Dec
24
Westward South
After finishing Joan Didion’s most recent book, West and South, where the paragraphs became shorter and shorter as she wrote it out (a book that was centrally about her despairs, her regrets, and especially her more than failing health), I expected no other book out of of her—and, in a real sense, I was right.
This book is not a piece of new work. Instead, it is a collection of notes for stories she never wrote, stories intended to live first in magazines, but stories—instead—that had to wait until a publisher decided she would write no new book.
Inside of these covers are two stories: one the story of a peripatetic journey through the Deep South in 1970, and the second a story, putatively, about the trial of Patty Hearst, but barely mentioning Hearst or the trial.
This book is not a piece of new work. Instead, it is a collection of notes for stories she never wrote, stories intended to live first in magazines, but stories—instead—that had to wait until a publisher decided she would write no new book.
Inside of these covers are two stories: one the story of a peripatetic journey through the Deep South in 1970, and the second a story, putatively, about the trial of Patty Hearst, but barely mentioning Hearst or the trial.
