Joan Didion has a new book coming out next year so maybe 2017 will be better

Joan Didion once wrote, in one of her many Tumblr-sound-bite-able pieces, that she’d already lost touch with a few of the people she used to be. I think most of us, after 2016, hope that we lose touch with the people we were this year, because it’s been shit, and hopefully 2017 will be better.

One way it’ll be better: Joan Didion has a new book coming out in March next year. The collection of essays, personal reflections and interviews, called “South and West: From a Notebook”, was compiled on a roadtrip across the American South (of course) with her late husband in June 1970.

Released on the 7th March, the book will include sections from Didion’s travel notebooks, that she kept as she and husband John Gregory Dunne drove through Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama. Penguin’s blurb promises: “She interviews prominent local figures, describes motels, diners, a deserted reptile farm, a visit with Walker Percy, a ladies’ brunch at the Mississippi Broadcasters’ Convention. She writes about the stifling heat, the almost viscous pace of life, the sulfurous light, and the preoccupation with race, class, and heritage she finds in the small towns they pass through.

“And from a different notebook: the “California Notes” that began as an assignment from Rolling Stone on the Patty Hearst trial of 1976. Though Didion never wrote the piece, watching the trial and being in San Francisco triggered thoughts about the city, its social hierarchy, the Hearsts, and her own upbringing in Sacramento. Here, too, is the beginning of her thinking about the West, its landscape, the western women who were heroic for her, and her own lineage, all of which would appear later in her acclaimed 2003 book, Where I Was From.”