Joan Didion is not so much a chronicler of American culture as its velvet-gloved eviscerator. With spare and penetrating syntax that strips all excess from her narratives, she has, over the last seven decades, gone straight to the withered heart of the matter in novels and essays that have become legendary. Two of her nonfiction books, Slouching Towards Bethlehem and The White Album, have taken on well-deserved iconic, even mythic, status. 

Didion, who is now 86, has not published anything new in a while (her memoir of her daughter’s death, Blue Nights, appeared in 2011), but for the last few years she has been digging through her archives and notebooks and selecting fragments and abandoned pieces that offer a glimpse into her working process and her earlier self. Let Me Tell You What I Mean gathers 12 previously uncollected short pieces mostly written for magazines in the 1960s and ’70s, with a few dating to the tail end of the last century.

As a group, these essays are wide-ranging in subject, yet each displays the distinctive voice Didion has honed with precision. Whether she is profiling the studied perfection of then-first lady of California Nancy Reagan or the cultural significance of Martha Stewart on the cusp of her historic initial public offering, Didion allows her subjects to speak for themselves, inviting us to read between the lines and draw our own conclusions. At the height of the turbulent 1960s, this pioneer of new journalism could zero in on the discomfiting comfort of a Gamblers Anonymous meeting (“mea culpa always turns out to be not entirely mea”) or convey a proud veteran’s ambivalence about his son’s impending service in Vietnam during a 101st Airborne Association reunion in Las Vegas. Fans of Didion’s incisive fiction will delight in her candid reflection on why she abandoned the short story as a viable form early in her career.

Not unexpectedly, Let Me Tell You What I Mean is secondary Didion at best, but even minor offerings from this prose master are hard to dismiss—and equally hard to resist.

In this compilation of magazine columns from Southern Living and Garden & Gun, Rick Bragg continues to weave chicken-fried stories of his life in the South. Best known for his extraordinary memoir All Over but the Shoutin’ and his Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times journalism, Bragg’s voice is as rich as ever as he finds fresh ways of telling stories both hilarious and poignant.

Where I Come From is a series of vignettes—little jewels on family, faith, food and Fords. Bragg’s Alabama roots especially shine through when he writes about his family, and oh how we love hearing about his family. On the trials of finding a gift for his mother, he writes, “I got her a classic, two-tone blue 1956 Chevrolet. She used it as a greenhouse. I got her a house. It had too many lightbulbs. I got her another. The driveway is too steep. I got her false teeth. She spit them out in the weeds, just outside Pell City, Alabama.”

But Bragg balances the quaint by dipping his toe into current events—something he has typically shied away from in his writing. In a chapter called "The Best of Who We Are," he reckons with the ugliness that remains as our nation grapples with its racist roots. “I grew up in an everyday racism; the Confederate flag license plates that rode on the front bumpers of our pickups hurt others like a thumb in the eye,” he writes. “It took me a while to get it, but it came to me, even as a boy. I do not need a statue or flag to know that I am Southern. I can taste it in the food, feel it in my heart, and hear it in the language of my kin.”

In lighter, more mouthwatering chapters, Bragg reveals himself to be a heck of a food writer. His description of a po’boy sandwich (“shrimp are cooked in butter and spices, then stuffed into hollowed-out bread and drenched in the buttery liquid from the skillet”) had me wishing I could hop a plane to New Orleans. Alas, such a trip is not in the cards, but it was hard to feel too sorry for myself when I was immediately laughing at his next line: “If I were a sandwich, I think I would be a po'boy, overstuffed, a little sloppy, relatively cheap, and bad for you.”

Where I Come From is vintage Bragg: comforting, thought-provoking and as heartfelt as it gets.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Love audiobooks? Check out Where I Come From and other nonfiction audiobook picks.

In this penetrating new essay collection, 21 writers of color explore the joys and heartbreak of living in the contemporary American South, a vast and diverse region heavy with history, possibilities and contradictions. Edited by author Cinelle Barnes, a resident of Charleston, South Carolina, A Measure of Belonging aims to answer the question: Who belongs here?

Written by a mix of established and emerging writers, these piercing essays present a refreshing and nuanced view of the South by never engaging in flat Southern stereotypes or assuming a veneer of homogeneity. Instead the collection subverts the cultural dominance of whiteness by engaging with topics as varied as Black college majorettes, the DMV and apartment hunting. Kiese Laymon, writer of the critically acclaimed memoir Heavy, looks into the difficulties of living in Oxford, Mississippi, as a Black professor. In his essay “That’s Not Actually True,” he explores the layered tension of race and class in trying to record his own audiobook. In the essay “Foreign and Domestic,” Jaswinder Bolina talks about the unique sensation of being mugged in Miami and feeling a kinship to his muggers because of their similarities. He feels at home in a neighborhood with people who look like him, in a city that is technically part of the South but also a world away. In “My Sixty-Five-Year-Old Roommate,” Jennifer Hope Choi delightfully describes the unexpected comfort of moving in with her mother in South Carolina after a veritable lifetime of living precariously in New York City. Latria Graham painfully deals with the never-ending flooding on her family’s farm, while Minda Honey relishes in her newfound auntie status.

Not all of the writers are originally from the South, but they all contribute to a well-rounded view of the Southern United States as a place that isn’t a monolith. Sharp and witty, this collection shows that there are many different ways to live, breathe, thrive and be a person who belongs in the South.