South and West From a Notebook

Joan Didion, Nathaniel Rich

eBook - 2017

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • “One of contemporary literature’s most revered essayists revives her raw records from a 1970s road trip across the American southwest ... her acute observations of the country’s culture and history feel particularly resonant today.” —Harper’s Bazaar Joan Didion, the bestselling, award-winning author of The Year of Magical Thinking and Let Me Tell You What I Mean, has always kept notebooks—of overheard dialogue, interviews, drafts of essays, copies of articles. Here are two extended excerpts from notebooks she kept in the 1970s; read together, they form a piercing view of the American political and cultural landscape.“Notes on the South” traces a road trip that she and her husband, John Gregory Dunne..., took through Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama. Her acute observations about the small towns they pass through, her interviews with... more