This March Joan Didion is set to release a new book, South and West: From a Notebook comprised of scribblings recorded during a road trip with her husband John Gregory Dunne, in June 1970. Pressed is marking the occasion by revisiting her famed 1968 essay, “On Keeping a Notebook,” in which she examines her obsessive journaling.

In her typical gloomy fashion Didion calls those who, like herself, possess a need to frantically record their observations, “lonely and resistant rearrangers of things”. But it’s this desire to record fleeting moments that becomes most lucrative when writer’s block hits. “On that bankrupt morning” she tells us, “I will simply open my notebook and there it will all be…” An overheard argument, a private thought, a stranger’s offhand remark. “‘That woman Estelle,’ the note reads, ‘is partly the reason why George Sharp and I are separated.’”
 

Didion’s statement about the truthfulness of these recordings is perhaps the most poignant. Who is Estelle? The story that she will spin off this brief comment will likely resemble little of this woman’s actual existence. But does this matter? “I imagine…that the notebook is about other people. But of course it is not...How it felt to me…[to] Remember what it was to be me: that is always the point.”

Reader, buy a notebook; buy one now.

South and West: From a Notebook will be out 7 March 2017 and available from all major book sellers.