Where I Was From
A Memoir
From the bestselling, award-winning author of The Year of Magical Thinking: In this "arresting amalgam of memoir and historical timeline” (The Baltimore Sun), Didion—a native Californian—reassesses parts of her life, her work, her history, and ours.
Didion applies her scalpel-like intelligence to California'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 From explores 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…
$24.95
September 14, 2004
JOAN DIDION was born in Sacramento in 1934 and graduated from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1956. After graduation, Didion moved to New York and began working for Vogue, which led to her career as a journalist and writer. Didion published her first novel, Run River, in 1963. Didion’s other novels include A Book of Common Prayer (1977), Democracy (1984), and The Last Thing He Wanted (1996).
Didion’s first volume of essays, Slouching Towards Bethlehem, was published in 1968, and her second, The White Album, was published in 1979. Her nonfiction works include Salvador (1983), Miami (1987), After Henry (1992), Political Fictions (2001), Where I Was From (2003), We Tell Ourselves Stories in Order to Live (2006), Blue Nights (2011), South…
I Write to Find Out What I Am Thinking
Joan Didion; Introduction by Griffin Dunne
Notes to John
Joan Didion
Let Me Tell You What I Mean
Joan Didion
South and West
Joan Didion; Foreword by Nathaniel Rich
Insider Baseball
Joan Didion
Blue Nights
Joan Didion
Vintage Didion
Joan Didion
The Year of Magical Thinking
Joan Didion
The Year of Magical Thinking
Joan Didion
We Tell Ourselves Stories in Order to Live
Joan Didion; Introduction by John Leonard
Where I Was From
Joan Didion
Political Fictions
Joan Didion
Miami
Joan Didion
The Last Thing He Wanted
Joan Didion
Buddenbrooks
Thomas Mann
The Thinking Heart
David Grossman
Voices of the Fallen Heroes
Yukio Mishima
Of Human Bondage
W. Somerset Maugham
Giovanni's Room (Deluxe Edition)
James Baldwin
Go Tell It on the Mountain (Deluxe Edition)
James Baldwin
If Beale Street Could Talk (Deluxe Edition)
James Baldwin
Tomás Nevinson
Javier Marías
Knight's Gambit
William Faulkner
Answered Prayers
Truman Capote
The Rainbow
Yasunari Kawabata
The Passenger
Cormac McCarthy
Stella Maris
Cormac McCarthy
The Singularities
John Banville