Joan Didion

Does it mean anything to be from a place anymore? A typical thirty-year old American may have grown up in Illinois, gone to school in New York, and moved to California with the tech boom. We move thousands of miles for opportunity or adventure, driven by the need to create an identity separate from our hometowns.

In Where I Was From, Joan Didion takes on this particularly American identity crisis and uses it to explore her own relationship with her native California. 

Her memoir launches an important conversation, one that relies less on the rhetoric of urban theories and more on our own experiences in the cities that mean something to us. The book interweaves Didion’s own family history with the history of California, as if she’s introducing her great-great-great-grandmother to the aerospace industry and telling them to shake hands, because they’ve got a lot in common.

Didion calls it an attempt to explore her “confusions as much about America as about California, misapprehensions and misunderstandings so much a part of who I became that I can still to this day confront them only obliquely.”

The resulting off-center tale is a state history that brims over with emotion, particularly when Didion refers to the clash between Old California and New. Old California was the land of pioneers who would hunt a rattlesnake into the brush and kill it to keep it from striking anyone else. New California sees the rattlesnake, jumps in a car, and speeds away-as Didion realizes she herself has done, deserting her grandfather’s “code of the West.”

When Didion discusses Old California selling off its land, she recalls that her own family, which had lived in the Sacramento area for five generations, sold the family cemetery. Even more poignantly, no one remembers who sold it.

Didion herself has come and gone from California. Born in Sacramento in 1934, she moved to New York City after college to pursue journalism. She and her husband moved back to California in the ‘60s for 25 years before returning to New York, where they still live.

But this isn’t a nostalgia tale. Didion has set out to dispel some of the most entrenched myths about California and never strays far from that task. The book both surveys and confronts scores of writers who have tried to define California. Nineteenth century philosopher Josiah Royce called California a rugged community built on harsh loyalty. Author Frank Norris described California in terms of its entrepreneurs-whether wheat merchants or railroad barons. Didion even quotes her own early views of Californians as idealized pioneers from her 8th grade graduation speech and her first novel. 

But Didion now rejects the idea of a California founded on rugged individualism. She shows instead how the state was built with federal money, from the draining of marshes to create the Sacramento Valley, to the courting of Southern Pacific railroad, to the post-World War II dependence on defense contracts. She describes the prison boom in the 1990s as just one more way California looks to the government, rather than its pioneering citizens, to bring in wealth.

For the first time, Didion realizes that New California of self-promotion and federal handouts that she despised during her youth isn’t so different from the community of her grandparents’ time. Even one of the iconic gestures of pioneers, planting camellias for the deceased, was invented by her father’s stepmother, a Sacramento socialite, in the “same spirit of civic boosterism that would later turn Front Street, along the river, into the entirely ersatz ‘redevelopment’ known as ‘Old Sacramento.’”

Change, says Didion, “is one of the culture’s most enduring misunderstandings about itself.”

But if Californians can’t categorize themselves as old and new, there’s one unchanging category that still applies-the unspoken divisions of class. One of California’s most enduring myths is that of the classless society.

Didion recalls when, at twelve years old, she asked her mother to what “class” they belonged. Her mother’s reply was, “It’s not a word we use. It’s not the way we think.”

In California, explains Didion, “We believed in fresh starts. We believed in good luck. We believed in the miner who scratched together one last stake and struck the Comstock Lode.”

But from San Francisco’s Bohemian Club in the north to the planned community of Lakewood in the south, Didion finds old-fashioned class struggles hiding inside of the California Dream.

The Bohemian Club started as a haven for San Francisco artists and writers in 1872, but very quickly it became a meeting place for the moneyed and powerful of California. Today, the club’s membership list speaks more to wealth and privilege than many organizations explicitly designed to cater to the upper classes. Didion describes a recent summer camp of the club that included George Bush Sr., Leonard K. Firestone, and Frank A. Sprole of Bristol-Myers. But this change was not recent. In 1927, the Bohemian Club was already thinking conservatively when it banned from an art exhibit any entry “in radical and unreasonable departure from laws of art.”

Lakewood was constructed on the edge of Los Angeles just after World War II, a new community built around a mall and the aerospace industry. Didion describes the entire Lakewood community as a mirage-an attempt to supply the airplane plants with workers and, at the same time, convince a group of factory workers that they were becoming middle class, realizing the American Dream. It was the land of boys who play ball growing into men who play ball with wives who aspire to buy Kinkade paintings. But as plants closed, this “artificial ownership class” started losing jobs, and the dream started to wear thin.

In 1993, Lakewood became known as the home of the Spur Posse, a group of teenage boys who kept scorecards with competing tallies of women they’d slept with. In Didion’s telling, the Posse becomes the realization of the entire community’s frustration. In one example, a Posse member goes on a talk show where a black woman in the audiences criticizes him for lacking a certain amount of common sense. In response, he asks, “Where do you work at? McDonald’s? “I go to college.” This is a man clinging to the Lakewood mirage, looking down on others even as the bottom falls out on his life and his community.

Didion’s approach to class in America stands out because of the emotion she brings to the discussion. Other recent books have taken on the subject in a much more analytical way-reorganizing our categories with titles like “Bobo” or “the creative class.” But Didion’s continuing message-that new titles don’t change the essentials of how we interact-makes one wonder if the new labels aren’t just another version of Lakewood-our most recent attempt to pretend that we Americans don’t have to be tied to our past.

Of course, Didion’s oblique telling of California is her own way of myth-making. Because she can’t trust her own prejudiced memory, Didion bases her California in tangible things: a piece of appliquŽ her great-great-great-grandmother stitched “on the crossing,” a petit-point evening bag from her grandmother, a favorite silver ladle from her mother, and her own daughter.

In the end, Didion comes to terms with her past. She finally accepts that, while she can’t find her identity in the idea of an Old California full of adventurers, she can find it in her own family and the bits and pieces she owns of their lives.

In a country that pretends to have no divisions, Americans often hold onto the artificial categories put forth by everyone from liberal academics to companies trying to keep their workers in line. When someone tells us that there are two types of people-those who kill rattlesnakes and those who don’t-we try to figure out which category we fit into rather than questioning whether the categories reflect reality. Perhaps Didion’s self-examination can serve as a soft-spoken reminder of the myths that keep us from discussing community and class objectively, myths that each of us harbors.