The pleasures of this short book…are found in observing the South through Didion's eyes. She is particularly sensitive to Southerners' relationship to history, a relationship that stands in sharp contrast to the prevailing attitude in California.

At a remove of more than four decades, [Didion] maps the divisions splintering America today…As bookends to each other, the pieces in this book give us two Americas, two ways of looking at history: the South, deep in the grip of the past—a place where many people are invested in holding onto ancient prerogatives of race and class; and California, insistently focused on the future and the horizon—a place where the frontier ethos of shucking off roots is the one real tradition…[South and West] shows Didion at work, as a writer and reporter, gathering details, jotting them down and running her observations through the typewriter of her mind. Even these hurriedly written notes shine with her trademark ability to capture mood and place…More than that, this book illuminates Didion's later work, containing the seeds of both Political Fictions and her elliptical 2003 book on California and the West, Where I Was From. It is weirdly prescient—pointing the way not only to where she would go as a writer but also a path the country would take in the years to come.

01/09/2017
Even in raw form, Didion’s (Blue Nights) voice surpasses other writers’ in “elegance and clarity,” Nathaniel Rich astutely observes in his introduction to Didion’s notebooks from her 1970 trip to Louisiana, Alabama, and Mississippi and much shorter 1976 musings about her California youth. Didion’s notes display her characteristic verbal power: details such as “bananas would rot, and harbor tarantulas” (about New Orleans weather) punctuate this short volume. Moreover, Didion reveals remarkable foresight about America’s political direction: Rich traces a direct line from her nearly 50-year-old musings on the Gulf Coast as America’s “psychic center” to the Trump election. But most strikingly, Didion’s observations reveal differences with today, such as a degree of civility now often missing from public discourse. In one dinner exchange, for example, a wealthy white Mississippian gripes about busing, yet says, “Basically I know the people who are pushing it are right.” Students of social history, fans of Didion, and those seeking a quick, engaging read will appreciate this work: the raw immediacy of unedited prose by a master has an urgency that more polished works often lack. Agent: Lynn Nesbit, Janklow & Nesbit. (Mar.)This review has been corrected to reflect a slight change in the title.

One of the Best Books of the Year: NPR, Harper's Bazaar

“Vintage Didion. . . . Remind[s] us of her brilliance as a stylist, social commentator and observer.” —The Washington Post

“Elegant, eerily prescient. . . .  At once informal and immediate, magisterial and indelible.” —Elle

“Fascinating. . . . Shine[s] with her trademark ability to capture mood and place.” —The New York Times

“In these two pieces, Didion isn’t so much seeing the country as she is x-raying it, cataloging the presenting symptoms of the ailing republic. . . . [This] volume will persist in the memory.” —The Village Voice

“Reveals the author at her most fascinatingly unfiltered. . . . Captures the thrill of a writer discovering her richest subject: the American mythologies that governed her own romantic girlhood.” —Vogue

“Intimate, yet preternaturally detached, as though her matchless ear bears witness from the beyond.” —The Boston Globe

“Exemplif[ies] Didion’s signature brand of reportorial haiku—her pitiless camera eye, razor-sharp wit and telling techniques of self-deprecation that only bring the reader . . . further along for the ride.” —San Francisco Chronicle

“Deeply personal. . . . Offer[s] new insight into a formative time in the author's life.” —Rolling Stone

“One of contemporary literature’s most revered essayists revives her raw records from a 1970s road trip across the American southwest . . . her acute observations of the country’s culture and history feel particularly resonant today.” —Harper’s Bazaar

“Vintage Didion, idiosyncratic and tantalizingly self-revealing.” —USA Today

“This is the charm of South and West: while its political observations are both prescient and canny, the greater pleasure is the view into her mind at work. For a writer who has never shied away from exploring the personal in her writing, Didion's notebooks might be her most vulnerable work yet.” —Bomb

“Compelling . . . rooted utterly in a past now all but lost to us, while also incredibly timely and relevant.” —Los Angeles Review of Books

“If this is how Didion's notebooks read, let's have them all. . . . The form suits her particular brilliance: the ability to sequence arresting sentences, crammed with observation and insight, and let them generate their own momentum.” —Minneapolis Star Tribune

“A marvelous time capsule. . . . Fascinating documents spiked with virtuosic turns. . . . Cast[s] light backward and forward on her work, illuminating her reportorial process and the themes she would develop in later novels and nonfiction.” —Vulture

“[Didion’s] idiosyncratic genius is in full evidence in South and West. . . . Didion seemed to be aware that she was recording a singular moment in the culture. . . . She did not want to transcend the madness of the day, escape it, but rather to capture it completely.” —Newsweek

“Engaging and haunting. . . . Didion’s observations of the South are remarkable to read, dripping with a sense of unease. . . .  Didion at her most unfiltered. Those who admire her will find this glimpse into her notebooks exhilarating.” —Paste

“An amazing snapshot of Didion at work, her interviews with regular folks, her descriptions of motels and highways in one section and of what California means to her in another.” —Austin American-Statesman

★ 05/01/2017
Reading this slim volume is like opening a time capsule…and then having the alarming realization that almost nothing has changed. Here, National Book Award winner Didion (The Year of Magical Thinking) gathers together and juxtaposes her notes from a visit to the American South during the 1970s with those she wrote a few years later in San Francisco while covering the 1974 Patty Hearst kidnapping. As she draws parallels between the two places, she reveals the false promise of commercial industry and development, "the kernel of cyanide" hidden within the American dream, which has brought about its current state of decadence and decay. Though her notes are notes—in no way do they resemble the perfunctory outlines or drafts one usually associates with the term. Her narrative arrangement closely mirrors her itinerary, resulting in a multitextured patchwork of voices from New Orleans; Mississippi's Biloxi and Meridian, and Tuscaloosa, AL. The reader gets the sense she is eavesdropping on the past, and these conversations, haunting in their prescience, are difficult to forget. VERDICT This is important reading for today, but it is essential reading for the future.—Meagan Lacy, Guttman Community Coll., CUNY

Narrator Kimberly Farr dissolves the barrier between author and listener, creating an intimate atmosphere. Her unforced performance conveys Didion's unguarded reactions to life in the South, primarily in 1970. Farr enlivens Didion's recollections, highlighting the author's curiosity about the people she meets and the conversations she overhears as well as her uneasiness both in backwoods communities in rural Mississippi and at social gatherings in New Orleans’ Garden District. When Didion reflects on her native California, Farr's tone lightens, underscoring the author's comfort at being in familiar territory. This collection of unedited notebook entries emphasizes the sociocultural differences between the Gulf Coast and the West Coast, most of which still ring true decades later. Essayist Nathaniel Rich reads his own foreword to the audiobook. C.B.L. © AudioFile 2017, Portland, Maine

2016-12-26
A revealing publication from the celebrated prose stylist.In 1970, Didion (Blue Nights, 2011, etc.) took a sojourn in the Deep South, beginning in New Orleans and then heading to Mississippi and Alabama before returning to the Big Easy. (Also included are some pages about the author's California homes in her youth.) Didion had intended to write a book about the South, but she just never got around to it. However, she retained her notes and observations, which compose this slender volume. Here are many of the splendid, sharp-eyed sentences for which she has long been admired. There are also brief notes, snippets of overheard conversations (in restaurants, on the street, in motels, libraries, around motel swimming pools), and sights along the road, viewed from her rental car. Didion writes about snakes, heat, sports, racial issues, and a strange coolness she experienced from many of the locals. In Oxford, she mentions that she could not find William Faulkner's grave, which is hard to miss these days. She also bemoans the lack of bookstores in town, hardly a problem now. But what will strike readers is—as Didion declares—her inability to "get into it"—to interview the people she ought to (some avoided her) and to venture more deeply into the Southern heart. She does chronicle her interviews with some locals and others, including a visit with Walker Percy (for which readers will certainly yearn for more details). Didion also confesses that she was ready—just about at any time—to hop on a plane for home. But some of her observations are classics: a man with a shotgun shooting pigeons on a street in a Mississippi town; a comment about the fierce heat: "all movement seemed liquid." An almost spectral text haunted by a past that never seems distant.