Book review: Where I was From, Joan Didion

 

Where I was From: and What I Represent

A storm-tossed deep-dive into the history of California, intertwined with the history of her ancestors, Where I was From was, not what I expected. While the book, divided into four parts, does talk about California; her great-great-great-great-great-grandmother, Elizabeth Scott’s birth in 1766 all the way to her mother’s death in 2001, the exploration of her ancestry is not the only focal point in this memoir.

What is California? A product of a gold rush, or a result of the colonial attitude, the concept of exceptionalism, that expansion is at the surface, a sign of God, a given right? While most of History goes along the same path, of conquering, dividing, or usually both, California seems to come off as no exception.

Didion herself states that the book "represents an exploration into my own confusions about the place and the way in which I grew up, confusions as much about America as about California, misapprehensions and misunderstandings so much a part of who I became that I can still to this day confront them only obliquely.”

Rather than a straightforward memoir, the book explores various aspects of life in California, pre- and post- the becoming of California itself. When one hears of ‘pushing America’s frontier westward’ they may think of pushing in over mountains, mining gold, and vast, untouched deserts and valleys, waiting to be overtaken, but must not forget what it is now.

The transformations that happen on a small scale, on a corporate or political level, ‘mirror a larger transformation, that of California itself from what it had been, or from what its citizens preferred to believe that it had been, to what it is now’.

The description of this land, the stark contrast between what is perceived and what is, deflates the vitality of the corporate California. California has a certain charm, ‘a peculiar charm, which all who have lived here long enough feel’. Yet, on the topic of ‘those who have lived long enough’, another problem of “our people”, and “new people” emerged. One gets so attached to a place, that they start generations there, and take pride in their own ‘special history’, one that others may never live up to.

Overall, Didion argues that there is “slippage between the way Californians perceived themselves and the way they actually were.” “Amnesia” is in the DNA of the place. Family trees and generations of people have created a foundation, each ancestor has survived thick and thin, yet the root of it all is to be ignored.

And however far one would go to leave the place they grew up, there would be no escaping it. Despite ‘changes’, the essence of California may forever stay the same, since the first American Settlement: individualism and autonomy, non-negotiables.

She tells us that her mother -- peculiar, cranky, opinionated -- represented many of the contradictions and confusions about life in California; and her death, her sudden absence, left Didion reaching for what was receding from her grasp. “There is no real way to deal with everything we lose’.

Maybe that is why we choose to hold on to some things, why California remains what it hopefully started out as, a ‘lustrous, pearly mist’, unknowable, yet, entirely familiar.