by Joan Didion
First published 2017
Joan Didion opens her private notebooks to reveal two unpublished drafts that capture America in transition. The first traces her 1970 journey with husband John Gregory Dunne through Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama. Didion records conversations with local figures, visits to roadside diners and abandoned reptile farms, and an encounter with novelist Walker Percy. She observes the thick heat, the slow rhythms of small town life, and the persistent tensions around race and class that define the region. The second notebook contains her "California Notes" from 1976, originally planned as a Rolling Stone piece about the Patty Hearst trial. Though she never completed the assignment, her time in San Francisco sparked reflections on the city's social structure, the Hearst family's influence, and her own Sacramento childhood. These notes became the foundation for her later examination of western identity and landscape. Together, the notebooks reveal Didion's method of transforming raw observation into lasting insight.
Genres: 20th-century, american, biography-memoir, american-history
Vibes: atmospheric, emotional, intimate, thought-provoking
Tropes: personal-narrative, social-commentary
Setting: Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, San Francisco, Sacramento
Period: 1970, 1976
160 pages · Hardcover · Knopf