Where I Was From: A Memoir

In her moving and insightful new book, Joan Didion reassesses parts of her life, her work, her history and ours. A native Californian, Didion applies her scalpel-like intelligence to the state’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 Fromexplores 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 her book is at once intellectually provocative and deeply personal.

• South and West: From a Notebook (Vintage International)
• Blue Nights
• Slouching Towards Bethlehem: Essays (FSG Classics)
• Run River
• The White Album: Essays (FSG Classics)
• Many Californias: Literature from the Golden State (Western Literature Series)
• Play It As It Lays: A Novel (FSG Classics)
• Political Fictions
• American Babylon: Race and the Struggle for Postwar Oakland (Politics and Society in Modern America)
• We Tell Ourselves Stories in Order to Live: Collected Nonfiction (Everyman's Library)