Joan Didion's South and West (2017) comes several decades after the initial writing of the notes. It is comprised of two sections about the south and California (west) in particular. It's a pity that Didion never finished her project about life in South when she flew to New Orleans in 1970 and rented a car and started driving around the south talking to people and trying to understand it and she hope that understanding would help her also understand her experience in the west.
The way in which all the reporting tricks I had ever known atrophied in the South. There were things I should do, I knew it: but I never did them.
Her reporting is sharp as she characterizes people and describes the places she visits with her husband and tries to imagine having grown up there-something that she is incredulous about. This book would have been good background writing when I was visiting New Orleans last year:
When I think about New Orleans I remember mainly its dense obsessiveness, its vertiginous preoccupation with race, class, heritage, style, and the absence of style. A sit happens, these particular preoccupations all involve distinctions which the frontier ethic teaches western children to deny and to leave deliberately unmentioned, but in New Orleans such distinctions are the basis of much conversation, and lend the conversation its peculiar childlike cruelty and innocence.
From New Orleans she drives all over Mississippi making the same pity and provocative observations about the region. She tries to imagine herself living there:
It occurred to me almost constantly in the South that had I lived there I would have been an eccentric and full of anger, and I wondered what form the anger would have taken. Would I have taken up causes, or would I have simply knifed somebody?
Many of her statements about the south are almost aphorism, and they still feel accurate today: "The time warp: the Civil War was yesterday, but 1960 is spoken of as it were about three hundred years ago." I very much would have liked to read her book on the south, I expect it would have been as fascinating as her book on Miami. The second section was inspired by a piece that she was assigned to write about the Patty Hearst incident that she never completed. However, that did eventually lead to a book on her growing up in the Sacramento Valley that was Where I Was From (2003). I enjoyed that book and perhaps it would have been good to re-read it as I visit the region for the second year in a row now that I am more familiar with the area-I suspect I would get much more from it now. That being said this short section has some pearls of wisdom as well: "In the South they are convinced that they have bloodied their place with history. In the West we do not believe that anything we do can bloody the land, or change it, or touch it." I guess my biggest complaint is that I want more of Didion's summations and observations about these two regions.
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