Book Review: Where I Was From
My losing entry for Freddie deBoer's book review contest // more Didion criticism
Below is the first book review I’ve ever written. I submitted it to Freddie deBoer’s book review contest, but of the 38 entrants, mine didn’t crack the top three. It was one of three entrants that came in at exactly the 2000 word limit, all of which he said he enjoyed. But I’m bummed I lost, cause I was banking on the prize money to help me pay rent (sorry, Mom). Still, it was fun to compete and I hope to write more of these down the road. My review’s main flaw, in Freddie’s mind, was too much description / summary, too little evaluation of the text. Judge for yourself!
Joan Didion’s vision for Where I Was From crystallized in 2001, after learning by telephone in her New York City apartment that her mother had died three thousand miles away in Monterey, California. Sensing a twinge of guilt amid the grief, she suddenly found herself “thinking a good deal about the confusions and contradictions in California life.” She felt that she’d abandoned her childhood home and her mother along with it, but it struck her that she did so precisely because she was a California child born to a California woman. Didion never was one to turn away from unpleasant truths, so she started poring over family relics and state histories, California literature and visual art, and her own novels and reporting. From them she extracted a revisionist history of her home state, but the book is less about California itself than it is about why Didion ceased to call it home. In The Center Will Not Hold, she says: “If I examine something, it’s less scary. We always had this theory that if you kept a snake in your eye line, the snake wasn’t going to bite you. That’s kind of the way I feel about confronting pain. I want to know where it is.” Where I Was From is, at its core, a snake hunt.
Paradoxically, nothing could have been truer to Didion’s roots than abandoning them. Her great-great-great-great-great grandmother left behind everything she knew and loved to cross the fruited plains in search of a better life; Didion did the same. She’d been raised, like all good Californians, to see the crossing as a “noble odyssey.” But after her mother’s death, Didion began to rethink her admiration for leaving it all behind. And she wondered about the hidden consequences suffered by every Californian who’d ever learned to celebrate the crossing as a noble odyssey. Resolved to confront her pain, she put the crossing story, and the values implicit in it, under the microscope. What she pulled out was a total evisceration of California’s ethos and mythos – a portrait of a people perpetually content to gloss over grim reality with grand narrative. But there’s a deeply cynical implication looming over this portrait, and a hidden irony lurking in its margins.
Didion eviscerates the grand narratives she was raised on, but she stops short of condemning them. An anecdote from Part Four helps to explain why. The first time she ever saw her mother cry was during World War Two, outside the military housing office in the town where her father was stationed. Her mother went in, was told there was nowhere for them to stay, and came back outside crying. But by the time she got into the car, “her eyes were dry and her expression was determinedly cheerful.” She told her kids, “It’s an adventure. It’s wartime, it’s history, you children will be thankful you got to see all this.” Didion’s mother framed the family’s housing crisis as an adventure to shield her children from a harsher, potentially crippling reality. So, sure, maybe California’s ethos and mythos never held much water. But maybe they were necessary, because without a good narrative, all you have is grim reality. Then you die.
Now, you might wonder whether Californians could have lived on better, truer stories. But Didion didn’t seem to. She seemed convinced that we have two options: either we comfort ourselves with pretty lies, or resign ourselves to the ugly truth. After telling us her father felt a deep, amorphous obligation to his family – including a duty to stay in Sacramento – she dismisses that obligation as “unfulfilled and unfulfillable.” So, you can abandon your family and tell yourself you’re on a noble odyssey, but that’s dishonest. Or you can try to honor your obligations to your family, but that’s futile. This is a disturbingly cynical dichotomy, and a dubious one. The irony is Didion may have needed it to be true, because if our duties are out of reach, there’s no need to beat ourselves up when we neglect them. After learning of her mother’s death via long distance call and eviscerating the comforting stories of her youth, Didion invented a new one: the social obligations Californians had never fulfilled were always unfulfillable.
I’m haunted by the possibility that Didion’s right, even though I’m convinced she’s not. I’m twenty-five, which means I entered political maturity in the era of social media. The dynamics of social media are inherently detrimental to grand narratives. Didion had to put three thousand miles between her and the California ethos before she started noticing confusions and contradictions. But we have a billion irreverent minds ever in the palms of our hands. In the wise words of @powerbottomdad1, “twitter is so vast you could spend all day blocking fucking idiots and not even make a dent in the endless multitudes of fucking idiots who need blocking.” No matter what stories or values you bring into the trenches, none escape unscathed. Some idiot somewhere will have a take that rattles your faith. That said, I’m not an internet pessimist. I cling to some small hope that a thoroughly responsible ethos framed by a sufficiently compelling story can prove resilient enough to nourish a new generation. But if our deepest social obligations are inherently unfulfillable, as Didion suggests, then there’s no such thing as a thoroughly responsible ethos. No set of values can hold water, and it’s only a matter of time before trolls find the holes in your story and mock it into oblivion. So let’s litigate Didion’s case: what exactly were the stories and values Californians prided themselves on, and what holes did she expose in them?