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    South and West: From A Notebook
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    South and West: From A Notebook
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    South and West: From A Notebook
    Audiobook2 hours

    South and West: From A Notebook

    Written by Joan Didion

    Narrated by Kimberly Farr

    3.5/5

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    About this audiobook

    From one of the most important chroniclers of our time, come 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

    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.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarperCollins Publishers
    Release dateSep 21, 2017
    ISBN9780008257194
    Unavailable
    South and West: From A Notebook
    Author

    Joan Didion

    Joan Didion is one of America’s most respected writers, her work constituting some of the greatest portraits of modern-day American culture. Over the four decades of her career, she has produced widely-acclaimed journalistic essays, personal essays, novels, non-fiction, memoir and screenplays. Her memoir The Year of Magical Thinking won the National Book Award in 2005.

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    Reviews for South and West

    3.5/5

    132 ratings9 reviews

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    • 5/5
      I am always so pleasantly surprised by Joan Didion’s writing.
    • 3/5
      "I was underwater in some real sense, the whole month."
      A delightful and scattered little volume, which is to be expected from its content, and perhaps a good introduction to someone I am just beginning to read. It provided an excellent sense of atmosphere that at once seemed vague, honest, and vivid.
      Two notes: Nathaniel Rich's foreward is awful, already dated just two years later, and projects an elitism onto Didion's writing that is simply not there in the text. I didn't realize in 2016 that the year would mark all nonfiction with a dull brand of specific political comment. The only redeeming quality of these offensive little pages was how they drew the attention to Didion's occasional "The sense of ..." fragments, which were remarkable little tones.
      Also, I find it entertaining that typography pages seem to be more commonly found in books set in Bodoni than any other font. The font itself isn't half as obtrusive as the perpetual notes on its history.
    • 5/5
      It had been too long, as I had forgotten some of the beauty of Didion’s prose. This book was taken right from her notebooks that chronicled her travels, with all manners of dialogues, interviews, drafts of essays, and copies of her articles. The section on the west starts on page 109 of this slim book of only 126 pages. It was that fact that drove me to get her book Where I Was From, so I could read her writing about the whole state of California, as well as the Sacramento area where she lived and grew up. The section on the south is from a car trip she took with her husband, John Gregory Dunne, through Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama. There’s a raw feel to much of this “notebook” writing. They haven’t lost the directness of her seeing these things for the first time, and the edges and the freshness haven’t been heavily edited or polished away. The west section was from a Rolling Stone assignment to write about the Patty Hearst trial, but that article was never written. This is a slim book—and if it had regular-sized margins, it would have been much thinner—but it feels true to its subjects. With the southern material, it is shocking to read how little has changed down there in all the years since these observations were first made. It is interesting to read something that was written years ago that related to things even further back in history. It’s like a time experiment, where time is on three different levels: the reader’s present, the writer’s experiences, and finally, history. Didion fans such as I will be disappointed by the book’s brevity, but will always be thrilled with more of her writings. And, if a reader comes to this volume a virgin to Didion’s writings, this collection will most likely start them down the route to more and more of her writings—she does that to people who appreciate quality prose.
    • 4/5
      Didion’s wondrously clear, but humorous “I” permeates and marinates these notes, recollections and observations from a month travelling around the South (Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama) from New Orleans in 1970, doing “nothing at all but try to find out, as usual, what was making the picture in my mind.”It is perhaps understandable based on the evidence of these extracts from Didion’s notebook why no coherent article was created from the “material” collected, but there are the usual wonderful “quotes”:“Bananas would rot, and harbor tarantulas. Weather would come in on the radar, and be bad. Children would take fever and die, ...”The reported conversations can be about absolutely nothing or grimly fatalistic, but often hilarious.After about 100 pages about the South, there follows about 14 pages of notes from when Didion visited California in 1976 to report on the Patty Hearst trial (a wealthy teenager who was kidnapped, probably coerced into an armed bank robbery and served a reduced prison term) for Rolling Stone. But the notes aren’t about Patty Hearst, but about Didion herself, and she comments that this assignment lead to her much later writing Where I Was From (2003).
    • 4/5
      Didion's mastery over her reports from the front is glorious to behold. This little book is built from notes and sketches made during a road trip with her husband. Her observations of the South (where I am from) show how little the culture and attitudes have changed over the last four or five decades. The New South is wholly recognizable, and there is nothing new about it. As Faulkner said, the past isn't history -- it isn't even past.
    • 4/5
      Didion's South and West is a pleasure to read. To be a fly on the wall in her travels would be pure entertainment, especially in a place like the south. She writes with such freewheeling commentary that is simultaneously gripping and simple.

      Note: Didion's latest was my first foray into her work, so that may color my opinion.
    • 3/5
      I think because of her west coast snobbery and elite background she missed a lot of great stuff surrounding the deep south. How can you give a place an even shake when you're dying to get out of it.Brilliant prose but all the truly great stuff in the introduction!
    • 4/5
      To call this a book of essays is a misnomer, as it is reaslly notes for two separate pieces that Didion wrote in thee 1970's., The first (and longest) piece is about her travels through, Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama during a summer in the 1970;;'s. The last, which is more of a coda to the first part are notes on California she made in anticipation of writing a piece on the trial of Patty Hearst for Rolling Stone magazine. Neither piece was ever written, but Didion's notes read better than most people's finished proseHer journey through the South gfeels remarkably contemporary even though it was written over forty years ago.. Her descriptions of languid summer days, the preoccupation of where a stranger is from and the casual racism of the white population, are just as relevant today as it was then.Her short piece on California seems to be reconciling herself to the place of her birth. Howeveras Nathaniel Rich states in his forward to the book California's dreamers of teh golden dream were just that - dreamers - while the "dense obsessiveness of the South, and all the vindictiveness that comes with it, was the true American condition, the condition to which we always inevitably return.This slim volume provides much food for thought.
    • 4/5
      This is fabulous, if you're a Didion fan. She is my favorite writer, with untouchable precision and sharpness, and the most concise writing style. Reading her best sentences can be like being hit by a blast of icy wind on a cold winter day. South and West are fragments, apparently taken from notebooks in which she wrote up her daily notes of impressions. So it's not finished work. However, the first part, about a road trip through the South, is striking, resonant and feels contemporary.This book also contains one of the most excellent and perceptive forwards by a blurbing colleague that I've ever read.