Notes on a Birthplace by Way of Joan Didion
Demopolis: Wherein we were all just passing through
This is part 2. Read part 1, Notes on a Marriage by Way of Joan Didion.
Joan Didion’s South and West: From a Notebook was published in 2017. It contains notes Didion made on a driving trip through what she calls the Gulf South in 1970. She was supposed to write an essay about the South based on that trip, but never did. According to the foreword by Nathaniel Rich, Didion told a reviewer for The Paris Review in 2006 why she’d traveled southward:
I had a theory that if I could understand the South, I could understand something about California, because a lot of the California settlers came from the Border South.
As someone who comes from the South but lives in California, I’m not sure one explains or even illuminates the other. The differences between the South and the West are monumental, then as now—though in the foreword, written in 2016, Rich postulates that certain attitudes from the South have creeped stealthily northward.
In 1970 Joan Didion passed through Demopolis. Her notes for this part of the journey are called “On the Road from Meridian to Tuscaloosa.” I began my life in Demopolis in the same year Didion passed through. I was born at Whitfield Memorial Hospital though my family never lived in Demopolis. (On this point, I have tried and failed over the years to obtain clarity.) Of Demopolis, Didion writes,
In Demopolis around lunchtime the temperature was 96 degrees and all movement seemed liquid. An Alabama state trooper drove slowly around town.
It is difficult to imagine a less glamorous place to give birth or a less glamorous place to come into being.