Review

Notes

• p10 - I had imagined the Second World War as a punishment specifically designed to deprive me of my father, had counted up my errors and, with an egocentricity which then approached autism and which affects me still in dreams and fevers and marriage, found myself guilty.
• p14 - …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. I did not much want to talk about this.
• p115 - I seem to have been rewarde, out of all proportion to my generally undistinguished academic record, with an incommensurate number of prizes and scholarships (…) and recommendations and special attention and very probably the envy and admiration of at least certain of my peers. Curiously, I only remember failing, failures, and slights and refusals.
  • TB: I relate to this just a little bit.
• p117 - At the center of this story there is a terrible secret, a kernel of cyanide, and the secret is that the story doesn’t matter, doesn’t make any difference, doesn’t figure. The snow still falls in the Sierra. The Pacific still trembles in its bowl. The great tectonic plates strain against each other while we sleep and wake. Rattlers in the dry grass. Sharks beneath the Golden Gate. In the South they are convinced that they have bloodied their place with history. In the West we do not believe that anything we do can bloody the land, or change it, or touch it.
• p126 - Part of it is simply what looks right to the eye, sounds right to the ear. I am at home in the West. The hills of the coastal ranges look “right” to me, the particular flat expanse of the Central Valley comforts my eye. The place names have the ring of real places to me. I can pronounce the names of the rivers, and recognize the common trees and snakes. I am easy here in a way that I am not easy in other places.

Review

I liked it! Reading about the South is always a little fascinating. The regionality of this country is at times hard to reconcile, especially today with this vague monoculture and supposed shrunken world. I did not grow up in The South, but I grew up in a place that was quite insistent it was Southern, and would you please remember that, everything in their character insisted.

A few times in the Southern notes, Didion talks about free flag decals. Impossible not to think of Prine’s Your Flag Decal Won’t Get You Into Heaven Anymore an incredible song as applicable in the late 60’s as it was in 2002 and 2025. I say 2002 because I remember after 9/11 and the years following when the local newspaper would come with full page inserts: one side an American flag, the other at times a tearful eagle. These were all over the place. You couldn’t pass a busted up mobile home or hole-roofed house without seeing them in the windows.

So, while Didion is trekking around the South in the 60’s, it sure does feel like the Southern region of the state I grew up in. Similar people, maybe with some proclivities a little dampened. Same fondness for the high school gymnasium and the one restaurant in town. There is a lot that I see familiar, anyway.

The short section of Western notes is quite different. I don’t relate to the San Francisco or Sacramento of it all, though it is lovely writing.

Part of it is simply what looks right to the eye, sounds right to the ear. I am at home in the West. The hills of the coastal ranges look "right" to me, the particular flat expanse of the Central Valley comforts my eye. The place names have the ring of real places to me. I can pronounce the names of the rivers, and recognize the common trees and snakes. I am easy here in a way that I am not easy in other places.

I wonder where this is for me. Southern (!!) Illinois was certainly not it. Chicago was very close. Washington D.C. holds many people that I like and more. Though I would not say any of these places has been perfect. I wonder if there is a such a thing as a perfect place. Or at least, I wonder where I will feel the easiest. Perhaps I will find out someday.

I enjoyed Didion’s writing. I will be reading more.