-
Your next favorite book
is waiting.
Summary | Discuss | Reviews | More Information | Read-Alikes
From the bestselling, award-winning author of The Year of Magical Thinking: In this "arresting amalgam of memoir and historical timeline" (The Baltimore Sun), Didion—a native Californian—reassesses parts of her life, her work, her history, and ours.
Didion applies her scalpel-like intelligence to California's ethic of ruthless self-sufficiency in order to examine that ethic's often tenuous relationship to reality. Combining history and reportage, memoir and literary criticism, Where I Was From explores California's romances with land and water; its unacknowledged debts to railroads, aerospace, and big government; the disjunction between its code of individualism and its fetish for prisons.
Whether she is writing about her pioneer ancestors or privileged sexual predators, robber barons or writers (not excluding herself), Didion is an unparalleled observer, and this book is at once intellectually provocative and deeply personal.
BookBrowsers Ask Lauren J.A. Bear, author of Aphrodite in Pieces
I forgot about that interview – so fun! Ok, here I go: Aphrodite's first kiss with Nerites was inspired by the beach kiss in From Here to Eternity . "Cuddle my whole body!" is something my youngest is famous for saying. I gave that line to Eros. In Medusa's Sisters , I gave Poseidon a pronounced ...
-Lauren_JA_Bear
Name three nonfiction books you absolutely loved and would recommend
Let's Take the Long Way Home by Gail Caldwell Always Home, Always Homesick by Hannah Kent Magical Thinking by Joan Didion Hidden Valley Road by Robert Kolker
-Michele_P
Did you read any books in 2025 that are widely considered classics? If so, which ones and why?
The Mother's Recompense/ Edith Wharton, Night/ Elie Wiesel, Age of Innocence/ Wharton, Lolita/ Nabokov, Nineteen Eighty Four/ Orwell, the last two for bookclubs. I read a few books by Octavia Butler and a few by Joan Didion but not sure if they would be considered classics. When I retired in 2015...
-Paula_Walters
Overall, what did you think of The Forgotten Book Club? (no spoilers, please!)
I am sorry to say that I did not enjoy the book. I found Grace's character to be uninteresting and really difficult to take seriously. When she makes a comment regarding Joan Didion's book - something to the effect that she didn't know there were books like this written about grief ! I just almos...
-Gerrie_B
Have you read many of the books mentioned in the novel? Did you find titles you added to your “to be read” list?
Thank you for the list - I had no idea so many were mentioned. I have read several. The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion Lord of the Flies by Williams Golding Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier Brave New World by Aldous Huxley Charlotte's Web by E B White D...
-Laura_S
The Forgotten Book Club Reading list
Here are the books listed in The Forgotten Book Club : One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest by Ken Kesey I Let You Go by Clare Mackintosh The List of Suspicious Things by Jennie Godfrey The Collected Dorothy Parker by Dorothy Parker The Bee Sting by Paul Murray Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift The...
-kim.kovacs
What’s your favorite epistolary novel?
I have to say Joan Didion's novels, especially her most recent Notes to John.
-Lynne_G
What's your go-to comfort read, and why?
Joan Didion is my feel good author. Her writing style is honest, thoughtful and deliberate with a philosophical tone. The first sentence in The White Album — We tell stories in order to live. I read stories in order to live. Her book The Year of Magical Thinking is a wonderful book when dealing w...
-Lynne_G
What book or books are you reading this week? (01/09/2025)
I am reading Blue Nights by Joan Didion and just finished another book by Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking, for the second time. Both are about grief after losing a loved one. I am also reading The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien and listening to How to Read a Book by Mortimor J. Adler an...
-Bridget_Smith
What are you reading this week (1/2/2025)?
Only a few pages left of Joan Didion's Run River. Waiting for my copy of The Frozen River but not today already received my mail. No library requests ready to pick up. But many books I can read from my home library but not sure what??
-Paula_Walters
What are you reading this week? (12-26-2024)
This week reading my Christmas gift, This Sweet Magic and looking forward to reading some of my Joan Didion books.
-Paula_Walters
What's the last book you received as a gift, and what's the last book you gave as a gift?
Christmas gift from my son The Library of America 3 volume set of Joan Didion. From my granddaughter This Sweet Magic. Books I gave as a gift to my son two nice hardbacks of Hemingway and The Berry Pickers for my daughter in law.
-Paula_Walters
"Compelling... . A love song to the place where her family has lived for generations, but a love song full of questions and doubts." —The New York Times
"An arresting amalgam of memoir and historical timeline... . Exquisitely crafted, as subtle as the slow waking from a pleasant dream." —The Baltimore Sun
"One beautiful sentence follows another... . This is a book about history, about what we learn from genealogy and history books, novels and old newspapers, and how we square all that with what we see around us... . Didion has remained a clearheaded and original writer all her long life." —Newsweek
This information about Where I Was From was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Photo © 2003 Colleen Guaitolini
Joan Didion (1934-2021) was born in Sacramento, CA, the daughter of an officer in the Army Air Corps. A shy, bookish child, Didion spent her teenage years typing out Ernest Hemingway stories to learn how sentences work. She attended the University of California, Berkeley where she got a degree in English and won an essay contest sponsored by Vogue magazine. The prize was a research assistant job at the magazine where Didion would work for more than a decade, eventually working her way up to an associate features editor. During this time she wrote for various other magazines and published her first novel, a tragic story about murder and betrayal, called Run River in 1963. The following year she married fellow writer John Gregory Dunne and the two moved to Los Angeles. The couple adopted a ...
If you liked Where I Was From, try these:
by Margaret Atwood
Published 2026
How does one of the greatest storytellers of our time write her own life? The long-awaited memoir from one of our most lauded and influential cultural figures.
by Sarah Moss
Published 2025
An unflinching memoir about childhood, food, books, and our ability to see, become, and protect ourselves.
by Manuel Munoz
Published 2022
Shimmering stories set in California's Central Valley, the first book in a decade from a virtuoso story writer.
Theo of Golden by Allen Levi
One spring morning, a stranger arrives in the small southern city of Golden. No one knows where he has come from…or why…
Your guide toexceptional books
BookBrowse seeks out and recommends the best in contemporary fiction and nonfiction—books that not only engage and entertain but also deepen our understanding of ourselves and the world around us.
