California Notes: Now in the West, Joan Didion is asked to write about Patty Hearst, but diverts to musing on her own sense of belonging in Hearst country, developed since childhood.

From the best-selling author of the award-winning The Year of Magical Thinking - excerpts from her never-before-seen notebooks.

Joan Didion has always kept notebooks of overheard dialogue, observations, interviews, drafts of essays and articles - and here is one that traces a road trip she took in June 1970, through Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama.

And in her native west, the memoir piece California Notes that began as an assignment from Rolling Stone on the Patty Hearst trial of 1976.

Read by Laurel Lefkow
Abridged by Eileen Horne
Produced by Clive Brill
Directed by Eoin O'Callaghan
A Brill production for BBC Radio 4. Show less