California and the SouthĪt first glance, even the arrangement of the book seems strange: why should Didion’s “Notes on the South” from her 1970 notebooks be paired with her “California Notes” from six years later?Īren’t the two incompatible on so many levels? South and West is proof that they shouldn’t. In other words, the ever-intuitive brilliant mind of perhaps the greatest modern American essayist felt, back in the 1970s, that the American story most of the other people believed in is not the whole story.Īnd feared that, one day, the untold parts of it would feel like a twist. Trump and caught so many political and media insiders unawares.” At a remove of more than four decades, she maps the divisions splintering America today, and uncannily anticipates some of the dynamics that led to the election of Donald J. “No doubt Didion has now decided to publish South and West,” wrote Michiko Kakutani in her review for The New York Times, “because they similarly shed light on the current political moment. Then why should these notes be published at all?
“South and West PDF Summary”ĭescribed as “a scrapbook of background notes, thoughts and early drafts by one of the most extraordinary writers of our time,” Joan Didion’s South and West, for the most part, looks like a book that never should have been written.Īnd, in a way, it never was: comprising two sections – the substantial “Notes on the South” and the pretty brief, even less structured, and no more than trivial “California Notes” – the book is nothing more but a string of beginnings no middle and an end, sort of would-be essays, if you please.Īnd they all date back to the 1970s, the second part being peculiarly and almost anachronistically topical, covering (mostly) the abduction of Patty Hearst by the Symbionese Liberation Army.
Winner of the National Book Award for Nonfiction for her autobiography The Year of Magical Thinking, Didion is the author of six novels and as many screenplays, a play, and about a dozen nonfiction works. Widely admired for her writing style and her capability to portray the disintegration of American morals and the social fragmentation of the USA, Didion is often considered one of the most prominent voices in the New Journalism literary movement. Joan Didion is an American journalist, novelist, and essayist.
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