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From the bestselling, award-winning author of The Year of Magical Thinking: In this “arresting amalgam of memoir and historical timeline” (The Baltimore Sun), Didion—a native Californian—reassesses parts of her life, her work, her history, and ours.

Didion applies her scalpel-like intelligence to California’s ethic of ruthless self-sufficiency in order to examine that ethic’s often tenuous relationship to reality. Combining history and reportage, memoir and literary criticism, Where I Was From explores California’s romances with land and water; its unacknowledged debts to railroads, aerospace, and big government; the disjunction between its code of individualism and its fetish for prisons.

Whether she is writing about her pioneer ancestors or privileged sexual predators, robber barons or writers (not excluding herself), Didion is an unparalleled observer, and this book is at once intellectually provocative and deeply personal.

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JOAN DIDION is the author of five novels, ten books of nonfiction, and a play. Her book The Year of Magical Thinking won the National Book Award in 2005. She lives in New York.

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Just as there were stations of veneration, so there were objects of veneration, relics of those who had made the redeeming journey.

So Saxton Brown, the heroine of Jack London's curious 'California' novel The Valley of the Moon, could hold in her hands her mother's red satin corset ("the pioneer finery of a frontier woman who had crossed the plains") and see pass before her, 'from East to West, across a continent, the great hegira of the land-hungry Anglo-Saxon. It was part and fiber of her. She had been nursed on its traditions and its facts from the lips of those who had taken part.'

'Who could tell the deep sense of bereavement, distress and desolation that weighed on that poor girl's heart, there in the wilderness with no telling what fate was in store for her and her sick brother?' Reid asks his readers and surely also himself. Such memories might have seemed difficult to reconcile with the conviction that one had successfully met the tests or challenges required to enter the new life. The redemptive power of the crossing was, nonetheless, the fixed idea of the California settlement, and one that raised a further question: for what exactly, and at what cost, had one been redeemed? When you jettison others so as not to be 'caught by winter in the Sierra Nevada mountains,' do you deserve not to be caught? When you survive at the cost of Miss Gilmore and her brother, d...

The publication of 'The Toilers' enables Presley to dine at the table of "the Railroad King" (Blue Point oysters, puree a la Derby, ortolan patties, grenadins of bass and stuffed salmon, Londonderry pheasants, escalopes of duck, rissolettes a la pompadour; asparagus rushed to the kitchen of the Railroad King by special train within hours of its cutting), even as, outside in the fog, the dispossessed widow of one of the evicted and killed San Joaquin wheat growers is literally starving to death, falling into her terminal coma on a vacant lot at the top of the Clay Street hill, her small daughter at her side, her older daughter already descended into prostitution.

Presley knows nothing of the fate of the widow, but had by fortuitous narrative design run into the older daughter, her degradat...

In fact almost no one in California speaks of 'farmers,' in the sense the word is used in the rest of the country, and yet this persistent suggestion of constructive husbandry continues to cloud the retrospect. What amounted to the subsidized monopolization of California tends to be reinvented either as 'settlement' (the settlers came, the desert bloomed) or, even more ideally, as a kind of foresighted commitment on the part of the acquistiors, a dedication to living at one with both the elemental wilderness and an improved patrician past.

This was not a community that pushed its children hard, or launched them into the far world. Males were encouraged to continue, after graduation and indeed into adulthood, playing ball (many kinds of ball, all kinds of ball) in the parks and on the schoolgrounds where they had grown up. Females were encouraged to participate in specific sports of their own, as well as to support the team activities of the ball players.

One day at the mall I walked over to the freestanding Bullock's, which, beacuse it was about to close its doors for good, was in the process of selling everything in the store at thirty-five percent off the ticket price. There were women systematically defoliating the racks in the men's-wear department, women dropping discards and hangers in tangles on the floor, women apparently undiscouraged by the scraweled sign warning that register lines were 'currently in excess pf 3+ hours long,' women who had already staked out positions with forts of quilts, comforters, bedspreads, mattress pads, Cuisinarts, coffee makers, sandwich grills, Juice Tigers, and Heart Wafflers. These were the women who had seen the hundred-foot pylon in 1950 and decided that this was the place to start. The clerks and ...

书籍介绍

From the bestselling, award-winning author of The Year of Magical Thinking: In this “arresting amalgam of memoir and historical timeline” (The Baltimore Sun), Didion—a native Californian—reassesses parts of her life, her work, her history, and ours.

Didion applies her scalpel-like intelligence to California’s ethic of ruthless self-sufficiency in order to examine that ethic’s often tenuous relationship to reality. Combining history and reportage, memoir and literary criticism, Where I Was From explores California’s romances with land and water; its unacknowledged debts to railroads, aerospace, and big government; the disjunction between its code of individualism and its fetish for prisons.

Whether she is writing about her pioneer ancestors or privileged sexual predators, robber barons or writers (not excluding herself), Didion is an unparalleled observer, and this book is at once intellectually provocative and deeply personal.