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Biography & Autobiography. Literary Criticism. Nonfiction. HTML:From the best-selling author of the National Book Award-winning The Year of Magical Thinking: two extended excerpts from her never-before-seen notebooksâ??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 articlesâ??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 TIMEâ??s most anticipated books of 2017 One of The New York Times Book Review's â??What Youâ??ll Be Reading in 2017â?ť Includued among the Best Books of March 2017 by both LitHub and Signature … (more)
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South and West are fragments, apparently taken from
This book also contains one of the most excellent and perceptive forwards by a blurbing colleague that I've ever read.
Her 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.
Brilliant prose but all the truly great stuff in the introduction!
Note: Didion's latest was my first foray into her work,
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).
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.
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
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.