One of the best things about reading Joan Didion is her honesty, the fact that she hasn’t forgotten the uncertainty that comes from being young, or just how hard it can be to part truths from myth.
Didion once wrote about having seriously considered building a shopping mall empire to support herself as a writer, and in Where I Was From she is still thinking about the complicated, alienating place where she grew up – about why it has so often left her feeling troubled or chagrined. “For most of my life California felt rich to me,” she admits, “that was the point of it, that was the promise.” Where I Was From is a tricky blend of memoir, literary criticism, and investigative reporting, and it is fascinating.
Returning to an eighth-grade graduation speech and her first novel, Run, River, the author owns up to her “false” nostalgia about the place, and subjects her novel to a thorough critical reassessment. To give readers some context and to satisfy her own curiosity, she dusts off some (very dusty) classics, among them Frank Norris’s The Octopus: A California Story, an obscure William Faulkner short called “Golden Land,” and the private writings of Josiah Royce, the philosopher and California-native who not-so-famously concluded that “there is no philosophy in California.” In these, too, she finds a lot of myth, a lot of confusion.
In some of the best essays, Didion looks at California’s prison system, prompted to write after seeing her state no longer “rich enough to adequately fund its education system,” the central valley towns of her youth “so impoverished in spirit as well as in fact that the only way their citizens could think to reverse their fortunes was by getting themselves a state prison.” If the prisons are part of the largest such system in the western hemisphere, they’re so isolated you might never know it. Who has heard of Blythe? Susanville? Chowchilla? The prison guards’ lobby, Didion reports, is also one of the most powerful political organizations in the state, and she makes an eerie parallel between the prisons and the Southern Pacific railroad, the subject of Norris’s Octopus.
Which reminds me. I read submissions for a literary journal, mostly short stories, but recently I opened something a prisoner had sent. It was from Soledad, if I remember right, and what I found myself reading was not so much literary fiction as a cry for help. The town of Soledad has two prisons. In Spanish, soledad means solitude.
Didion is a writer especially attuned to ironies, but the more you read this book, the more it hits you that there are just too many. And it’s not just the prisons. The state has sold out to various corporate interests, perpetuating a belief in self-reliance while relying on federal dollars to sustain itself. The gold rush mentality persists. This is a place where, if you’re trying to find an apartment in San Francisco, you might, as I did, run into an insane Craigslist ad that reads: “Two of your housemates are tech entrepreneurs (both built companies from zero or near zero through exit) with extensive backgrounds in B2B, high-volume consumer and some social gaming/enterprise social.” (Just saying).
She also writes movingly about the death of her mother, an immense loss that seems to go hand in hand with her questions about what makes us who we are. What does it mean to be from somewhere, really, if as she suggests, “‘me’ is what we think when our parents die, even at my age, who will look out for me now, who will remember me as I was, who will know what happens to me now, where will I be from.”
When critics talk about Didion they tend to talk about her coldness, or as a blurb from Harper’s in my paperback copy puts it, her “ice-pick/laser-beam prose.” But what makes Where I Was From worth reading is something else, not just iciness and intelligence. This is a book that makes you want to find everyone you know and shake them and tell them “hey, you should really read this now” – because there is a lot packed into these gems of essays, and the stakes are as high as ever.
