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Title: Where I Was From by Joan Didion ISBN: 0-679-43332-5 Publisher: Knopf Pub. Date: 23 September, 2003 Format: Hardcover Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $23.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.43 (7 reviews)
Rating: 4
Summary: more about Didion than about California
Comment: I think most of the reviewers have missed the point -- this book is not about California, it's about Didion. If you read her novels, the central character is always a woman looking for home and safety and innocence -- Maria in "Play it as it lays" dreams about "the way light strikes filled Mason jars on a windowsill" and brushing her daughter's hair, and Lily in "Run, River" likes to remember waking early on a summer morning and running barefoot through the sprinklers, etc. This longing for home/safety/innocence is the lifetime obsession of certain people (usually women, but not always), and this obsession is EXACTLY the same, whether you're from Sacramento or St. Louis or Syracuse. But the people who lose their home/safety/innocence are the ones who ruthlessly jettison the past (like the California pioneers she denigrates), who abandon people and places without a backward glance. Like Didion did, when she left California and moved to New York City and became a famous journalist. If she had stayed in Sacramento and married a local boy and spent years canning peaches in Mason jars and brushing her daughter's hair, she wouldn't have a subject to write about. Her novels and her nonfiction always tell the same story: I had a sweet innocent life, I ruthlessly left it, now I'm adrift in the big bad world, and I can't get back. It's about her lost innocence, not California's.
Rating: 4
Summary: Geography, Genealogy, Generations and the Great Divide
Comment: Californians think they're special. There is no doubt about that. The first thing a native will tell you upon introduction is how many generations their family has been here. They don't do that in Boston -- where old families know they're old families and don't really give a damn if you know it or not. They don't do that in DC, New York or Toronto. But they do it in California. Those who have been here awhile will tell you exactly how many generations a long while is.
Didion's book is filled with that brand of smugness - the one-upmanship of who's been here longer.
Personally, I don't care.
I don't mean to be too harsh on the book, though, for on another level this is a story not of geography or genealogy but of a generation - the generation born in the mid-to-late 1930s - too young to remember the Depression but old enough to remember the way America "used to be."
My parents are from that same generation, and Didion bears a resemblence to a cousin. My grandparents are of the same generation as Didion's parents. Like them, we also have a family graveyard (ours is still in the family, still accepting members). And my father was an aerospace worker who lamented how things changed in his 42 years on the job, happy to now be retired.
I mention all this because "Where I Was From" had its greatest impact on me not as a depiction of the changes in the Golden State, but as a depiction of how a family ages, of how the older generations pass over the Great Break of the grave and the Great Divide of death. While it may feel true that the land is yours only after you bury your dead in it, underlying much of this book is a sadness that this may not be enough, that not even the graves of the elders shall be respected with the passage of time - that graveyards will be sold, driven over, dug up. That progress will efface all markers.
In retrospect there appears to have been no redemption for passing over the Great Plains. Perhaps there will be or will not be a redemption after passing through the grave. There is here an acceptance of the possibility that all is meaningless; and I was left with the impression that the title is facing the wrong direction. Perhaps it is not so much "Where I Was From" but "Where I Was Going." The promised land of the Golden State may prove to be nothing other than a hustler's illusion, there for the masses to devour only to enrich those who in turn will become the Disillusioned.
Rating: 5
Summary: a beautiful meshing of person and place
Comment: I grew up in San Diego and have lived in the Golden State all my life, but only in the previous three years of doctoral research into the psychic fallout of conquered California did I come to appreciate her history--including its shadows. Didion paints us vivid pictures of how closely the history of a place parallels what goes on in its current inhabitants. (Susan Griffin's A CHORUS OF STONES comes to mind, but it is less geographical.)
California's past is more troubled than most realize. From the mission system that wiped out thousands of Indians to the settlers who fought for "purity of labor" in the mines while supported by newspapers calling for outright eradication of native Californians; from the war against blacks (IF HE HOLLERS, LET HIM GO), ethnic Mexicans (see the work of Stephen Piti), and Asians (chronicled by Kevin Starr); from the replacement of green hills and native plants with asphalt and strip malls: the history of the state is a history of brutal conquest, Big Four imperialism, Southern Pacific "factories in the fields," and masses of people who cannot tell fantasy from reality. Ethnic cleansing, concentration camps, slave labor, bare-faced corruption in high places: we've seen it all and go on seeing it all. Eugenics laws in several states enforced the sterilization of those deemed unfit to breed, but only here could one find an actual State Lunacy Commission to oversee the process. (We now have a Self-Esteem Committee, a kinder, gentler form of control).
Why does this matter? Because the pain involved continues, as do the machinations and the pavings-over, the taking of roles for selves and the destruction of people and resources (hasta la vista, baby). In California we have not learned from our own past; we have covered it over and called ourselves liberals and agents of change, we whose Southern California cities were founded primarily by ex-Confederates looking for new places to build plantations. A hundred years of psychology should have warned us that what we repress from awareness does not go away: it festers like an untended wound. For that reason exposes such as Didion's perform the valuable service of showing us where our collective psyche hurts and stands in need of healing.
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Title: Fixed Ideas: America Since 9.11 by Joan Didion, Frank Rich ISBN: 1590170733 Publisher: New York Review of Books Pub. Date: April, 2003 List Price(USD): $7.95 |
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Title: Slouching Towards Bethlehem : Essays by Joan Didion ISBN: 0374521727 Publisher: Noonday Press Pub. Date: 01 October, 1990 List Price(USD): $14.00 |
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Title: The King of California: J. G. Boswell and the Making of a Secret American Empire by Mark Arax, Rick Wartzman ISBN: 1586480286 Publisher: PublicAffairs Pub. Date: October, 2003 List Price(USD): $30.00 |
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Title: Political Fictions by Joan Didion ISBN: 0375718907 Publisher: Vintage Pub. Date: 27 August, 2002 List Price(USD): $14.00 |
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Title: Living to Tell the Tale by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Edith Grossman ISBN: 1400041341 Publisher: Knopf Pub. Date: 04 November, 2003 List Price(USD): $26.95 |
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