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Where I Was From
Where I Was From | Joan Didion
6 posts | 14 read | 7 to read
In this moving and unexpected book, Joan Didion reassesses parts of her life, her work, her history, and ours. Where I Was From, in Didions 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 todaya 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 itsand in Americascore values.Joan Didions 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 Hardcover edition.
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Esin
Where I Was From | Joan Didion
Mehso-so

A California I haven‘t known but have sometimes met

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Ephemera
Where I Was From | Joan Didion
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Pickpick

The state of California has a lot of cultural mythology surrounding it. Anyone who grew up there or lived there for any length of time should read this book. Joan Didion was born and grew up in Sacramento, and this incisive series of essays puts a truer perspective on California history. The writing is superb. Five stars.

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GatheringBooks
Where I Was From | Joan Didion
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#HeatOfJuly Day 8: I didn‘t know that Didion was one of em #CaliforniaGurls - this memoir of hers also evoke a strong sense of place, apparently.

Cinfhen I‘ve still not yet read ANY Didion ~ must correct that!! 6y
GatheringBooks @Cinfhen likewise! i just got my book depository order of one of her books that i am so itching to read. will bring it when i travel a few weeks from now 6y
BarbaraBB I didn‘t know that either even though I read some of her books 😀 6y
Cathythoughts I‘ve never read either .... stacking. 👍🏻 6y
JennyM Neither did I! 6y
81 likes1 stack add5 comments
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peggyriley
Where I Was From | Joan Didion
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Sitting with Joan Didion in the sun.

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leslieisreading
Where I Was From | Joan Didion
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Although she no longer lives here, Joan Didion is from Sacramento. The only book I've read of hers is her first one, a novel set here, Run River. It was written in the 60s, and it was fun to read about familiar places in such a different time. Where I Was From is nonfiction about California, and I understand there is a lot of material about my region, so that's one of hers I'd really like to get to. #localauthor #aprilbookshowers

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darynne
Where I Was From | Joan Didion
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Pickpick

After reading Play It as It Lays, I put a dozen Didion books on hold. This memoir-style collection of essays traces her attachment to California, the place and the idea. The early chapters are slow and heavy on genealogy, but in characteristic Didion style each part is pulled tight by the end.