Joan Didion has always kept notebooks: of overheard dialogue, observations, interviews, drafts of essays and articles --- and here is one such draft that traces a road trip she took with her husband, John Gregory Dunne, through Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama. And from a different notebook: the "California Notes" that began as an assignment from Rolling Stone on the Patty Hearst trial. 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.