3.5. Non è affatto quello che mi aspettavo. È un'altra storia. È appunto "da dove vengo", la California e le sue contraddizioni. Mi aspettavo tutt'altro, tratta in inganno da quell'autobiografia nel titolo, ma mi sono trovata davanti alle miserie e alle luci di questo posto, una terra di cui non sapevo nulla, in un lavoro di ricerca e studio incredibili.

La quarta parte è meravigliosa, Didion in purezza (quella non ha stelle che bastino).

An engaging, grounded exploration of California's history and how it influences the identity of everyone born here. No way that Lady Bird isn't partially inspired by it IMO.

I picked up Joan Didion's WHERE I WAS FROM to fill a space on a summer book bingo card: A book that takes place in the area where I was born. Having grown up in the Greater Sacramento Area and lived in California nearly all my life, I really enjoyed this book-- its reluctant corrections of the history we were taught, its continuing search for place and self. As my first read of Didion, this was a good choice for me.

California me interesa, pero tampoco tanto

No he podido conectar con tanta vaca, trigo, arroz y tal. Lo he tenido que dejar, no sé si es este libro o si realmente tengo que asumir ya que no me gusta Didion

this is not a book i ever would have picked up on my own. i didn't think i cared about a personal history of california told by a wealthy white woman. i underestimated how a mind and a pen like joan didion's can shape a subject. navigating between irrigation, mythology, american dreaming, race riots, and the muted undercurrent of class, didion creates a poignant landscape that refuses to indulge mere sentiment. there are turns of phrase in here that took my breath away. quote(s) to come.

Me aferré a este libro en el final del 2020 como si fuera una biblia y me sostuvo firme. Didion duda de todo, lo observa todo y lo separa en capas delgadas para finalmente exponerlo sin vueltas.

"there is no real way to deal with everything we lose". this is his point of view on ''California'', his personal life, and his family. Joan is a great writer, and i didnt know it at first, but I started to notice more. in Didion's book, she exposes what she thinks is at the heart of the California conundrum. by describing several individuals, including herself in the past, the reader can see the distortions of internal logic that keep them believing they are free and self-determined. ''whats left when everything you loved about a place is gone?'' thats Didion question.

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I am at home in the West. The hills of the coastal ranges look ‘right’ to me, the particular flat expanse of the Central Valley comforts my eye. The place names have the ring of real places to me. I can pronounce the names of the rivers, and recognize the common trees and snakes. I am easy here in a way that I am not easy in other places. (From ‘California Notes’, 1976)

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I was born in Sacramento, and lived in California most of my life. I learned to swim in the Sacramento and the American, before the dams. I learned to drive on the levees up and downriver from Sacramento. Yet California has remained in some way impenetrable to me, a wearying enigma, as it has to many of us who are from there. We worry it, correct and revise it, try and fail to define our relationship to it and its relationship to the rest of the country. (From ‘Where I Was From’, 2003)

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In the final paragraph of ‘California Notes’ - a collection of notes which were meant to be about Patty Hearst, as a privileged Californian, but became more about their author Joan Didion, who also defines herself as a privileged Californian - you can sense the writer beginning to evolve a subject which took her 30 more years to fully address in this memoir. The subject is the West, the Golden State, California: the meaning of California, not just as a state but also as a state of mind. And by examining her home state, with its manifold attractions and repulsions, Didion is attempting to both construct an origin story and to also turn it inside out and examine it for errors, even lies. The errors and lies were there right from the beginning, she concludes.

One of the tags I hesitated over, and then finally chose to describe this book is ‘mythology’. Much of Didion’s dissection of California has to do with the mythologising of that place, not just in the wider culture, but also more specifically by her family - who count themselves as special, and rarified, because they come from early settler stock. When Didion begins to debunk the myths she was raised with, to examine how romance was so often divorced from reality, she alternates between examining her own family history and the impressions and analysis recorded by other writers. Veins of traditional memoir are like the gold seams running through the rock of writing with a more journalistic and general bent. Large portions of the book are devoted to specific historical and cultural moments, some of them occurring in the early 1990s, and chosen by Didion to explore and amplify the contradictions of the place. Her writing sometimes seems to meander, but invariably it swoops back to close the circle of a particular line of thought.


A good deal about California does not, on its own preferred terms, add up.

This extreme reliance of California on federal money, so seemingly at odds with the emphasis on unfettered individualism that constitutes the local core belief, was a pattern set early on, and derived in part from the very individualism it would seem to belie.

Not much about California, on its own proffered terms, has encouraged its children to see themselves as connected to one another.

One difference between the West and the South, I came to realise in 1970, was this: in the South they remained convinced that they had bloodied their land with history. In California we did not believe that history could bloody the land, or even touch it.

Hers is an extreme example of the conundrum that to one degree or another confronts any Californian who profited from the boom years: if we could still see California as it was, how many of us could now afford to see it?

We believed in fresh starts. We lived in good luck. We believed in the miner who scratched together one last stake and struck the Comstock Lode. We believed in the wildcatter who leased arid land at tow and a half cents an acre and brought in Kettleman Hills, fourteen million barrels of crude in its first three years. We believed in all the ways that apparently played-out possibilities could while we slept turn green and golden.

That I should have continued, deep into adult life, to think of California as I was told as a child that it had been in 1868 suggests a confusion of some magnitude, but there it was.

Joan just has a way of being able to weave in news, history, personal anecdotes from her childhood, and her own life to just leave you speechless. I learned so much about her version of California and its history. It’s incredibly fascinating to deal with her grappling with her sense of personal history and connection with a place— something I don’t think I can relate to.

This made me feel warm inside. It made me feel icky inside. I love this type of book - part history, part memoir, part investigative. If I could kill a rattlesnake I would. I’m feeling very Californian. We truly live in such an amazing, convoluted, questionable, stunning state.

I chose this book to bring on our family trip to Yosemite/Lake Tahoe because I was looking for something on-theme either about California or set in California, and after reading The Year of Magical Thinking, I was interested in reading more Didion.

In this book, Didion offers a variety of reflections on how the history of California affects what it means to be from California, both generally and in her personal experience. She offered me many new perspectives on California, showing me how complex Californian history is underneath the standard 21st-century stereotypes. A lot of the book draws out the tensions and contradictions that exist in "California values." Some of her reflections were deeply personal as she explored her family history and how her ancestors lived up to California ideals and how they influenced her own understand of what it means to be a Californian.

As a whole, the work felt very fragmented, bouncing between personal and cultural. Sometimes Didion showed how certain elements were connected or used recurring themes or beliefs as a throughline, but other times the shifts in subject were jarring. But ultimately, Didion is not trying to create a cohesive, ordered, sequential narrative; rather, she seems to be trying to provide the reader with a sense of the Californian ethos which is saturated with contradictions.

Really enjoyed this. Learned a lot about California - not just a liberal haven as it is often painted, filled with a lot of dark history. Didion brings her classic nuanced view, and both critiques and shows fondness for the state. Apparently she waited to write this one until both her parents had passed for fear that she may come off as too critical of, or inaccurately portray, their home state. Highly recommend.