This was wow. Every Californian should read. How she unravels the confusions of California is just !!!! It was a joy to read something just so personal and relatable and also enlightening. And especially because she left, and then returns, and I will too…and being someone and part of a family unit from everywhere and no where and making (struggling?) California our home…like didions own family and many others…

best writer on irrigation systems ❤️

Very interesting read how California's self-image came to be and its implications for the author, Joan Didion. Definitely more non-fiction than I expected (in comparison to autobiography) but Didion is a really illustrative author and knows how to take examples to build up to a bigger picture.

It was okay. There was a fairly big chunk that was blindingly brilliant. There was another fairly big chunk that was almost totally throw-away. The chapters about Lakewood, the military/aerospace industry town, were completely fascinating. I also liked the beginning and end chunks that were largely memoir. Some of the sections in between these were boring, abstruse, with absurdly long sentences that contained dozens of names of rivers, or ranches, or whatever. It was like she, who usually writes with such laser precision, was writing instead to obfuscate, to frustrate, to bewilder or rebuff her readers. I almost gave up on the book near the halfway point, but when I checked on some review to help me decide, several people said this was their favorite of her books. I'm very glad I continued, because I would have quit on the knife's edge of the best section of the book. But boy, she made me work for it this time.

Okay I'm feeling very Arizonan about this book and I'm not sure I have a single AZ born and raised buddy on this app to understand where I'm coming from lol but ultimately I think Arizona culture has shaped me to subconciously be anti-obsession with California. (I also think the influx of Bay Area kids fighting with SoCal kids in my EVST classes for four years influenced that). So a history of California culture doesn't quite work for me conceptually, and I really think Joan Didion (and probably Eve Babitz) is the rare writer that can pull it off for me. (I promise I'm not having a superiority complex about the Arizona thing, though all my California friends def have one!, I just think it's interesting to learn that bias was inside me).

ANYWAY, I did like learning more about California despite my bias. I wasn't aware of the 80s defense contractor town booms. It was interesting to hear Didion's perspective witnessing the insane rate of increased prisons in California in a similar timeframe.

ALSO, the ending made me cry on the train (and to my coworker) when she talked about her parents passing. It made it abundantly clear I am not ready to read A Year of Magical Thinking, although I'm chomping at the bit for that one.

What a compelling read for anyone who has lived in California for any length of time. Joan Didion is trying to find the THERE THERE amongst the inhabitants in her impossible search for what, in reality, appears to be the meaning of life itself.

A thought-provoking exploration on the history of California as well as the history of generations of Didion’s ancestors before her. As much as I love Didion’s writing and admire her work, I can truthfully say that I wouldn’t have enjoyed this as much if I wasn’t a California resident. Being a California resident, it was a treat to read about the local places and events mentioned in this book. Regardless, it’s no question that Didion is one of the greatest journalists of all time and it really shines through in this collection.

Joan Didion's Where I Was From is a reflection on her past life in California that will resonate with anyone who holds on to connections with the past.

The state of California was founded by a rough-and-tumble collections of settlers who fought the Natives and took their land. From the birth of the state, corporations have carved it up and turned it into fields for capitalist harvest. First the Southern Pacific Railroad company then the aerospace industry, each partnered with the federal government's funding of dams and levees to direct water to the desert and to place California as one of the largest corporate agricultural producers in the world. And as each of these companies would leave the state - and leave a path of harm and destruction in their wake - the Californians left behind inevitably feel nostalgia for a California that no longer - and quite frankly never did - exists.

Where I Was From is presumably about California but its meaning will touch even those with no connection to the state. Didion once again writes to remind us that nostalgia can be a tempting method of seeing the world but it clouds our view of the present and rewrites the news of the past. Nostalgia tells us that the reason for societal decline is increased crime rates and social decay when in reality these are but symptoms of a larger capitalist exploitation and failure. The resonance of this book is incredible; read it.

This shape-shifting book isn't quite what it appears to be -- there's the exploration of California pioneer narratives, probing the fictions and delusions at the heart of the state's self-image, reporting the wreckage from its economic collapse in the early 1990s. But as the book progresses, the narrative becomes increasingly personal with Didion discussing her own nostalgic reasons for writing her first novel and its many blind spots, and concluding with a heart-rending section on the death of her parents. She writes, "There is no real way to deal with everything we lose."

m'ha tornat loca!!! fet per tots aquells que tenim una relació complicada amb es lloc d'on venim, sa nostra família, nosaltres mateixos

Great! As she says early on, "This is a country at some level not as big as we like to say it is." Thomas Pynchon and his ancestors (and his identifying with Henry Adams) is another of few tracing their participation back generations. Pagan Kennedy's taking the trouble to write Black Livingstone also comes to mind.

Read Cormac McCarthy's The Crossing and you'll get a sense of the terrain, here -- ditto his Blood Meridian against the grain of Toni Morrison's Beloved. People died.

"My mother had no interest in keeping the hill ranch, or in fact any California land: California, she said, was now too regulated, too taxed, too expensive."

Ha!

"She spoke enthusiastically, on the other hand, about moving to the Australian outback."

Yes.

These aren't things people care about unless you're Lisa Carver -- or other zinesters.

"If my grandfather spotted a rattlesnake while driving, he would stop his car and go into the brush after it ... 'New people' [to California], I was told, did not understand their responsibility to kill rattlesnakes."

You'll find Chinatown and Mulholland Drive running through your head -- even if you don't mean to.

"There is no real way to deal with everything we lose."-2003, no less.

Altogether, a good book. You'll find your own memories of where you heard of things spooling and re-spooling -- if you're from America, or have heard of it.

"It was only Quintana who was real."