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Overview
In her moving and insightful new book, Joan Didion reassesses parts of her life, her work, her history and ours. A native Californian, Didion applies her scalpel-like intelligence to the state’s ethic of ruthless self-sufficiency in order to examine that ethic’s often tenuous relationship to reality.
Combining history and reportage, memoir and literary criticism, Where I Was From explores California’s romances with land and water; its unacknowledged debts to railroads, aerospace, and big government; the disjunction between its code of individualism and its fetish for prisons. Whether she is writing about her pioneer ancestors or privileged sexual predators, robber barons or writers (not excluding herself), Didion is an unparalleled observer, and her book is at once intellectually provocative and deeply personal.
Synopsis
In this moving and unexpected book, Joan Didion reassesses parts of her life, her work, her history, and ours. Where I Was From, in Didion’s words, “represents an exploration into my own confusions about the place and the way in which I grew up, confusions as much about America as about California, misapprehensions and misunderstandings so much a part of who I became that I can still to this day confront them only obliquely.” The book is a haunting narrative of how her own family moved west with the frontier from the birth of her great-great-great-great-great-grandmother in Virginia in 1766 to the death of her mother on the edge of the Pacific in 2001; of how the wagon-train stories of hardship and abandonment and endurance created a culture in which survival would seem the sole virtue.
In Where I Was From, Didion turns what John Leonard has called “her sonar ear, her radar eye” onto her own work, as well as that of such California writers as Frank Norris and Jack London and Henry George, to examine how the folly and recklessness in the very grain of the California settlement led to the California we know today–a state mortgaged first to the railroad, then to the aerospace industry, and overwhelmingly to the federal government, a dependent colony of those political and corporate owners who fly in for the annual encampment of the Bohemian Club. Here is the one writer we always want to read on California showing us the startling contradictions in its–and in America’s–core values.
Joan Didion’s unerring sense of America and its spirit, her acute interpretation of its institutions and literature, and her incisive questioning of the stories it tells itself make this fiercely intelligent book a provocative and important tour de force from one of our greatest writers.
The New York Times
Ms. Didion's compelling if sometimes vexing new book, Where I Was From, is a kind of bookend to her earlier musings on California, a reassessment and reappraisal of her thinking about her home state. It is a love song to the place where her family has lived for generations, but a love song full of questions and doubts. — Michiku Kakutani
Editorials
From Barnes & Noble
The Barnes & Noble ReviewPart literary memoir, part cultural critique, this collection of intelligent, idiosyncratic essays is seventh-generation Californian Joan Didion's revised look at the Golden State, its puzzling contradictions and legendary excesses, and its unique place in American history. Recalling her Sacramento upbringing in a family whose frontier roots extend back to the 18th century, Didion describes life as a sort of local "dreamtime" in which reality was shrouded in cultural myth. Decades later, she has come to see California as a series of connections that never quite add up.
In prismatic prose, Didion reveals the cloud behind each silver lining: Myth #1: California is a bastion of independent thought. Fact: California is a federally subsidized state with a long history of selling out to the highest bidder. Myth #2: Californians are tolerant freethinkers with a live-and-let-live philosophy. Fact: Californians have traditionally employed a "detain and commit" policy in dealing with immigrants, the mentally ill, and criminals. In similar fashion, she bursts more utopian bubbles, replacing romantic images with the grim reality of a people so in love with the ideas of fresh starts, good luck, and boom times that they refuse to accept the failure of the dream. As the promise of freeways, Silicon Valley, and the university system morphs monstrously into the nightmare of pollution, congestion, sprawl, and unemployment, Californians continue to delude themselves.
California writers, the prestigious Bohemian Club, and the curious, chilling episode of Lakewood's "Spur Posse" come in for their share of Didion's attention, as does her own California-drenched novel from 1963, Run River -- which she reviews through newly unblinkered eyes. Rife with insight, these remarkable reflections on Paradise Lost represent another triumph for one of America's most important writers. Anne Markowski