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.
Publication Year: 2003
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I was slightly confused at the beginning because this is sold as a memoir but Didion was mainly writing in a very matte of fact way about migrations to the West and how California came to be. It was very interesting, do not get me wrong but it wasn't what was expecting. But...you should always trust Joan Didion, she knows what she is doing. In the last part, she very smoothly and with expertise transitions to talking about her parent's lifes and deaths and growing up in Sacramento and it's just so good.
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