In Where I Was From, Didion has written a book that makes my scalp tingle with admiration. In California we did not believe that history could bloody the land, or even touch it.”  Didion's writing during the 1960s through the late 1970s engaged audiences in the realities of the counterculture of the 1960s and the Hollywood lifestyle. Elizabeth Scott Hardin had bright blue eyes and sick headaches. . Gazing down at the Midwest, the Rockies and the Sierra Nevada, she found herself caught in a moment of abandonment that children often feel when a parent dies: Who will look out for me now, who will remember me as I was, who will know what happens to me now, where will I be from?She tells us that her mother -- peculiar, cranky, opinionated -- represented many of the contradictions and confusions about life in California; and her death, her sudden absence, left Didion reaching for what was receding from her grasp.

But sometimes, just sometimes, the stories we tell are just as important as the stories we are afraid to tell.Ask anyone who was not born in California -- the families that came from Mexico at the turn of the last century, or fled the Dust Bowl in the 1930s, or escaped the Killing Fields during the 1970s. It is Dickensian, as is Didion’s portrait of the state as an oversized welfare recipient grossly in need of reform. At the RNC, Trump allowed almost no presence of past Republican leaders.Get the latest news and notes from our community Book Club. Our mission is to get Southern California reading and talking.From the British-born tech writer turned novelist, “Red Pill” tracks an academic in Berlin who’s in too deep in an online conspiracy theory.Brit Bennett brings her bestselling novel, “The Vanishing Half,” to L.A. Times Book Club readers. In “The Great Exception,” Carey McWilliams once described the difficult task of understanding the Golden State; writing about California, he argued, is like “trying to chart a course in a storm: the instruments will not work; the landmarks are lost; and the maps make little sense.” Didion incarnates McWilliams’ navigator.Valediction and elegy alike, “Where I Was From” is a storm-tossed book. No longer does California, if it ever did, anticipate the future, she says, and with its political landscape in chaos, its budget a shambles and more people suddenly leaving the state than arriving, her words seem apposite. Is it possible to be anything more than who we are? Dreamers, failures or entrepreneurs: Such individuals made sense of their lives under the rubric of a dream, and this speaks to the real purpose of that dream. Such ignorance comes with a price.When Didion’s essay “Trouble in Lakewood” first appeared in the New Yorker in 1993, its portrait of the Spur Posse, the teenage boys who made a game of their sexual conquests, drew fire for its parachute journalism and its presumptuous overtones (calling residents, for example, an “unnatural ownership class”), but today Didion’s portrait, reedited for this collection, reads more poignantly as the picture of families struggling to come to grips with what happens when a community is suddenly cut loose (in this case, from government contracts with McDonnell Douglas). In this moving and unexpected book, Joan Didion reassesses parts of her life, her work, her history, and ours. Either in her defense or for reasons of his own, her husband was said to have killed, not counting English soldiers or Cherokees, ten men. Throughout her life -- notably in “Slouching Toward Bethlehem,” “The White Album” and “After Henry,” and in her fiction, most famously “Play It as It Lays” -- she has proved that, although there is no going home, there is certainly no escaping it, and her work is unavoidable: “to find,” as she writes, “the ‘point’ of California, to locate some message in its history.”By punching holes in popular mythologies, by disabusing us of any solipsistic spin of history, Didion argues that there is “slippage between the way Californians perceived themselves and the way they actually were.” It’s as true now as it was back then. It is a great irony, in Didion’s telling, that a state which so prides itself on individualism and autonomy (“where distrust of centralized governmental authority has historically passed for an ethic”) remains unaware of the real sources of its prosperity.

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