South and West: From Some Notebooks

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Joan Didion fans and those new to her work will enjoy this collection of journals kept while she traveled the American south and California. The "South" section focuses on her time spent road tripping through the southern states with her husband. There she records overheard dialogue, interviews locals, eats at roadside diners, and encounters the stifling heat only found in the south. In "West," she's in California covering the Patty Hearst trial for Rolling Stone. While the coverage never gets published, her notes, the trial itself, and her relationship to California provide a wonderful, insightful, and short read that is part travelogue, part memoir, and part sociological inquiry. A great vacation read! Recommended By Emily L., Powells.com

If everyone wrote journal entries as honestly and incisively as Joan Didion, what a fully drawn world it would be. South and West is comprised of two diary excerpts from the ’70s, yet its focus on tensions surrounding place feels so relevant today. Recommended By Renee P., Powells.com

From the best-selling author of the National Book Award-winning The Year of Magical Thinking: two extended excerpts from her never-before-seen notebooks – writings that offer an illuminating glimpse into the mind and process of a legendary writer.

Joan Didion has always kept notebooks: of overheard dialogue, observations, interviews, drafts of essays and articles – and here is one such draft that traces a road trip she took with her husband, John Gregory Dunne, in June 1970, through Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama. She interviews prominent local figures, describes motels, diners, a deserted reptile farm, a visit with Walker Percy, a ladies’ brunch at the Mississippi Broadcasters’ Convention. She writes about the stifling heat, the almost viscous pace of life, the sulfurous light, and the preoccupation with race, class, and heritage she finds in the small towns they pass through. And from a different notebook: the “California Notes” that began as an assignment from Rolling Stone on the Patty Hearst trial of 1976. Though Didion never wrote the piece, watching the trial and being in San Francisco triggered thoughts about the city, its social hierarchy, the Hearsts, and her own upbringing in Sacramento. Here, too, is the beginning of her thinking about the West, its landscape, the western women who were heroic for her, and her own lineage, all of which would appear later in her acclaimed 2003 book, Where I Was From.

One of TIME’s most anticipated books of 2017

One of The New York Times Book Review’s “What You’ll Be Reading in 2017”

"South and West: From a Notebook reveals the author at her most fascinatingly unfiltered, recording folksy vernacular at a motel pool, having G & Ts with Walker Percy, and searching fruitlessly for Faulkner’s grave in an Oxford cemetery…her riffs on everything from Gertrude Atherton to crossing the Golden Gate bridge for the first time in three-inch heels captures the thrill of a writer discovering her richest subject: the American mythologies that governed her own romantic girlhood, a yearning for an MGM-style heritage that never really was — a yearning that feels freshly perilous in its delusions." Megan O’Grady, Vogue

"You’ll learn more about America’s future from Didion’s 40-year-old field notes…than you will from tomorrow’s newspaper." Esquire

"South and West is a compelling book — rooted utterly in a past now all but lost to us, while also incredibly timely and relevant…[it] bears the hallmarks of Didion’s sparkling prose: her use of detail, juxtaposition, and compression…sentence fragment, description, and insight…Originally written in the 1970s as a pair of diaries, it finally sees the light of day at a moment when California and the Real America of the South are warring over the soul of the country…. South and West is vital, ultimately, for how it demonstrates (even inadvertently) how such a tension plays out." Colin Dickey, The Los Angeles Review of Books

From the best-selling author of the National Book Award-winning The Year of Magical Thinking two extended excerpts from her never-before-seen notebooks--writings that offer an illuminating glimpse into the mind and process of a legendary writer.
Joan Didion has always kept notebooks: of overheard dialogue, observations, interviews, drafts of essays and articles--and here is one such draft that traces a road trip she took with her husband, John Gregory Dunne, in June 1970, through Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama. She interviews prominent local figures, describes motels, diners, a deserted reptile farm, a visit with Walker Percy, a ladies' brunch at the Mississippi Broadcasters' Convention. She writes about the stifling heat, the almost viscous pace of life, the sulfurous light, and the preoccupation with race, class, and heritage she finds in the small towns they pass through. And from a different notebook: the "California Notes" that began as an assignment from Rolling Stone on the Patty Hearst trial of 1976. Though Didion never wrote the piece, watching the trial and being in San Francisco triggered thoughts about the city, its social hierarchy, the Hearsts, and her own upbringing in Sacramento. Here, too, is the beginning of her thinking about the West, its landscape, the western women who were heroic for her, and her own lineage, all of which would appear later in her acclaimed 2003 book, Where I Was From.

Joan Didion is the author of five novels and nine books of nonfiction. Her collected nonfiction, We Tell Ourselves Stories in Order to Live, was published by Everyman’s Library in 2006. Born in Sacramento, California, Didion now lives in New York City.