A review by n_ck
Where I Was from by Joan Didion

reflective sad medium-paced

4.0

What a fucking writer. Didion's command over language and sentence structure is really something. I had heard that all before. But as a political thinker, she's just as interesting. She has complicated impulses — weary of change, but too clear-eyed to see the past of California as the kitschy hotel art would depict it. Dry, ironic, unsentimental in dispatching bullshit but she's not heartless. She writes lean, winding sentences but she layers so much meaning them through context that I wasn't expecting to be so affected by those last few lines at her mother's death bed.

I saw a blurb on the cover refer to this as a love song to California. I think that's not quite it: it's a break-up song for someone you love but you can't stay with anymore. Where you were from, not where you are from.