“I had only some dim and unformed sense,” Didion writes in a passage that comes as close as she gets to a statement of purpose for her Southern passage, “a sense which struck me now and then, and which I could not explain coherently, that for some years the South and particularly the Gulf Coast had been for America what people were still saying California was, and what California seemed to me not to be: the future, the secret source of malevolent and benevolent energy, the psychic center.”

Both pieces are raw and clearly unfinished, but both are fascinating documents spiked with virtuosic turns. “At the time,” she writes, “I had thought it might be a piece.” Her jottings from that trip are now the bulk of her new book South and West: From a Notebook, a slim volume that also includes a short fragment from an abandoned assignment to cover the Patty Hearst trial of 1976, in San Francisco, for Rolling Stone. That June of 1970 Didion and Dunne set out on a monthlong trip to New Orleans and the Gulf Coast. Didion was at the height of her powers, but as a journalist she was homeless. The release of the first film from a Didion-Dunne screenplay, The Panic in Needle Park, was still a year away. As Tracy Daugherty reports in his 2015 biography The Last Love Song, sometimes Life didn’t even run the columns she filed, so she broke the contract after six months. “Some of the guys are going out,” her editor told her. Didion had been writing a column for Life that exposed her sometimes very personal writing to a mass audience (“We are here on this island in the middle of the Pacific in lieu of filing for divorce,” she wrote in the winter of 1969), but Life wouldn’t send her where she wanted to go: Vietnam. But the Saturday Evening Post - the magazine that had sustained the couple through the late 1960s and the original home of most of the essays collected in Slouching Towards Bethlehem (1968) - had gone belly up. In the Times John Leonard called it “just about perfect according to its own austere terms” and compared her to Nathanael West it would be nominated for the National Book Award and garner a hefty advance for paperback rights after several precarious years she and her husband John Gregory Dunne had spent freelancing. Play It As It Lays, her second novel, was published to rapturous reviews. In the summer of 1970 Joan Didion was 35 years old, truly famous for the first time, and professionally adrift.

Joan didion west and south