Book description
A memoir of land, family and perseverance from one of the most
influential writers in America.
In this moving and surprising book, Joan Didion reassesses parts of her
life, her work, her history - and America's. 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, 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. Didion examines
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.
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
America's greatest writers. 'Her tough, beautiful, surgically precise
prose is like nothing else I've ever read.' Donna Tartt
'She is a voice like no other in contemporary journalism.' New York Times
'Everything Didion writes has a land's end edginess to it- a
hyperattentiveeye on the dramas of the human condition. She writes as
someone who has come through great shudders of the earth with a
fundamental understanding that everything is subject to instantaneous
and complete revision.' Village Voice
'She is the best chronicler California has.' Vogue
'Valediction and elegy alike, WHERE I WAS FROM is a storm-tossed book…
Some writers see Californians as brilliant dreamers; others see
failures, seeking a second start. Didion steps over both arguments and
portrays the settlers of the state as shrewd entrepreneurs who would
stop at nothing to turn dirt into dollars.' Thomas Curwen, LA Times
Joan Didion was born in California and lives in New York. She is the
author of five novels and six previous books of nonfiction: among them
the great portraits of a decade in essays, Sentimental Journeys, The
White Album, and Slouching Towards Bethlehem.
