Where I Was From

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by Joan Didion

Joan Didion reexamines portions of her life, work, history, and ours in her latest book, which is both poignant and enlightening. Didion, a native Californian, examines the state's ethic of merciless self-sufficiency with her scalpel-like acumen in order to evaluate the ethic's frequently shaky link to reality.

Where I Was From analyses California's romances with land and water, its unspoken obligations to railways, aerospace, and large government, and the contradiction between its code of individualism and its obsession for jails, combining history and reporting, biography and literary critique. Didion is an unrivalled observer, whether she's writing about her pioneer ancestors or wealthy sexual predators, robber barons, or authors (including herself), and her work is both academically intriguing and personally intimate.

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Our favourite quote from Where I Was From

I closed the box and put it in a closet. There is no real way to deal with everything we lose.

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I closed the box and put it in a closet. There is no real way to deal with everything we lose.

— Joan Didion, Where I Was From