From Publishers Weekly
California comes under Didion's captivating, merciless microscope in her controversial look at the greed, acquisitiveness and wasteful extravagance lurking beneath the state's eternal sunshine. In admirably lean, piercing prose, she describes her ancestors, women who could shoot, handle stock and shake snakes from their boots every morning. These pioneers had lived through an arduous crossing far removed from the noble odysseys chronicled by California mythmakers and arrived in wrecked wagons, facing desolation and death. Didion dramatically highlights the gap between California's rosy notion of itself as a land that stood for individual entrepreneurship, and the reality of growing government control and reliance on federal money. As a Sacramento native now living in New York, she conveys the tension of loving an area that's also disappointed her. She utilizes the 1993 Spur Posse scandal, in which teenage boys in Southern California slept with as many girls as possible and then regarded them as notches on their gun, to portray the spiritual vacancy of young Californian men, particularly in light of an overindulgent public attitude that downplayed their moral callousness. Didion cites cozy, pastel paintings by artists like Thomas Kinkade as contributing to the hazily romantic view of a state that treated foreigners early in its history with vicious bigotry, underrated education's importance and committed disturbed citizens to institutions on unacceptably flimsy evidence of their mental state. Throughout, Didion digs deep to find the "point" of California. Many will find her conclusions inflammatory and may rise to California's defense, but the book is a remarkable document precisely because of its power to trigger a national debate that can heighten awareness and improve conditions on the West Coast and throughout the country. Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From Booklist
Didion's remarkable family history parallels that of the U.S. in its journey west, belief in starting over, and enduring stoicism. Her great-great-great-great-great-grandmother, Elizabeth Scott, was born in 1766 and left what became Virginia for Tennessee, Kentucky, and the Missouri Territory. Elizabeth's granddaughter traveled deep into the western frontier with the infamous Donner-Reed party, and others made it to the promised land of California, where Didion was born and raised. Her homeland has always influenced her work, but now in the wake of her parents' deaths, she sees her native land with startlingly fresh and revelatory clarity. As always, Didion is scrupulous in her research, discerning in her observations, and eloquent as she scours the outer world for keys to inner conflicts, and, consequently, her insights into California's psyche are perspicacious and arresting. A land seemingly dedicated to personal freedom, it is in fact a state saddled with an inordinate number of prisons, a debilitating dependence on the federal government, and an extraordinarily high incidence of mental instability. As Didion uncovers sharp memories and incisively interprets California's messy politics and dire economics, she not only creates an electrifying inquiry into the spirit of a unique place and the soul of an uncommon family but also illuminates with piercing candor the dark side of the pioneer mythos, the very heart of the American mystique. Donna Seaman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved


Book Description
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.





From the Inside Flap
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.

FROM OUR EDITORS

The Barnes & Noble Review
Part 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

FROM THE PUBLISHER

In this 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 narrative of how her own family moved west with the frontier from the birth of her great-great-great-great-great grandfather 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.

FROM THE CRITICS

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

The Washington Post

… Didion has written a brave little book. An implacably honest writer (if at times a somewhat studied one), she has the courage to say a number of things that, while almost certainly true, will win her no friends among Californians. She also has, in effect, the courage to rewrite her own work. A significant part of Where I Was From is, if not an outright retraction of Run River, an acknowledgment that she no longer can stand behind many aspects of the portrait of California she painted in that novel four decades ago. — Jonathan Yardley

The New York Review of Books

...[I]ntensely written and powerfully imagined critical biography. — Christopher Benfey

The New Yorker

For four decades, Didion has written in masterly fashion about the contradictions of California culture. In this book, she casts an arctic eye on recent phenomena—the Rodney King riots, the Spur Posse—and on her own upbringing in the Sacramento area. Her great-great-grandparents “crossed” to California in the eighteen-hundreds, and she was brought up on wistful recollections of the past. Her family lived in dark houses, ate with tarnished silver, dressed her in “an eccentric amount of black,” and prized anything that was “old.” Along with a recipe for India relish and a green-and-red calico appliqué, she inherited a view that California had been spoiled. And yet “the logical extension of this thought, that we were the people who had spoiled it, remained unexplored.” Addressing her own confusion about the place, she identifies the settler imperative—“the past could be jettisoned, children buried and parents left behind”—in the fact that her birthplace is now "a hologram that dematerializes as I drive through it."

Publishers Weekly