses other writers' in "elegance and clarity," Nathaniel Rich astutely observes in his introduction to Didion's notebooks from her 1970 trip to Louisiana, Alabama, and Mississippi and much shorter 1976 musings about her California youth. Didion's notes display her characteristic verbal power: details such as "bananas would rot, and harbor tarantulas" (about New Orleans weather) punctuate this short volume. Moreover, Didion reveals remarkable foresight about America's political direction: Rich traces a direct line from her nearly 50-year-old musings on the Gulf Coast as America's "psychic center" to the Trump election. But most strikingly, Didion's observations reveal differences with today, such as a degree of civility now often missing from public discourse. In one dinner exchange, for example, a wealthy white Mississippian gripes about busing, yet says, "Basically I know the people who are pushing it are right." Students of social history, fans of Didion, and those seeking a quick, engaging read will appreciate this work: the raw immediacy of unedited prose by a master has an urgency that more polished works often lack. This review has been corrected to reflect a slight change in the title.
