Much has been written about Joan Didion’s legacy as the modern writer on California. Some have gone so far as call her the ‘conscience’ of the state or, more pejoratively, an interpreter of California for America’s intelligentsia (e.g. snooty New York). After publishing remarkable books on the state such as River Run, The White Album and Slouching Towards Bethlehem, in Where I Was From, Didion fully injects herself into the narrative with lukewarm results.
The book traces her family’s life in the state, which approximately parallels the states Anglo-history, and then analyzes the states broader social and cultural trends along the way. 
Didion deftly twists the big themes of California, Frontier society, the influx of money following the completion of the transcontinental rail road, and big Agriculture, water and land rights, etc. into a nice neat package for her smart readers to chew on.
The book is at its best when she describes personal or family stories relating to different aspects of California culture. She writes with real empathy on the problems inherent in a society cut off from leveling forces of history, family and society and the greed and avarice which often result when “going it alone”. We read the big tales of California, Land owners, like Henry Miller, who could drive his cattle form the Oregon board to Mexico without leaving his land, of individuals so mortgaged and turned out by life that living itself is proving impossible and of a society so dependent culturally and financially on government that one is left to wonder how we continue to survive here.
And though Joan probably though this was a great triumph, she is wrong. The alert for me came when Didion is describing the false reality of Sacremento’s Disney-like “Old West” downtown. As she walks through ‘Sacto’ with her daughter Quintana, she describes the fact that only her daughter is “real” in the scene in front of her. Everything else about California is not. California's a fake world, my how original? Did she really need 215 pages to tell us something nearly every writer commenting on the Golden State has written since the white man put pen to paper? I mean seriously even the name California is base on a fantasy. Of course, in the eyes of the New Yorker she has become this is to be expected. But for the rest of us, to Californians today, the people carving out a life here our troubles are all too real. And yet, we “go it alone” and progress without the Didion’s, thank you very much.
Portraying California as calcified and dying is false. For example, Latinos, among our most energetic citizens, are not even mentioned. She goes to great lengths to show us that “the valley” is a dying financially, another lie. Once you finish the book you get the sneaking suspicion that Didion is just bitter the California of her childhood dreams is gone. She has no right to drag a whole state into her own feelings of doubt and self-remorse.
Joan Didion, who’s character was shaped by a California that no longer exists (and was only available to the lucky few in the 1950’s, anyway), does not seems to understand that the true greatness of the state is it’s everlasting ability to attract or create mavericks and free spirits who tap into our pool of mania and then make it survivable. This spirit of re-generation is absent from Didion’s book and that is a crying shame.
Read:
Didion, Joan. Where I was From. Alfred A. Knopf, New York. 2003.
Just consider yourself warned.
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