Automated equipment has changed the lifestyle long, quiet winters of socializing have given way to year-round farming. Invited to lunch in Clarksdale, Mississippi, Didion listens as her host wistfully talks of cotton farming. Didion’s manicurist, aged 17 and about to finish high school, dreams of earning her cosmetologist’s license, then possibly entering modeling school. While getting a manicure, Didion strikes up a conversation with the proprietress’s daughter. The idea of listening to the car radio elicits an astonished “Drive where?” from southerners. Joining a group of wives at a broadcaster’s convention, Didion listens as they avidly discuss their television and radio listening habits.

I love boys,” Didion writes.īouldin is exceptional. “A boys house, everything rough and ready. When Didion visits, Bouldin is in the midst of remodeling the family home. Now a practicing ob/gyn, she has thrown off any trappings of domestic femininity, professing a hatred of cooking and an indifference to her appearance. Mel Bouldin, a cotton planter’s wife, returned to medical school after bearing children. Southern women working outside the home are rare enough to merit mention. Invited to a dinner in New Orleans, Didion is closely questioned by her host: What sports does her husband engage in? Why did he “allow” her to hang around with “marijuana hippie-smoking trash?” That Didion kept company with the “trash” in question for reasons of journalism is dismissed by her host. It is this area, rather than California, where she suspects the future of America lies, “The secret source of malevolent and benevolent energy, the psychic center.” Nothing did - until now.ĭidion manages, in her usual idiosyncratic way, to be both inchoate and searing about what draws her to the South, particularly the Gulf Coast states. Didion, impelled neither by court case nor newsworthy event, had hoped some writing would emerge from her travels.

The majority of South and West is devoted to “The South”, notes taken over the course of a month-long road trip in 1970.

Of course, this is Joan Didion’s notebook, not yours or mine, meaning it’s a polished, coherent document. Indeed, this is what makes this release so startling. Given South and West: From a Notebook is assembled from notes taken nearly 50 years ago, some may argue she offers nothing new here. Never in robust health, now aged and besieged by personal loss, Didion is an author with every reason to stop writing. For certain readers, word of a new Joan Didion book brings a sense of relief.

Didion south and west