Mélangeant critique littéraire et sociale, reportage, histoire et essai personnel, j'ai encore une fois été enveloppée par la prose de Didion, simple, efficace et touchante, aux passages où on s'y attend le moins.

Exploration sur la Californie, son histoire et son édification mythique pour ceux qui y déposent leurs racines, terre aride et dépourvue transformée en fontaine éclaboussant ses tributaires de richesse, de fortitude agraire et d'american dream. Avec Where I Was From, Didion offre des réflexions sur ce que signifie être californien, le progrès qui s'y est opéré depuis la naissance de l'état jusqu'au début des années 2000 et ce que ces changements camouflent, la journaliste loin d'être dupe aux boucs émissaires et aux fables imaginaires qui peuplent le discours ambiant.

Chaque essai composant ce livre est fascinant et évocateur, à la fois érigeant la Californie en un lieu majestueux et mystique, tout en annihilant les idéaux supposés composer sa fondation. Le volet plus personnel se dévoile vers la fin, en culmination de la confusion, des contradictions, des multitudes qui sont au coeur de la conception de Didion de sa la Californie natale. Et quelle volupté que de tourbillonner dans cette ambiguïté, dans cette incertitude, dans ces mille teintes de gris que l'autrice rend pourtant si cristallines, claires et vives. Incontestablement, mon affection pour Joan Didion n'est plus à démontrer!

During college, I heard Joan Didion read from this book. She is a miniscule person with giant glasses, a quiet voice, and a knack for putting words together that really blows me away. I finally got around to reading it. Joan Didion could write a book about plastic bags and I'd still read it, and still probably like it. This topic wasn't something I particularly give a damn about (California history), but her writing is so elegant, understated and thoughtful that I liked it for form over substance

My new friend Chris sent me this book after I took him to Point Reyes for the day. I think I did a pretty good job of convincing him that California is a really nice place to live. He recommended (and sent me) this book - an homage and narrative of the state by one of its most revered writers. It's really fascinating. It's a fairly slim book, but it took me two weeks to get through. That's a big compliment - I kept slowing down and rereading passages, unwilling to miss anything.

How does she do it? How does Didion masterfully write in so many different genres at once?

A handful of pages into this book, I thought it was going to be a historical chronicle of family history. But then it was literary criticism. And then it was trenchant cultural commentary. And then it was almost poetry. Around page seventy-five, I realized that I wouldn't be able to place the literary form. This genre-bending tale transcends them all. Because it's not just a little bit of this and a little bit of that; Didion creates something far greater than the sum of its parts.

So relevant. So quotable. So poignant.

(There is something I'm mulling over in the wake of reading this book, which has to do with the narratives that we tell children. More than once, Didion suggests that she was subject to revisionist and idealized versions of historical epochs and events. This is surely the case. And she is right to feel the sting of that realization as an adult, just as she is right to come full circle by means of nuance. But I'm wondering what version of the settling of California, of the state's identity, Didion might expect children to be able to handle. What, to her mind, would be a better way to bring children into the history of the place, without overburdening them with adult themes? How does she envision a history lesson that doesn't create cynics or induce identity crises in tweens? I'm pretty sure I should write her and ask while I still have the chance.)

I enjoyed this. Having spent the past month in New York which can be so consuming in its urbanity and contemporaneousness it’s kind of nice to read a book on the recent history of California, where I am from too, by an author who is from there + deals with place and location so deeply in her work. It’s hard to write critically about an entire state and across so much history but she does it very well. In the end this was an elegy for her parents and I feel like she managed to braid in all the threads she brings up over the essays — and the crest of emotion toward the undercuts a lot of rationalizations and critiques she makes of California throughout the book, “despite despite despite.” So effective.

California rendered down to baron land of the droll. It may not pay to be so goddamn arch all the time. Resting arch-face soon worries my doorknob—Out!

Not surprised in the least that Didion can trace her family, both sides, back to the formations of the country. I can barely trace my own grandparents to Albuquerque and Minneapolis.

(Bryan Ferry on the subject: “Too much cheesecake too soon/ Old money’s better than new”)

Read any WTV book on my home state for an erudite and far less post-Ironic Country Club punch of clutched pearls and Tom Collins mix.

I need a Benson & Hedges, blow it all away.

The self mythology of California runs deep. Didion isn't afraid to dive into those depths, even if it means destroying the shiny image on the surface which made up part of her own self understanding for years. It's this bit of personal and familial exposure that opens the book up and prevents it from becoming just another historical or journalistic critique of California and transforms it instead into what is a classic piece of literature on the nature of culture and place.

Forse io e Didion non comunichiamo sulla stessa lunghezza d'onda?
Non saprei. Forse è una lettura che sarebbe meglio fare in un altro momento? Nemmeno questo so.
Quello che so è che dopo pagina 40 le cose si sono fatte troppo complicate per poterle assorbire. La storia della California raccontata a mio avviso, con molta precisione e dovizia di famiglie, nomi, terre, libri sul tema. Tanti particolari per chi arriva da lontano e non sa nemmeno bene la differenza fra Sacramento e San Diego. Ho lasciato a pagina 85 infrangendo la mia "regola" della metà.
Forse un giorno ci ritroveremo.

this made me scream and tear my hair out genuinely. greta gerwig i love you but you'll never know northern california like joan fucking didion

I have to reread this when I get smarter

Though I am not from CA and moved here as an adult, I could still identify with a lot here. I love her writing style. I echo the critique about not really addressing the role of people of color in CA, but it also wasn't a long book...

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