Where I Was From by Joan Didion

California. That's the first answer to the implied question of the title - as we all knew. But America is as important: the dream of America, that westward march for more land and more opportunity and more possibility that found its culmination in California.

Where I Was From is not as personal as a reader might suspect it would be - at least, not at first. Joan Didion was a reporter, and, more than that, an inherently reticent writer, one who sat in the corner quietly and took notes, who asked pointed questions in an offhand way, who saw and thought rather than did. This book is about her family, or about family in general, but not just about them: it's not a memoir, or the "how I got here" book the title might imply.

It's more a book about "why California is the way it is" (as of about 2000, in the depths of that recession) or "why Californians are the way they are" (and have been, pretty consistently, for a century or more, even as "Californians" were hugely self-selected from people from other places).

It starts with personal history, the great-great-greats who did interesting things or left behind letters and other writings. The ones who did that westward march, who were part of the Donner Party but went a different way, who got over the high passes of the western mountains before the snow flew and so found their ways to the assumed paradise on the west coast, where anything was possible and riches were available to all.

It wanders from there, but keeps coming back: that family is the lens through which Didion sees all of California, all of America. The stories, the keepsakes, the attitude, the ways it molded her. As she often does, there's that thread of self-denigration, talking about how she didn't notice something for years but now will tentatively write about it. But what she didn't notice is that central concern - or, rather, what it means and how it has shaped everything. What she didn't notice was the shape of the entire world, the way her thinking was bent by everything and everyone around her, all her life.

The middle of Where I Was From comes close to being a survey of the literature - Faulkner's one California story, historical records, a Jack London novel, and on until Didion gets to her own first novel, Run River, and loops back to the personal. It's all loops with Didion, though: that's the way her books always go - first outward, and then coming back.

This was a major book by a major writer, and is now about twenty years old. I'm not going to be the one to make it or break it. But I do like to read books that matter - especially at this point in my life, when frivolous books seem even more frivolous - and this is one that does. Some of the concerns are more of their time than others - the slow crash of the military-industrial complex in California, as plants moved to states with more capital-friendly economies (and, probably, to more reliably Republican districts as well, which is close to the same thing), and the "Spur Posse" kerfuffle of 1993, which I had utterly forgotten. But its core concerns are those of California and by extension America: is the dream real? Can we go on like this, and what does "this" mean? Where did we come from...and where are we going?