Reviewed by Tricia Brick

The title of Joan Didion’s Where I Was From suggests that this brilliant novelist, essayist, and interpreter of the American experience, of whose life we all know bits of tantalizing detail, has focused that finely tuned writer’s lens more deeply onto the stories of her own life. But readers hoping for a navel-gazing turn-of-the-millennium memoir from the grand dame of personal journalism may be frustrated. But, true to its name, Where I Was From is an exploration of a place -- Didion’s home state of California -- and its stories, and the writer’s position here is primarily that of the detached, even estranged, observer. If Didion herself is implicated in this analysis it is largely because she, like all of us, is shaped by the stories we tell and are told about our homes and our histories.

Like a child turning over stones to see what lies beneath, Didion considers the tarnished underbelly of the Golden State piece by piece. She examines, among other things, the pioneer stories of her own family; the development of the railroad; the treatment of immigrants and the mentally ill; the state’s dependence on the aerospace industry and the government; the Spur Posse sex scandals in Lakewood. As she reconsiders California’s mythos, Didion finds its stories largely to be fantasies costumed as lessons of rugged individualism, obscuring what she concludes is a history of “selling the future of the place we lived to the highest bidder.”

The narrative is brought together, made personal, by a short, surprisingly intimate final section, in which Didion recalls her mother’s death, the impetus for her California critique. The emotionally engaging scenes she draws in this section illuminate an emptiness at the center of this book -- the result, perhaps, of the writer’s self-excision from the place and stories she investigates.

Didion asks of the pioneer ancestors who left their homes in the east for the golden promises of the new west: “From what exactly was ‘the break’ or ‘the void’ or ‘the cutting clean’ to have redeemed them?” Didion’s break from her own past suggests that every such severance brings clear vision and new insights, even as our stories grow more complex and heavily laden -- no cut is ever so clean as our myths might have us believe.