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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.
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