Where I Was From

By Joan Didion

Categories: Biographies & Memoirs

Joan Didion examines California and her own family's place in it, beginning with ancestors who came west in the 1840s, one of whom traveled with the Donner-Reed party for part of the way, and the myths of self-reliance she inherited. She shows how the state depended on railroads, federal money and corporate power, turns to the Bohemian Club and the aerospace suburb of Lakewood, and closes with the death of her mother in 2001.

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