Joan Didion’s South and West is loosely defined as a travel essay, but of course, like all of Didion’s writing, it delivers so much more.
The book is comprised of excerpts from notebooks Didion kept in the 1970s. The first part, ‘Notes on the South‘, traces a road trip that she took through Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama, with her husband, John Gregory Dunne. Along the way, she chronicles her observations about the small towns they pass through and she gently examines the deeply rooted (and sometimes unquestioned) beliefs about race, class, and heritage held in the South.
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