“Where I Was From” by Joan Didion

The 'Where' in the name of Joan Didion's seventh publication of nonfiction, 'Where I Was From ', is California. A sixth-generation Californian who now inhabits in New York, Didion has in writing about the Golden State, its persons, government, commerce and heritage all through her four-decade vocation, in books like Run River (which she talks about at extent in this book) and Play It As It Lays, as well as in term papers like "The White Album" and "Some Dreamers of the Golden Dream." (Didion 2003)

But 'Where I Was From ' is her first publication dedicated solely to California, and it reads like a climax of her composing career. She is "trying to find the 'point' of California, to find some note in its history." (Didion 2003) She starts with the state's town throughout the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, when homesteaders, lured by the solid pledge of gold and the vaguer concept of an earthly "golden" paradise, made the perilous traversing over the western frontier. Today, some two century years subsequent, this is the type of its annals that California promotes: people of hardy supply braving the unsafe wilds to discovered a new, freer humanity with abundant land and opportunity. This mythology, which Didion admits buying into when she was much junior, is an illusion, a self-congratulating article the state notifies itself.

'Where I Was From ' examines this statewide self-deception over two centuries as it presents itself in art, government, economics and family stories. Didion is especially proficient at pin pointing the financial forces behind heritage phenomena. For demonstration, she contends that the emergence of the Lakewood Spur Posse --- a suburban gang whose constituents, throughout the late eighties and early nineties, forced and threatened juvenile young women into sex --- was inseparable ...