Sur y Oeste

Joan Didion has always kept her notebooks, filled with overheard conversations, observations, interviews, and drafts of her articles. In the summer of 1970, she filled one of these notebooks with accounts of a road trip through Mississippi, Alabama, and Louisiana with her husband, John Gregory Dunne. During the trip, she interviewed prominent local figures whose concerns about race, class, and heritage revealed a country mired in its own past. The result is a sharp and incisive collection of observations on that backward South, notes that, in light of the current dynamics of the political, social, and cultural landscape of the Trump era, take on an almost prophetic meaning.