Download South and West: From a Notebook AudioBook Free
Through the best-selling author of the National Publication Award-winning The 12 months of Magical Thinking: two extended excerpts from her never-before-seen notebooks - writings offering an illuminating glance into the brain and process of a legendary copy writer. Joan Didion has always retained notebooks - of overheard dialogue, observations, interviews, drafts of essays, and articles - and here's one such draft that traces a street trip she took with her spouse, John Gregory Dunne, in June 1970, through Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama. She interviews dominant local figures, identifies motels, diners, a deserted reptile farm, a visit with Walker Percy, a women' brunch at the Mississippi Broadcasters' Convention. She writes about the stifling warmth, the almost viscous speed of life, the sulfurous light, and the preoccupation with race, class, and history she locates in the small towns they pass through. And from some other notebook: the "California Notes" that started as an assignment from Rolling Rock on the Patty Hearst trial of 1976. Though Didion never wrote the piece, observing the trial and being in SAN FRANCISCO BAY AREA activated thoughts about the city, its interpersonal hierarchy, the Hearsts, and her own upbringing in Sacramento. Here, too, is the beginning of her thinking about the West, its landscape, the European women who were heroic on her behalf, and her own lineage, which seems later in her acclaimed 2003 reserve Where I GOT From.
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