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South and West: From a Notebook
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 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.
160 pages, Hardcover
First published March 7, 2017
About the author
Joan Didion
94 books13.7k followersJoan Didion was an American writer and journalist. She is considered one of the pioneers of New Journalism along with Gay Talese, Hunter S. Thompson, and Tom Wolfe.
Didion's career began in the 1950s after she won an essay contest sponsored by Vogue magazine. Over the course of her career, Didion wrote essays for many magazines, including The Saturday Evening Post, Life, Esquire, The New York Review of Books and The New Yorker. Her writing during the 1960s through the late 1970s engaged audiences in the realities of the counterculture of the 1960s, the Hollywood lifestyle, and the history and culture of California. Didion's political writing in the 1980s and 1990s often concentrated on the subtext of political rhetoric and the United States's foreign policy in Latin America. In 1991, she wrote the earliest mainstream media article to suggest the Central Park Five had been wrongfully convicted. In 2005, Didion won the National Book Award for Nonfiction and was a finalist for both the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Pulitzer Prize for The Year of Magical Thinking, a memoir of the year following the death of her husband, writer John Gregory Dunne. She later adapted the book into a play that premiered on Broadway in 2007. In 2013, she was awarded the National Humanities Medal by president Barack Obama. Didion was profiled in the Netflix documentary The Center Will Not Hold, directed by her nephew Griffin Dunne, in 2017.
Didion's career began in the 1950s after she won an essay contest sponsored by Vogue magazine. Over the course of her career, Didion wrote essays for many magazines, including The Saturday Evening Post, Life, Esquire, The New York Review of Books and The New Yorker. Her writing during the 1960s through the late 1970s engaged audiences in the realities of the counterculture of the 1960s, the Hollywood lifestyle, and the history and culture of California. Didion's political writing in the 1980s and 1990s often concentrated on the subtext of political rhetoric and the United States's foreign policy in Latin America. In 1991, she wrote the earliest mainstream media article to suggest the Central Park Five had been wrongfully convicted. In 2005, Didion won the National Book Award for Nonfiction and was a finalist for both the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Pulitzer Prize for The Year of Magical Thinking, a memoir of the year following the death of her husband, writer John Gregory Dunne. She later adapted the book into a play that premiered on Broadway in 2007. In 2013, she was awarded the National Humanities Medal by president Barack Obama. Didion was profiled in the Netflix documentary The Center Will Not Hold, directed by her nephew Griffin Dunne, in 2017.
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Displaying 1 - 29 of 1,547 reviews
November 30, 2023
i'm didion-ing again.
this is like reading didion's notes for a book of common prayer.
in other words, it's like being told by some sort of cool girl literary genie that you've been granted a behind the scenes look at a didion book, and you're freaking out, like: is it the year of magical thinking! is it play it as it lays! is it blue nights!
and then being told, no...it's one of her less successful and known works. but like. it's still didion.
so less exciting, but still a treat to glimpse inside one of the coolest minds there ever was.
mixed with travels with charley, which can only be a good thing.
bottom line: clever and incisive and a low-level wish come true!
this is like reading didion's notes for a book of common prayer.
in other words, it's like being told by some sort of cool girl literary genie that you've been granted a behind the scenes look at a didion book, and you're freaking out, like: is it the year of magical thinking! is it play it as it lays! is it blue nights!
and then being told, no...it's one of her less successful and known works. but like. it's still didion.
so less exciting, but still a treat to glimpse inside one of the coolest minds there ever was.
mixed with travels with charley, which can only be a good thing.
bottom line: clever and incisive and a low-level wish come true!
![Profile Image for Orsodimondo [part time reader at the moment].](https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/users/1528452721i/10490224._UY200_CR39,0,200,200_.jpg)
August 27, 2021
LA NUOTATRICE
Alice Tye: Slouching towards Biloxi.
La nuotatrice: perché da l’idea che come Ned, il protagonista del racconto di Cheever, Didion abbia nuotato di piscina in piscina, non quelle delle ville di amici bensì quelle di alberghi e motel, abbia attraversato il sud e il Golfo a nuoto seguendo la pista delle piscine:
All’Edgewater Gulf Hotel di Biloxi “l’acqua puzza di pesce”, all’Hotel Johnson’s di Meridian un bambino si asciuga con la bandiera confederata, al Ramada Inn di Tuscaloosa “tutto sembrava fatto di cemento, e umido”, a Winfield la piscina è piena di alghe, all’Holiday Inn di Oxford si sente la radio sott’acqua, e al motel St. Francis di Birmingham il suo bikini è oggetto di battute da parte degli avventori del bar.
Lo scopo del viaggio in quel luogo, dove Joan non avrebbe mai pensato di tornare da sposata, è scoprire se davvero il Sud è la nuova frontiera del paese.
In verità, era capire la California attraverso il Sud perché molti dei pionieri californiani venivano da lì.
Sembra una contradizione in termini: perché quel sud annega nel proprio passato, mentre l’Ovest guarda al futuro.
Didion riporta brandelli di conversazione carpiti in negozi e ristoranti, annota le scritte delle lapidi nei cimiteri e i cartelli stradali, s’aggira indolente conforme alle abitudini e alla temperatura viscosa che quelle zone fanno venire in mente.
Il signore nella foto insieme a Joan, Stan Torgerson, è l’autore di questa frase che trovo il succo e l’essenza del Sud confederato:
Non le dico che inviterei a cena da me un pastore nero, perché non lo farei. Ma le cose stanno cambiando. L’altro giorno parlavo con un tizio che ha un negozio di elettrodomestici, non pensava che avrebbe mai potuto mandare un tecnico nero a casa di qualcuno. Ora non trova un bianco… Mi ha chiesto se conosco un nero che faccia buona impressione. Questo si chiama progresso.
La Corvette e l’eterna sigaretta.
Varia critica ha trovato che il gran valore di questo breve libro sia nel sapere anticipare il futuro: dal 1970 Joan ha predetto quello che sarebbe poi successo nel 2016 con l’elezione di Trump.
Come se la Cotton Belt sia diventata Rust Belt e abbia fornito l’elettorato per l'elezione del 45esimo presidente degli US (che forse ha almeno raggiunto un obiettivo speriamo imbattibile: essere il più orribile e mostruoso di tutti).
Come se il muro della vergogna sia lo specchio dei muri che allora imponevano la segregazione razziale.
Una festosa manifestazione del KKK con sventolio di bandiere confederate.
A me pare che la predizione, se davvero esiste, sia poco importante: a parte un magnifico insuperabile ritratto di quella parte dell’America del nord in quel periodo, è la prosa, lo stile di Didion che come sempre mi conquista, l’impassibilità maestosa della sua prosa, scritta come da una grande distanza, una distanza quasi empirea, un’apparente impassibilità e distanza che io avverto pulsanti.
Incrocio ferroviario in Mississippi.
Ho letto tutto quello che di Joan Didion è stato pubblicato in italiano, e finora l’ho sempre avvicinata a Flaubert e al suo ‘mot juste’.
Questa volta, invece, mi ha fatto pensare a Brian Wilson, alla sua attenzione per la scrittura e la registrazione musicale, che col tempo divenne ossessione. Ho pensato in particolare a quel capolavoro di Pet Sounds con quelle gemme che si chiamavano Wouldn’t It Be Nice o God Only Knows. Album riconosciuto “come uno dei più influenti della storia della musica pop”, in testa a molte classifiche degli album migliori di tutti i tempi, che forse prese il nome anche dalla sperimentazione (clavicembali, il Theremin, ma anche campanelli di biciclette, e perfino cani che abbaiano, tra cui proprio quello di Wilson, il suo Banana, chissà se il pet del titolo si riferisce a lui.
L’attrice sceneggiatrice e regista Greta Gerwig insieme a Saoirse Ronan, la protagonista del suo bel film “Lady Bird”, che può essere visto anche come un omaggio a Joan Didion, una cui frase è usata come epigrafe del film, Anyone who talks about California hedonism has never spent a Christmas in Sacramento.
La scrittura della Didion è come se fosse perennemente alla ricerca della nota giusta, dell’arrangiamento appropriato, della parola perfetta, della stratificazione sonora. La melodia eterna, l’armonia indimenticabile.
E qui, trattandosi di appunti, del taccuino di un viaggio nel Sud degli States compiuto insieme al marito nel 1970, un mese a girovagare senza meta e senza vero scopo su una macchina in affitto, note e appunti che non diventarono mai un pezzo concluso e pubblicato (ripescato nel 2017), annusando, registrando mentalmente, guardando, annotando, ho pensato ancor più che a Pet Sounds alle Smile Sessions dove è possibile ascoltare tentativi, rifacimenti e …. Di canzoni indimenticabili, su tutte quel capolavoro intitolato Good Vibrations
Ci raccontiamo storie perché dobbiamo vivere.
Alice Tye: Slouching towards Biloxi.
La nuotatrice: perché da l’idea che come Ned, il protagonista del racconto di Cheever, Didion abbia nuotato di piscina in piscina, non quelle delle ville di amici bensì quelle di alberghi e motel, abbia attraversato il sud e il Golfo a nuoto seguendo la pista delle piscine:
All’Edgewater Gulf Hotel di Biloxi “l’acqua puzza di pesce”, all’Hotel Johnson’s di Meridian un bambino si asciuga con la bandiera confederata, al Ramada Inn di Tuscaloosa “tutto sembrava fatto di cemento, e umido”, a Winfield la piscina è piena di alghe, all’Holiday Inn di Oxford si sente la radio sott’acqua, e al motel St. Francis di Birmingham il suo bikini è oggetto di battute da parte degli avventori del bar.
Lo scopo del viaggio in quel luogo, dove Joan non avrebbe mai pensato di tornare da sposata, è scoprire se davvero il Sud è la nuova frontiera del paese.
In verità, era capire la California attraverso il Sud perché molti dei pionieri californiani venivano da lì.
Sembra una contradizione in termini: perché quel sud annega nel proprio passato, mentre l’Ovest guarda al futuro.
Didion riporta brandelli di conversazione carpiti in negozi e ristoranti, annota le scritte delle lapidi nei cimiteri e i cartelli stradali, s’aggira indolente conforme alle abitudini e alla temperatura viscosa che quelle zone fanno venire in mente.
Il signore nella foto insieme a Joan, Stan Torgerson, è l’autore di questa frase che trovo il succo e l’essenza del Sud confederato:
Non le dico che inviterei a cena da me un pastore nero, perché non lo farei. Ma le cose stanno cambiando. L’altro giorno parlavo con un tizio che ha un negozio di elettrodomestici, non pensava che avrebbe mai potuto mandare un tecnico nero a casa di qualcuno. Ora non trova un bianco… Mi ha chiesto se conosco un nero che faccia buona impressione. Questo si chiama progresso.
La Corvette e l’eterna sigaretta.
Varia critica ha trovato che il gran valore di questo breve libro sia nel sapere anticipare il futuro: dal 1970 Joan ha predetto quello che sarebbe poi successo nel 2016 con l’elezione di Trump.
Come se la Cotton Belt sia diventata Rust Belt e abbia fornito l’elettorato per l'elezione del 45esimo presidente degli US (che forse ha almeno raggiunto un obiettivo speriamo imbattibile: essere il più orribile e mostruoso di tutti).
Come se il muro della vergogna sia lo specchio dei muri che allora imponevano la segregazione razziale.
Una festosa manifestazione del KKK con sventolio di bandiere confederate.
A me pare che la predizione, se davvero esiste, sia poco importante: a parte un magnifico insuperabile ritratto di quella parte dell’America del nord in quel periodo, è la prosa, lo stile di Didion che come sempre mi conquista, l’impassibilità maestosa della sua prosa, scritta come da una grande distanza, una distanza quasi empirea, un’apparente impassibilità e distanza che io avverto pulsanti.
Incrocio ferroviario in Mississippi.
Ho letto tutto quello che di Joan Didion è stato pubblicato in italiano, e finora l’ho sempre avvicinata a Flaubert e al suo ‘mot juste’.
Questa volta, invece, mi ha fatto pensare a Brian Wilson, alla sua attenzione per la scrittura e la registrazione musicale, che col tempo divenne ossessione. Ho pensato in particolare a quel capolavoro di Pet Sounds con quelle gemme che si chiamavano Wouldn’t It Be Nice o God Only Knows. Album riconosciuto “come uno dei più influenti della storia della musica pop”, in testa a molte classifiche degli album migliori di tutti i tempi, che forse prese il nome anche dalla sperimentazione (clavicembali, il Theremin, ma anche campanelli di biciclette, e perfino cani che abbaiano, tra cui proprio quello di Wilson, il suo Banana, chissà se il pet del titolo si riferisce a lui.
L’attrice sceneggiatrice e regista Greta Gerwig insieme a Saoirse Ronan, la protagonista del suo bel film “Lady Bird”, che può essere visto anche come un omaggio a Joan Didion, una cui frase è usata come epigrafe del film, Anyone who talks about California hedonism has never spent a Christmas in Sacramento.
La scrittura della Didion è come se fosse perennemente alla ricerca della nota giusta, dell’arrangiamento appropriato, della parola perfetta, della stratificazione sonora. La melodia eterna, l’armonia indimenticabile.
E qui, trattandosi di appunti, del taccuino di un viaggio nel Sud degli States compiuto insieme al marito nel 1970, un mese a girovagare senza meta e senza vero scopo su una macchina in affitto, note e appunti che non diventarono mai un pezzo concluso e pubblicato (ripescato nel 2017), annusando, registrando mentalmente, guardando, annotando, ho pensato ancor più che a Pet Sounds alle Smile Sessions dove è possibile ascoltare tentativi, rifacimenti e …. Di canzoni indimenticabili, su tutte quel capolavoro intitolato Good Vibrations
Ci raccontiamo storie perché dobbiamo vivere.
March 12, 2017
Joan Didion’s notebook of her drive across Louisiana and Mississippi with her husband in the summer of 1970 is filled with glimpses and impressions of the blazing heat, canopies of kudzu, a sense of disintegration and insularity. Didion interviewed friends of friends and folks who knew about important local happenings, but she had a hard time gathering the ambition to follow through with attending events in the muggy heat. She made notes, but the aimless drift through a South she knew was important somehow never fanned into flame...until now. Her instincts were right. The South tethers us still, to a past we cannot escape.
Didion’s experience of the South is that of confederate flag beach towels at the motel pool, debutante dresses, and plans for dinner out with local literati, illegal bottles of liquor smuggled in a large leather handbag carried expressly for that purpose. The childhood of a young white boy in the South may be the best childhood in the world, she imagines.
The house of one family had a slave certificate still hanging on the wall and servants that dated back a generation. Everyone seemed sure of where they stood on the race question, and stated it openly. The order to integrate schools immediately (80% black, 20% white) came in February: why didn’t they wait until September when a little more time might have gotten some folks to go along, a local white man with school-aged kids opined. "I can't sacrifice my kids to idealism," he concludes.
Didion and her husband sought the gravesite of William Faulkner in Oxford, Mississippi but found only a young black man leaning against a two-tone sedan in the heat, waiting for customers, selling marijuana, perhaps. It was too hot to think too much about it. They never found the grave but the graveyard feel of the South pervaded her writing nonetheless. Death is a feature of the South. It feels close, as does rot, and subsidence. And yet, the South holds a history, slavery, which will not die, no matter how we wish it would.
The University of Mississippi is in Oxford with that elusive gravesite of Faulkner’s. The university library carries only textbooks, a few bestsellers, and Faulkner novels. Didion mentions her visit there:"…I saw a black girl on the campus. She was wearing an Afro and a clinging jersey and was quite beautiful with a NY/LA coastal arrogance. I could not think what she was doing at Ol’ Miss or what she thought about it." One cannot help think that the piece would have been infinitely improved if she had roused herself enough to ask the girl that question. All through this book she never crossed the color barrier once except to be introduced to the maid or gardener of a white homeowner.
Fireflies, heat lightning, heavy vines and soggy ground, fainting heat, water that smells of fish, vacant expressions, algae-covered ditches, fast-melting ice. The South is present everywhere in her words, in the barely-stirring observations she makes from a sitting position. But the 1970s South is evoked as surely as the 1950s and 1960s South. Things change only incrementally, imperceptibly.
The travel by car was onerous, and Didion tells us she had to avoid cities with airports because she would immediately book a ticket out. It was a struggle, this trip, and one evening they stopped late for dinner:
We return to California and it is here that Didion's intimacy with us becomes the story. She tells us of her upbringing and we see where she gets her sense of confidence and superiority. She’d never had anything blocking her way, in the “peculiar vacuum” of her childhood. She’d come from an affluent family and only saw in hindsight her extraordinary luck in a world that offers most people little certainty. She’d “been rewarded out of proportion to her scholarship,” but she remembers only her failures. Looking back, sometimes she does not “feel up to the landscape.” She tries to place herself, place us, in history.
The sentences in this book are a remarkable evocation of place, even if she “never wrote the piece” and her notes on her upbringing at the end are scattershot, gorgeous, real, thoughtful, meaningful, relatable, full of atmosphere and intimacy.
Kimberly Farr narrated this collection of notes, and her quiet sophistication is quite up to the task of looking askance at the deep-rooted and culturally-queer habits of the South, and at the naiveté of Didion's upbringing in California. Didion thinks people make too much and too little, both, of their effect on, say, the South, or the West. She takes the long view now, musing that we all seem so inconsequential except when we are not.
Didion’s experience of the South is that of confederate flag beach towels at the motel pool, debutante dresses, and plans for dinner out with local literati, illegal bottles of liquor smuggled in a large leather handbag carried expressly for that purpose. The childhood of a young white boy in the South may be the best childhood in the world, she imagines.
The house of one family had a slave certificate still hanging on the wall and servants that dated back a generation. Everyone seemed sure of where they stood on the race question, and stated it openly. The order to integrate schools immediately (80% black, 20% white) came in February: why didn’t they wait until September when a little more time might have gotten some folks to go along, a local white man with school-aged kids opined. "I can't sacrifice my kids to idealism," he concludes.
Didion and her husband sought the gravesite of William Faulkner in Oxford, Mississippi but found only a young black man leaning against a two-tone sedan in the heat, waiting for customers, selling marijuana, perhaps. It was too hot to think too much about it. They never found the grave but the graveyard feel of the South pervaded her writing nonetheless. Death is a feature of the South. It feels close, as does rot, and subsidence. And yet, the South holds a history, slavery, which will not die, no matter how we wish it would.
The University of Mississippi is in Oxford with that elusive gravesite of Faulkner’s. The university library carries only textbooks, a few bestsellers, and Faulkner novels. Didion mentions her visit there:"…I saw a black girl on the campus. She was wearing an Afro and a clinging jersey and was quite beautiful with a NY/LA coastal arrogance. I could not think what she was doing at Ol’ Miss or what she thought about it." One cannot help think that the piece would have been infinitely improved if she had roused herself enough to ask the girl that question. All through this book she never crossed the color barrier once except to be introduced to the maid or gardener of a white homeowner.
Fireflies, heat lightning, heavy vines and soggy ground, fainting heat, water that smells of fish, vacant expressions, algae-covered ditches, fast-melting ice. The South is present everywhere in her words, in the barely-stirring observations she makes from a sitting position. But the 1970s South is evoked as surely as the 1950s and 1960s South. Things change only incrementally, imperceptibly.
The travel by car was onerous, and Didion tells us she had to avoid cities with airports because she would immediately book a ticket out. It was a struggle, this trip, and one evening they stopped late for dinner:
"The sun was still blazing on the pavement outside. The food seemed to have been deep-fried for the lunch business and kept lukewarm on the steam table. Eating is an ordeal, as in an institution, something to be endured in the interests of survival."The point of view is distant and unconvinced when a dinner host says something about how the blacks would return to the delta if there were jobs anymore because “this is a place with a strong pull.” Didion’s judgment is as clear as a torch in a muggy dark night.
We return to California and it is here that Didion's intimacy with us becomes the story. She tells us of her upbringing and we see where she gets her sense of confidence and superiority. She’d never had anything blocking her way, in the “peculiar vacuum” of her childhood. She’d come from an affluent family and only saw in hindsight her extraordinary luck in a world that offers most people little certainty. She’d “been rewarded out of proportion to her scholarship,” but she remembers only her failures. Looking back, sometimes she does not “feel up to the landscape.” She tries to place herself, place us, in history.
The sentences in this book are a remarkable evocation of place, even if she “never wrote the piece” and her notes on her upbringing at the end are scattershot, gorgeous, real, thoughtful, meaningful, relatable, full of atmosphere and intimacy.
Kimberly Farr narrated this collection of notes, and her quiet sophistication is quite up to the task of looking askance at the deep-rooted and culturally-queer habits of the South, and at the naiveté of Didion's upbringing in California. Didion thinks people make too much and too little, both, of their effect on, say, the South, or the West. She takes the long view now, musing that we all seem so inconsequential except when we are not.
March 11, 2017
Nothing makes me want to write more than reading Joan Didion.
March 13, 2022
South and West: From a Notebook by Joan Didion gives one a lot of insight into the writing process and keen observational skills as we have access to the notes of one of our great contemporary writers. These notes, consisting of notes that were taken for one month during the summer in 1970 when she and her husband, John Gregory Dunne, and their three-year old daughter traveled around the south starting in New Orleans as they continued their aimless travels through Louisiana, Alabama, and Mississippi, all in the oppressive heat with overgrown kudzu vines seeming to creep everywhere along the brown and still rivers. What was telling is that Didion writes that she avoided large cities because she feared she would board a flight bound for California.
One of the most prescient observations of significance and importance of this writing is in the Foreword by Nathaniel Rich in 2016 as follows:
It was telling in her decisions about who to interview such as a white owner of an all-black radio station in Meridian, Mississippi whose radio station programs gospel and soul reaching 180,000 blacks in Alabama and Mississippi maintaining that the membership and influence of the KKK has diminished. Or the young girl in the beauty shop planning to get her cosmetology license after graduation and then to modeling school. Or her observations in the student union at Ole Miss and the university bookstore with a few novels by William Faulkner. They also went to search for Rowan Oak, William Faulkner's home and later to the cemetery in search of his grave. Didion comments about how struck she was when she read a book about Faulkner in Oxford. There were interviews with his fellow citizens in Oxford. She was struck by their hostility towards him and with Faulkner's ability to ignore it.
Before leaving the South, they spent time with an established plantation family of many generations from the Mississippi Delta and learning how mechanization has changed their lives. From the Delta they went to Greenville where they dined with the local newspaper editor and another couple as they discussed the social problems unique to the South. Didion then observed that the FBI is a leitmotif in the South that she heard discussed in Biloxi, Oxford, Grenada and in Greenville. And the time warp: the Civil War was yesterday, but 1960 is spoken of as if it were about three hundred years ago." And Didion ends these notes on the South with one of my favorite drives in the South:
One of the most prescient observations of significance and importance of this writing is in the Foreword by Nathaniel Rich in 2016 as follows:
"'South and West' is, in one regard, the most revealing of Didion's books. This might seem a far-fetched claim to make about an author who has written about her ancestry, her marriage, her health, and with painful candor, her grief--Didion's readers are, after all, on familiar terms with the personal details of her life. But the writing itself--the cool majesty of her prose, written as if from some great empyreal distance, elevating personal experience into universal revelation--has an immaculacy as intimidating as Chelsea porcelain. 'South and West' offers for the first time a glimpse inside the factory walls."
It was telling in her decisions about who to interview such as a white owner of an all-black radio station in Meridian, Mississippi whose radio station programs gospel and soul reaching 180,000 blacks in Alabama and Mississippi maintaining that the membership and influence of the KKK has diminished. Or the young girl in the beauty shop planning to get her cosmetology license after graduation and then to modeling school. Or her observations in the student union at Ole Miss and the university bookstore with a few novels by William Faulkner. They also went to search for Rowan Oak, William Faulkner's home and later to the cemetery in search of his grave. Didion comments about how struck she was when she read a book about Faulkner in Oxford. There were interviews with his fellow citizens in Oxford. She was struck by their hostility towards him and with Faulkner's ability to ignore it.
Before leaving the South, they spent time with an established plantation family of many generations from the Mississippi Delta and learning how mechanization has changed their lives. From the Delta they went to Greenville where they dined with the local newspaper editor and another couple as they discussed the social problems unique to the South. Didion then observed that the FBI is a leitmotif in the South that she heard discussed in Biloxi, Oxford, Grenada and in Greenville. And the time warp: the Civil War was yesterday, but 1960 is spoken of as if it were about three hundred years ago." And Didion ends these notes on the South with one of my favorite drives in the South:
"Crossing the Pontchartrain bridge, the gray water, the gray causeway, the gray skyline becoming apparent in the far distance just about the time you lose sight of the shore behind you. The sight of New Orleans coming up like a mirage from about the midway point on the Lake Pontchartrain Causeway."
March 8, 2017
Joan offers the reader an intimate look at her writing process. Anyone who read Didion would be aware of her personal life, her upbringing, her essays and how she wrote about the loss of a husband and her daughter in her last two non fiction works.
Here we are in the 70s in the South ... New Orleans .. the past... the glimpse of conversations in elevators.. the state of various swimming pools in hotels... the process of writing in a notebook
The west... the look toward the future...
And reading it in 2017 still makes those vignettes and snippets reflective of the American consciousness or unconsciousness at the same time.
This book is intimate and unstructured ... it's free in form and leaves an everlasting impression.
Here we are in the 70s in the South ... New Orleans .. the past... the glimpse of conversations in elevators.. the state of various swimming pools in hotels... the process of writing in a notebook
The west... the look toward the future...
And reading it in 2017 still makes those vignettes and snippets reflective of the American consciousness or unconsciousness at the same time.
This book is intimate and unstructured ... it's free in form and leaves an everlasting impression.
May 17, 2018
As its subtitle implies, South and West is culled from notebooks Joan Didion kept in the 1970s. It consists of two essays: "California Notes" is a brief, slight piece that apparently became the basis for her book Where I Was From; "Notes on the South" is a much longer, more substantial one about a road trip she and her husband took through the deep south, mostly the gulf coast area, in 1970. In an introduction to this book written in December 2016, novelist Nathaniel Rich claims "Notes on the South" is relevant to understanding the south of today, i.e., the south that would elect Donald Trump as president. I was skeptical of this assertion. I mean, of course someone had to say something like that about South and West; how else would the publisher justify publishing notes from nearly 50 years ago? Happily, though, Rich's claim actually turned out to be true. "Notes on the South" offers numerous insights on the mindset of the south as it attempted to reconcile its embrace of tradition with its need for progress. The relevance of some of these insights to the present day was evident, impressive, and enlightening.
Beyond that, South and West is worth reading simply because, even though it's somewhat rougher than Didion's other books, her considerable talents make it a joy to read. Didion and her husband are just passing through the south, but her reporting works because she's not attempting to speak for anyone who lives there: She's an outsider, and she writes as an outsider. She employs a high level of detail, but it's always in the service of a broader view; she doesn't make the mistake of thinking small details, in and of themselves, tell the whole story. She also lets many southerners speak for themselves—she's clearly gained their trust, and she doesn't exploit it. By my calculation Didion was 35 when she wrote "Notes from the South"; it's the work of a mature writer of the sort we may never see again at that age.
As I mentioned in one of my status updates, I began this book thinking of it as a lesser Didion work, and in the sense that its publication is more recent and it hasn't (yet) gained classic status, that's true. The writing, though, is absolutely at the level of her well-known collections Slouching Towards Bethlehem and The White Album. It has to be said, her publisher did a good job putting this book together. Joan Didion's name on the cover would have moved copies no matter what was inside, but the sharp focus, vivid detail, and relevance of "Notes on the South" make South and West an essential addition to her canon.
Beyond that, South and West is worth reading simply because, even though it's somewhat rougher than Didion's other books, her considerable talents make it a joy to read. Didion and her husband are just passing through the south, but her reporting works because she's not attempting to speak for anyone who lives there: She's an outsider, and she writes as an outsider. She employs a high level of detail, but it's always in the service of a broader view; she doesn't make the mistake of thinking small details, in and of themselves, tell the whole story. She also lets many southerners speak for themselves—she's clearly gained their trust, and she doesn't exploit it. By my calculation Didion was 35 when she wrote "Notes from the South"; it's the work of a mature writer of the sort we may never see again at that age.
As I mentioned in one of my status updates, I began this book thinking of it as a lesser Didion work, and in the sense that its publication is more recent and it hasn't (yet) gained classic status, that's true. The writing, though, is absolutely at the level of her well-known collections Slouching Towards Bethlehem and The White Album. It has to be said, her publisher did a good job putting this book together. Joan Didion's name on the cover would have moved copies no matter what was inside, but the sharp focus, vivid detail, and relevance of "Notes on the South" make South and West an essential addition to her canon.
May 13, 2017
Think of this as a literary sketchbook, full of jotted down conversation scraps, impressions, memories and thoughts. Most of the book is Didion's reflections on the South circa 1970. The smaller portion of the book deals with California around the time of the Patty Hearst trial. I loved the section devoted to the South; not so much the West.
No one writes like Didion - her prose is so pure and crisp, her observations so keen and precise. Didion's tone is always cool, almost clinical, but she cuts straight to the heart of what she is examining and holds it forth for us to observe, stripped to the bone and bare of artifice. I love her, always have.
This book is probably for Didion fans only, though - it's a slim volume of dated bits 'n pieces that will likely only give pleasure to those who rejoice in her extraordinary acuity and the beauty of the written word.
No one writes like Didion - her prose is so pure and crisp, her observations so keen and precise. Didion's tone is always cool, almost clinical, but she cuts straight to the heart of what she is examining and holds it forth for us to observe, stripped to the bone and bare of artifice. I love her, always have.
This book is probably for Didion fans only, though - it's a slim volume of dated bits 'n pieces that will likely only give pleasure to those who rejoice in her extraordinary acuity and the beauty of the written word.
August 21, 2018
In the South they are convinced that they have bloodied their place with history. In the West we do not believe that anything we do can bloody the land, or change it, or touch it.
Joan Didion could only write about California and I'd read it all. I'm obviously biased as someone who has spent his whole life in the Golden State, but she understands it so deeply and writes about it so well. Sadly most of this is actually about Louisiana and Mississippi, but not sadly really because it's so good. She's incredibly observant, and her economy of language is masterful. She doesn't over-describe or over-explain her experiences, surroundings, etc. She says exactly what she needs to say in the fewest words possible. It's quite impressive and shows why she's such a revered author. I really need to read more of her work!
December 30, 2022
How could I forget how perfectly Joan Didion could craft a sentence, capturing every nuance, every irony, even what was unsaid? Although the pieces in South and West never became published essays, the same quality remains. And I see why it is now that these notes for pieces that never got published finally saw the light now in the wake of the election.
Because, in fact, Didion, the eternal pessimist, knew what we did not. That nothing has really changed since she and her husband John Gregory Dunne motored through Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama in 1970. Then, when the Mississippi Highway Patrol reacted to student protests at Jackson State University by killing two black students, the white power structure embraced the police and blamed the students who were “un-American,” the “thug” being understood. Forty years later, video footage of police shooting unarmed suspects in the back aren’t enough to change the narrative in the slightest. A system where the plantation class installs the political class, pretends that we’ve come so far, and that blacks have every opportunity that their own privately educated children have — that hasn’t changed, either. A fervent belief — all evidence to the contrary — that low taxes and low wages are the key to economic prosperity, despite the poverty, poor education, substandard infrastructure, and low quality of life that ensues.
The only difference seems to be that Mississippi has spread to other states.
Because, in fact, Didion, the eternal pessimist, knew what we did not. That nothing has really changed since she and her husband John Gregory Dunne motored through Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama in 1970. Then, when the Mississippi Highway Patrol reacted to student protests at Jackson State University by killing two black students, the white power structure embraced the police and blamed the students who were “un-American,” the “thug” being understood. Forty years later, video footage of police shooting unarmed suspects in the back aren’t enough to change the narrative in the slightest. A system where the plantation class installs the political class, pretends that we’ve come so far, and that blacks have every opportunity that their own privately educated children have — that hasn’t changed, either. A fervent belief — all evidence to the contrary — that low taxes and low wages are the key to economic prosperity, despite the poverty, poor education, substandard infrastructure, and low quality of life that ensues.
The only difference seems to be that Mississippi has spread to other states.
July 14, 2021
Perhaps I’m biased, given that I have also been a Californian stranger in the South and I found so much of this so terribly familiar, but Didion off the cuff is probably more eloquent and more insightful than many others will ever be with years of deliberation.
January 2, 2018
I owe this book a longer review, because I struggled mightily with South and West (2017). Fourfalse starts it took me to finish a book of mere 126 pages? I'm not from "the South". I spent all of one year living in Nashville, Tennessee some 40 years after Joan Didion drove through cities, towns, and former Delta plantations in Louisiana and Mississippi. My location was urban, near a university, a self-described blue dot in a red sea. Yet, Didion's dismissive flippant, at times haughty remarks about the U.S. South ignite a vigorous desire to defend this region.
.
Her gaze was anthropological; her tone condescending. For example, she jests that she can't allow herself to stay overnight in any Mississippi towns near an airport, because her body would flee on the next Delta airplane back North or West, and she'd be powerless to stop her escape.
Most vexing: Joan Didion acknowledges she is biased. She faults the culprit that skews her Southern experiences -- a comfortable, educated, financially-stable white Northern Californian upbringing. . Her distance from provincial Southern life doesn't prevent her from skewering it. She looks askance at families who never leave their small towns. Nevertheless, I read page after page of SOUTH AND WEST, where Didion fails to connect why her taste befitting her higher economic class sullies Southern meals and activities. She must know full-well, her trash is embraced as treasure even ppl not from the South.
Joan Didion's South section becomes "bearable" on p. 91, "A Sunday Lunch in Clarksdale, when her voice steps aside, and Didion allows a descendant of a landowner whose parents employed 10-15 black family sharecroppers. The speaker minimizes and explains away the economic devastation that sharecropping inflicted on Black farming families ("NotAllSharecroppers"). Classic case of a reporter allowing an interviewee to lengthen the rope to tie himself. Didion does this job well.
Here's the thing. My one hand defends the low income Southern culture Joan Didion trashes; while, my other hands defends Didion's detractors (um, ME), for critiquing a unpolished material --- a compilation of Didion's notes that which she kept buried and unpublished until recently.
For now, I conclude that Didion's work in South and West matters tremendously for the historical record, scholars of Joan Didion and the way American essay structure and content developed over the last half-century.
.
Her gaze was anthropological; her tone condescending. For example, she jests that she can't allow herself to stay overnight in any Mississippi towns near an airport, because her body would flee on the next Delta airplane back North or West, and she'd be powerless to stop her escape.
Most vexing: Joan Didion acknowledges she is biased. She faults the culprit that skews her Southern experiences -- a comfortable, educated, financially-stable white Northern Californian upbringing. . Her distance from provincial Southern life doesn't prevent her from skewering it. She looks askance at families who never leave their small towns. Nevertheless, I read page after page of SOUTH AND WEST, where Didion fails to connect why her taste befitting her higher economic class sullies Southern meals and activities. She must know full-well, her trash is embraced as treasure even ppl not from the South.
Joan Didion's South section becomes "bearable" on p. 91, "A Sunday Lunch in Clarksdale, when her voice steps aside, and Didion allows a descendant of a landowner whose parents employed 10-15 black family sharecroppers. The speaker minimizes and explains away the economic devastation that sharecropping inflicted on Black farming families ("NotAllSharecroppers"). Classic case of a reporter allowing an interviewee to lengthen the rope to tie himself. Didion does this job well.
Here's the thing. My one hand defends the low income Southern culture Joan Didion trashes; while, my other hands defends Didion's detractors (um, ME), for critiquing a unpolished material --- a compilation of Didion's notes that which she kept buried and unpublished until recently.
For now, I conclude that Didion's work in South and West matters tremendously for the historical record, scholars of Joan Didion and the way American essay structure and content developed over the last half-century.
December 14, 2022
“Joan Didion explained her decision to visit the Gulf Coast in her 2006 Paris Review interview: "I had a theory that if I could understand the South, I would understand something about California, because a lot of the California settlers came from the Border South." It is a counterintuitive theory, for the South and the West represent the poles of American experience the South drowning in its past, the West looking ahead to distant frontiers in a spirit of earnest, eternal optimism. "The future always looks good in the golden land," Didion wrote in "Some Dreamers of the Golden Dream,"
"because no one remembers the past." In the South no one can forget it.”
"because no one remembers the past." In the South no one can forget it.”
May 9, 2017
"We sat out in back by the bayou and drank gin and tonics and when a light rain began to fall, a kind of mist, Walker never paid any mind but just kept talking, and walking up to the house to get fresh drinks. It was a thunderstorm, with odd light, and there were occasional water-skiers on the black bayou water."
This collection is comprised of conversations and observations from a notebook. As is customarily her style, Didion recorded bits and pieces that reveal lifestyle and cultural landscape. She spent a month, in the summer of 1970, traveling through the American South having conversations with notable Southerners and taking notes of small town life and habits. One month isn't really enough to gage the befuddling complications of the South, particularly the Deep South, and this could be why, I would humbly opine, she never did complete a piece. Until now.
There are some things about a place that can be shocking, debilitating, depressing, and when one discovers those things directed at oneself, they have the potential to damage one's view of place and people. There are moments in this collection when such things, often through long quotes of conversations, are revealed.
The reader can always count on Didion's boldness as relates to her innermost thoughts of herself, or observation of others. One may not find the interested engagement and structured style one may have encountered in Slouching Towards Bethlehem, or the contemplative meditation of Blue Nights, but what one could possibly encounter in this collection is unflinching honesty written in a way that unveils a piece of the American fabric, in as much as it also reveals a writer's disappointment. I included the first quote at the beginning because despite the immensely disturbing things about attitudes and notions that are rooted in the psyche of some Southern habits, there are also profoundly beautiful things about the South, its culture, and its landscape. Perhaps I wish more of these things had been included in the notes and observations, and yet, just as I've sensed the mood of these notes, perhaps I've also sensed why she could not.
This collection is comprised of conversations and observations from a notebook. As is customarily her style, Didion recorded bits and pieces that reveal lifestyle and cultural landscape. She spent a month, in the summer of 1970, traveling through the American South having conversations with notable Southerners and taking notes of small town life and habits. One month isn't really enough to gage the befuddling complications of the South, particularly the Deep South, and this could be why, I would humbly opine, she never did complete a piece. Until now.
Neither she nor the girl nor the two men spoke during the time we were there. The jukebox played "Sweet Caroline." They all watched me eat a grilled-cheese sandwich. When we went back out into the blazing heat one of the men followed us and watched as we drove away.
There are some things about a place that can be shocking, debilitating, depressing, and when one discovers those things directed at oneself, they have the potential to damage one's view of place and people. There are moments in this collection when such things, often through long quotes of conversations, are revealed.
It occurred to me almost constantly in the South that had I lived there I would have been an eccentric and full of anger, and I wondered what form the anger would have taken. Would I have taken up causes, or would I have simply knifed someone?
The reader can always count on Didion's boldness as relates to her innermost thoughts of herself, or observation of others. One may not find the interested engagement and structured style one may have encountered in Slouching Towards Bethlehem, or the contemplative meditation of Blue Nights, but what one could possibly encounter in this collection is unflinching honesty written in a way that unveils a piece of the American fabric, in as much as it also reveals a writer's disappointment. I included the first quote at the beginning because despite the immensely disturbing things about attitudes and notions that are rooted in the psyche of some Southern habits, there are also profoundly beautiful things about the South, its culture, and its landscape. Perhaps I wish more of these things had been included in the notes and observations, and yet, just as I've sensed the mood of these notes, perhaps I've also sensed why she could not.
April 13, 2021
For diehard Didion fans.
This is appropriately titled as a notebook. Very short observations pertaining to Didion's 1970s trip to the South as she wandered from town to town. The joy is in the insights which still hold so much relevance, today. Funny, so much has changed and yet, so little. I'm sorry I failed to transcribe my notes before the library loan ended for I would have liked to have shared a few.
Leaves the reader wishing there was more.
This is appropriately titled as a notebook. Very short observations pertaining to Didion's 1970s trip to the South as she wandered from town to town. The joy is in the insights which still hold so much relevance, today. Funny, so much has changed and yet, so little. I'm sorry I failed to transcribe my notes before the library loan ended for I would have liked to have shared a few.
Leaves the reader wishing there was more.
January 22, 2024
this book is made up of excerpts taken from didion’s notebook, which she wrote during her month-long road trip in 1970 through southern states such as louisiana, mississippi, and alabama. as always, i’m in awe of didion’s ability to capture place and time so well, and getting this little insight into her writing process was a treat.
December 15, 2020
There’s no question that Joan Didion is a masterful, almost preternaturally gifted writer. Her words leap off the page with a striking dynamism; her talent for precise observation and vividly detailed renderings of her experiences and surroundings is consistently manifest. But the heretofore unpublished journal notes which comprise South and West—though vibrantly, often beautifully written—are decidedly fragmentary and disjointed when taken as a whole.
This is perhaps to be expected, as they consist entirely of two very different sets of notes, taken six years apart and with nothing but a vaguely defined and never fully articulated thesis to bind them. There’s plenty of style here, with wit, intelligence, and arrestingly atmospheric descriptiveness to spare. But, unfortunately, there’s little of substance.
The sheer force of Didion’s talent as a writer is the main thing holding it all together—and this is definitely not nothing. Her intensely evocative prose makes it a highly enjoyable read for the most part. But to what end? I found myself wondering; why have these two completely disparate journals been so haphazardly thrown together? The first part of the book, and by far the longer, is taken from her notes during an impromptu trip to the South in 1970, while the second part—which is so much shorter than the first that it reads more like an epilogue—is taken from her 1976 notes for a (never written) article about the Patty Hearst trial in San Fransisco, which turned into what is essentially an interesting but unpolished essay-length rumination on life, childhood, family, California, and other random stream-of-consciousness thoughts. A possible answer to this mysterious coupling may be that her piece on the South was not long or self-contained enough to constitute a book on its own, and the piece on California was a bit like an orphaned essay, not fitting in easily anywhere else, so maybe some less-than-brilliant publisher thought, “Hey, didn’t Joan have that loopy idea years back about how the souls of the deep South and the frontier West are intertwined . . . somehow?”
So we’re given some gobbledygook about how Didion believed—or rather, had a vague notion—at some point in the 60s or 70s, that the spirit of California and of the West was somehow explicable by way of the history and culture of the South; the essence of San Fransisco and Sacramento lurking obscurely in the manners and mores (and kudzu) of the Mississippi delta. As it turns out, this doesn’t hold much water—and in fact in the foreword we’re told that Didion herself abandoned the idea as specious and uncorroborated. In this rather ill-conceived mashup of a book (to cast back to the same Yeats poem which is referenced in the title of Didion’s most well-known collection of essays), the center cannot hold.
It reminded in a way of all those piratical volumes of “never-before-published” writings from lauded authors (usually deceased) and the endless parade of posthumous albums squeezed from the dregs of popular musicians’ catalogues. In that tradition, South and West is more for die-hard fans and completists than for casual readers seeking the kind of truly revelatory work that made Didion famous in the first place.
It is, however, still quite a stunning thing to behold just how powerful and elevated even her leftover writings are. The scraps and scourings of her old notebooks rise far above the level of many a writer’s most refined and polished work. So as an aperitif, which can easily be digested in an hour or two, it does a fine job of whetting the appetite for all the works of true genius in which Didion actually did put the full force of her unique and formidable talents.
This is perhaps to be expected, as they consist entirely of two very different sets of notes, taken six years apart and with nothing but a vaguely defined and never fully articulated thesis to bind them. There’s plenty of style here, with wit, intelligence, and arrestingly atmospheric descriptiveness to spare. But, unfortunately, there’s little of substance.
The sheer force of Didion’s talent as a writer is the main thing holding it all together—and this is definitely not nothing. Her intensely evocative prose makes it a highly enjoyable read for the most part. But to what end? I found myself wondering; why have these two completely disparate journals been so haphazardly thrown together? The first part of the book, and by far the longer, is taken from her notes during an impromptu trip to the South in 1970, while the second part—which is so much shorter than the first that it reads more like an epilogue—is taken from her 1976 notes for a (never written) article about the Patty Hearst trial in San Fransisco, which turned into what is essentially an interesting but unpolished essay-length rumination on life, childhood, family, California, and other random stream-of-consciousness thoughts. A possible answer to this mysterious coupling may be that her piece on the South was not long or self-contained enough to constitute a book on its own, and the piece on California was a bit like an orphaned essay, not fitting in easily anywhere else, so maybe some less-than-brilliant publisher thought, “Hey, didn’t Joan have that loopy idea years back about how the souls of the deep South and the frontier West are intertwined . . . somehow?”
So we’re given some gobbledygook about how Didion believed—or rather, had a vague notion—at some point in the 60s or 70s, that the spirit of California and of the West was somehow explicable by way of the history and culture of the South; the essence of San Fransisco and Sacramento lurking obscurely in the manners and mores (and kudzu) of the Mississippi delta. As it turns out, this doesn’t hold much water—and in fact in the foreword we’re told that Didion herself abandoned the idea as specious and uncorroborated. In this rather ill-conceived mashup of a book (to cast back to the same Yeats poem which is referenced in the title of Didion’s most well-known collection of essays), the center cannot hold.
It reminded in a way of all those piratical volumes of “never-before-published” writings from lauded authors (usually deceased) and the endless parade of posthumous albums squeezed from the dregs of popular musicians’ catalogues. In that tradition, South and West is more for die-hard fans and completists than for casual readers seeking the kind of truly revelatory work that made Didion famous in the first place.
It is, however, still quite a stunning thing to behold just how powerful and elevated even her leftover writings are. The scraps and scourings of her old notebooks rise far above the level of many a writer’s most refined and polished work. So as an aperitif, which can easily be digested in an hour or two, it does a fine job of whetting the appetite for all the works of true genius in which Didion actually did put the full force of her unique and formidable talents.
May 3, 2024
Road tripping with Joan Didion during the sultry Southern summer of 1970. Much like Susan Orlean in The Orchid Thief, she becomes an American tourist in America. From New Orleans to Biloxi to Birmingham and beyond. Ole Miss and kudzu and Church on Sundays. Liquor smuggled into the Holiday Inn, which happened to be located in a 'dry' county. Industrialization. Intergration. And then from South to West, to California, which is where the book stumbles. Bare bones I'm okay with, but slim pickings was what was on offer in "California Notes." Why include it, especially when a whole book, Where I Was From, was dedicated to the subject 20 years earlier? For better or for worse, the American South is not just a place on a map but also a frame of mind. The West, probably because I call it home, is just the West to me. Not that interesting.
May 9, 2018
Counterintuitively, Didion's lucid prose and her book's impressionistic structure synergize exceptionally well, making for a hazy reading experience that almost obscures South and West's total lack of purpose or argument.
November 6, 2017
My introduction to Joan Didion's writing, and probably not the best place to start. This is essentially a collection of notes she made almost entirely during a trip she made with her husband to the Southern U.S., followed by a couple of pages of notes on California.
I liked the prose in the "South" section, and enjoyed the little slices of life Didion captured through her observations. However I think it was a mistake to include the "West" part. This part was less well written because these were literal notes - as opposed to the first section - which read more like a snippets of a first or second draft of a longer piece. I think it was a poor choice to include writing that was originally meant to be part of an article about the Patty Hearst trial, of which even the author herself admits
I just find it odd that they would include something that didn't really work out for Didion. Fair enough if the writing was good, but it was significantly inferior to that of the rest of the book.
Despite my complaints (which are pretty book specific), I will definitely check out some of the authors other books in the future.
I liked the prose in the "South" section, and enjoyed the little slices of life Didion captured through her observations. However I think it was a mistake to include the "West" part. This part was less well written because these were literal notes - as opposed to the first section - which read more like a snippets of a first or second draft of a longer piece. I think it was a poor choice to include writing that was originally meant to be part of an article about the Patty Hearst trial, of which even the author herself admits
I thought the trial had some meaning for me—because I was from California. This didn’t turn out to be true.
I just find it odd that they would include something that didn't really work out for Didion. Fair enough if the writing was good, but it was significantly inferior to that of the rest of the book.
Despite my complaints (which are pretty book specific), I will definitely check out some of the authors other books in the future.
January 8, 2023
This book is awful. Clearly written from the perspective of a privileged, white woman. Full of white fragility and judgment, generally boring and rambling. If it had been published in the 1980s or 1990s, maybe the times would be a good explanation, but it was published in 2017. Don’t waste your time.
April 3, 2022
The travel industry is largely made up of people talking about how wonderful a certain place or international program is, even if said place or program isn't all that wonderful.
At one point in my life, to support myself and further my writing aims, I found myself working to further this deception — for an absolute pittance, which would appear to make the deception worse — but merely for the allure of the title. Until one particularly miserable experience where I could deceive no longer ... thus bringing my travel writing career to a close.
That final assignment came to me while I was working as an English teacher (my day job at the time) in the beautiful Italian town of Polignano a Mare. I would take a week off and ferry across the Adriatic to Croatia to join up with something called "The Yacht Week," where I would spend, yes, a week, hopping on and off yachts suffused with drunk, rich bastards partying it up like it was 1999 (albeit in 2013).
I would still be getting paid a pittance, that hadn't changed, but this time my travel expenses would be covered. My living quarters were with the program's volunteers — i.e. other rudderless youths who were getting basically nothing other than the opportunity to spend a summer in Croatia — but I could spend some time on the yachts, could attend the parties, could at least tell myself that I was writing.
So I jumped at it.
And hated
every
single
second.
Cliques among the volunteers were already long-established thanks to previous summers together to serve the needs of well-off clients. My time spent on the yachts was even worse. The number of people I interacted with who weren't staggeringly intoxicated plunged after 12 o'clock, and the disdain the locals had for the rich Americans and Brits who came to play was more than palpable.
I'd return to my bedroom to find complete strangers cavorting in my bed. There was nary a quiet moment.
I would have left early but I wanted to finish the piece, which I did, except that it addressed issues that the travel site that had hired me was none too interested in shedding light on — namely, the effect that this company and mass tourism more generally were having on formerly little touristed locales, the fact that the residents of the once-serene towns on the itinerary were all-too-open about the fact that they did want us there, and my own general disdain at the whole enterprise.
Of course, I had never been told that this needed to be a fluff piece, but I suppose that was obvious given the nature of the industry. As a result of my outpouring of negativity, the piece was never published.
I wondered, while reading "South and West," whether that was why Didion's own "notes" on the American South went unpublished for so long. It's clear she hated pretty much the entirety of her month-long trip to Alabama, Louisiana, and Mississippi. Clearly, the tourism boards of those states would have squirmed if Didion's urgent — and hysterical — desire to leave their states had made it into the pages of Esquire or The New York Times.
"I was afraid to get too near Jackson [Mississippi] because planes left from Jackson for New York and California, and I knew I would not last ten minutes in Jackson without telephoning Delta or National [airlines] and getting out. All that month I hummed in my mind "Leavin' on a Jet Plane" ... and every night in our hotel room we got out the maps and figured out how many hours' driving time to Jackson, to New Orleans, to Baton Rouge, to the closest places the planes left from."
If Didion has anything positive to say about the South, it certainly got by me.
"It occurred to me almost constantly in the South that had I lived there I would have been an eccentric and full of anger, and I wondered what form the anger would have taken. Would I have taken up causes, or would I have simply knifed somebody?"
As someone who has spent a good deal of time in the South, I found the above passages absolutely hilarious — and very relatable. But there is also something I've always found fascinating about the South, albeit something occasionally dark and unpleasant, as Didion notes too. There's a certain danger, an insidious violence, simmering beneath the veneer of Southern Hospitality. That the South has the highest execution rate per capita of any region in the country hints at that, as do more obvious indicators like the region's avid Trumpism and its, occasionally, quite overt racism.
You can't travel to the South without seeing the fervent, almost cult-like following the region's college football teams have, so you can't help but feel what Didion observes as "the sense of sports being the opiate of the people."
If, as Joan Didion writes, the air in New Orleans "is heavy with sex and death," then death — if not the sex — permeates the entire South and is something you constantly feel weighing on you, pulling you ... or maybe that's just the stifling humidity.
But I didn't read this for an account of the South at all. It wasn't all that long ago that I escaped the South, and I don't wish to go back — not even in my reading.
I wish reviewers would more often state the reasons why a book appealed to them initially, so here's mine. I'm visiting California right now, and there is probably no writer I associate more with California than Joan Didion. I found this in a bookshop and took the title, "South and West," to mean something like "Southwest," whereas in fact the "and" is most definitely key.
"South and West" is not about the South and the West, though, and the fact that the West is getting equal billing here is akin to Matthew McConaughey's name appearing next to Leonardo DiCaprio's on the poster for "The Wolf on Wall Street." McConaughey was in that movie for no more than ten minutes and, likewise, the "West" gets 14 (14!!) pages here, which is a sneaky bit of marketing when you think about the lack of appeal a book called just "South" may have garnered. (though maybe "I Hate the Deep South," would have driven more sales?)
Joan Didion is a great observer, which is what made her such a great writer, and that first quality — and occasionally the second — is very present here. These are scrambled, disorganized notes to be sure, only seeing the light of day because they have the name "Joan Didion" attached to them, but in them I found something like a bedfellow of travel miseries past.
At one point in my life, to support myself and further my writing aims, I found myself working to further this deception — for an absolute pittance, which would appear to make the deception worse — but merely for the allure of the title. Until one particularly miserable experience where I could deceive no longer ... thus bringing my travel writing career to a close.
That final assignment came to me while I was working as an English teacher (my day job at the time) in the beautiful Italian town of Polignano a Mare. I would take a week off and ferry across the Adriatic to Croatia to join up with something called "The Yacht Week," where I would spend, yes, a week, hopping on and off yachts suffused with drunk, rich bastards partying it up like it was 1999 (albeit in 2013).
I would still be getting paid a pittance, that hadn't changed, but this time my travel expenses would be covered. My living quarters were with the program's volunteers — i.e. other rudderless youths who were getting basically nothing other than the opportunity to spend a summer in Croatia — but I could spend some time on the yachts, could attend the parties, could at least tell myself that I was writing.
So I jumped at it.
And hated
every
single
second.
Cliques among the volunteers were already long-established thanks to previous summers together to serve the needs of well-off clients. My time spent on the yachts was even worse. The number of people I interacted with who weren't staggeringly intoxicated plunged after 12 o'clock, and the disdain the locals had for the rich Americans and Brits who came to play was more than palpable.
I'd return to my bedroom to find complete strangers cavorting in my bed. There was nary a quiet moment.
I would have left early but I wanted to finish the piece, which I did, except that it addressed issues that the travel site that had hired me was none too interested in shedding light on — namely, the effect that this company and mass tourism more generally were having on formerly little touristed locales, the fact that the residents of the once-serene towns on the itinerary were all-too-open about the fact that they did want us there, and my own general disdain at the whole enterprise.
Of course, I had never been told that this needed to be a fluff piece, but I suppose that was obvious given the nature of the industry. As a result of my outpouring of negativity, the piece was never published.
I wondered, while reading "South and West," whether that was why Didion's own "notes" on the American South went unpublished for so long. It's clear she hated pretty much the entirety of her month-long trip to Alabama, Louisiana, and Mississippi. Clearly, the tourism boards of those states would have squirmed if Didion's urgent — and hysterical — desire to leave their states had made it into the pages of Esquire or The New York Times.
"I was afraid to get too near Jackson [Mississippi] because planes left from Jackson for New York and California, and I knew I would not last ten minutes in Jackson without telephoning Delta or National [airlines] and getting out. All that month I hummed in my mind "Leavin' on a Jet Plane" ... and every night in our hotel room we got out the maps and figured out how many hours' driving time to Jackson, to New Orleans, to Baton Rouge, to the closest places the planes left from."
If Didion has anything positive to say about the South, it certainly got by me.
"It occurred to me almost constantly in the South that had I lived there I would have been an eccentric and full of anger, and I wondered what form the anger would have taken. Would I have taken up causes, or would I have simply knifed somebody?"
As someone who has spent a good deal of time in the South, I found the above passages absolutely hilarious — and very relatable. But there is also something I've always found fascinating about the South, albeit something occasionally dark and unpleasant, as Didion notes too. There's a certain danger, an insidious violence, simmering beneath the veneer of Southern Hospitality. That the South has the highest execution rate per capita of any region in the country hints at that, as do more obvious indicators like the region's avid Trumpism and its, occasionally, quite overt racism.
You can't travel to the South without seeing the fervent, almost cult-like following the region's college football teams have, so you can't help but feel what Didion observes as "the sense of sports being the opiate of the people."
If, as Joan Didion writes, the air in New Orleans "is heavy with sex and death," then death — if not the sex — permeates the entire South and is something you constantly feel weighing on you, pulling you ... or maybe that's just the stifling humidity.
But I didn't read this for an account of the South at all. It wasn't all that long ago that I escaped the South, and I don't wish to go back — not even in my reading.
I wish reviewers would more often state the reasons why a book appealed to them initially, so here's mine. I'm visiting California right now, and there is probably no writer I associate more with California than Joan Didion. I found this in a bookshop and took the title, "South and West," to mean something like "Southwest," whereas in fact the "and" is most definitely key.
"South and West" is not about the South and the West, though, and the fact that the West is getting equal billing here is akin to Matthew McConaughey's name appearing next to Leonardo DiCaprio's on the poster for "The Wolf on Wall Street." McConaughey was in that movie for no more than ten minutes and, likewise, the "West" gets 14 (14!!) pages here, which is a sneaky bit of marketing when you think about the lack of appeal a book called just "South" may have garnered. (though maybe "I Hate the Deep South," would have driven more sales?)
Joan Didion is a great observer, which is what made her such a great writer, and that first quality — and occasionally the second — is very present here. These are scrambled, disorganized notes to be sure, only seeing the light of day because they have the name "Joan Didion" attached to them, but in them I found something like a bedfellow of travel miseries past.
February 14, 2022
Vignettes, observations, interviews - notes, from a notebook as the subtitle states, about the South and about California. In 1970, Didion took a month-long trip with her husband through Louisiana, Alabama, Mississippi, thinking there might be a piece in it, that she did not end up writing - there is no plot or conflict or ending, these aren't really even essays, but this slim book makes for strange and eerily gothic reading, and though it's going on 52 years since her trip there, since she wrote these notes, it is especially frightening that not enough seems to have changed in the Deep South. In 1976, in California, up in San Francisco for a magazine assignment about the Patty Hearst trial, there is little about the trial or Patty Heart, but about California, about girls like Hearst and like Didion, one who ended up kidnapped and a member of the SLA, the other an intense and prescient observer and writer. As a native-born Californian, Didion's assessment of it is how I've always felt, the harkening of its rotten mysteries beneath the sunshine.
Read
April 28, 2021didion just understands the assignment huh
May 16, 2017
Setting: 1970 Deep South roadtrip - Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama
Didion takes one month to travel the rural south to better understand "the west". She sees these two cardinal directions as linked in the American psyche, and forges that link more intricately in this piece. Three-quarters of the book are devoted to her travels in Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama, with only the last section more fully describing her own experiences of "West", coming of age in California.
Her writing is so effortless. It took me too long to get around to this literary giant, but I am glad I finally did and look forward to many more encounters.
Didion takes one month to travel the rural south to better understand "the west". She sees these two cardinal directions as linked in the American psyche, and forges that link more intricately in this piece. Three-quarters of the book are devoted to her travels in Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama, with only the last section more fully describing her own experiences of "West", coming of age in California.
Her writing is so effortless. It took me too long to get around to this literary giant, but I am glad I finally did and look forward to many more encounters.
June 23, 2018
Joan Didion is perhaps the Platonic ideal of a coastal elite, which makes this collection of notes, observations, and musings on the Deep South (all written during a month-long sojourn in the summer of 1970) particularly fascinating. The prose and details here are slick and savage as ever, and Didion’s sense of disorientation and disdain is a constant foreboding hum, like an air conditioner in an empty drugstore or mosquitoes gathering over stagnant ditch water.
Toward the end there are also some notes about California that don’t really fit and would have been better as an appendix to “Where I Was From.”
Toward the end there are also some notes about California that don’t really fit and would have been better as an appendix to “Where I Was From.”
October 18, 2017
Brief, beautifully written, rife with gorgeously detailed descriptions of southern life and culture in 1970. I always enjoy Didion's writing, and this was no exception.
December 26, 2018
Oh my. Today was a terrible, horrible, truly exceptionally bad day. So, of course, I went to the bookstore. I knew Joan Didion had released a new essay collection and I decided to treat myself to the hardcover instead of waiting for paperback.
And boy was it worth it.
The moment I dove into her prose I was no longer a stressed-out, sleep-deprived member of the proletariat; rather, I entered the world of Joan Didion's observation.
First, New Orleans. Ohh, New Orleans. Somehow Didion has the ability to drag a reader into her experience and show us the world as she saw it in the summer of 1970. The West, a bit more sentimental, reasonably so, as it was her home for many years.
A truly exceptional work. Read it, please.
Upon (yet another) reread: Still brilliant. Still a moment of peace in a world where that's becoming increasingly hard to find.
And boy was it worth it.
The moment I dove into her prose I was no longer a stressed-out, sleep-deprived member of the proletariat; rather, I entered the world of Joan Didion's observation.
First, New Orleans. Ohh, New Orleans. Somehow Didion has the ability to drag a reader into her experience and show us the world as she saw it in the summer of 1970. The West, a bit more sentimental, reasonably so, as it was her home for many years.
A truly exceptional work. Read it, please.
Upon (yet another) reread: Still brilliant. Still a moment of peace in a world where that's becoming increasingly hard to find.
July 1, 2022
As I hoped and waited for some posthumous publication of Didion's work, I decided to go back to the writer's catalogue and get my essential reading done.
I picked up South and West and it confirmed my original reflections of her work when I first read her collection of essays, 'Let Me Tell You What I Mean'.
My reflection of her work is as follows:
Something about Didion's writing, the style, the crafting of words is so sharp and crisp. So declarative and should I say, clever? She lays out scenes and images as though they are nothing less than factual. Acute. In her writing I find my perception to be hers and hers to be mine. I am boxed yet so content. Even though I wouldn't see what she lays out in her writing, I cannot help believe her. I cannot help thinking it is true.
Journalistic essence at its best!
I picked up South and West and it confirmed my original reflections of her work when I first read her collection of essays, 'Let Me Tell You What I Mean'.
My reflection of her work is as follows:
Something about Didion's writing, the style, the crafting of words is so sharp and crisp. So declarative and should I say, clever? She lays out scenes and images as though they are nothing less than factual. Acute. In her writing I find my perception to be hers and hers to be mine. I am boxed yet so content. Even though I wouldn't see what she lays out in her writing, I cannot help believe her. I cannot help thinking it is true.
Journalistic essence at its best!
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