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Joan didion west and south7/8/2023 John James Audubon, The Birds of America, 1830 Would that I could represent to you the dangerous nature of the ground, its oozing, spongy, and miry disposition. Stephen Vincent Benét, John Brown’s Body Here we not only see Didion’s signature irony and imagination in play, we’re also granted an illuminating glimpse into her mind and process. Though Didion never wrote the piece, the time she spent watching the trial in San Francisco triggered thoughts about the West and her own upbringing in Sacramento. “California Notes” began as an assignment from Rolling Stone on the Patty Hearst trial. Her acute observations about the small towns they pass through, her interviews with local figures, and their preoccupation with race, class, and heritage suggest a South largely unchanged today. “Notes on the South” traces a road trip that she and her husband, John Gregory Dunne, took through Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama. 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. 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.
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