Slouching Toward Didion

A new collection reminds us why every release from the writer is an event.

- Lea Carpenter

I had imagined the Second World War as punishment specifically designed to deprive me of my father, had counted up my errors and, with an egocentricity which then approached autism and which afflicts me still in dreams and fevers and marriage, found myself guilty.” This is how Joan Didion describes her first visit, as a child in 1942, to the South. When she returned almost 30 years later, on a road trip with her husband through Louisiana,Mississippi, and Alabama, she took notes. “At the time,” she writes, “I had thought it might be a piece.” Those notes now constitute a new collection, South and West: From a Notebook (KNOPF, $21), out this month, which pairs that draft alongside one from another trip for an assigned article that never happened, when Rolling Stone sent her to San Francisco to write about Patricia Hearst. South and West was written before mobile phones and terror wars, before the Reagan Revolution and before Barack Obama and Donald Trump and what feels like an epochal breaking apart of old orders. Yet her revelations feel new. Not new as explorations of place but of a writer in the process of becoming something.