Joan Didion: Where I Was From

Reviewed by MARGIE THOMSON

Didion is an American icon, known for her incisive observations and penetrating intellect — what one reviewer called "her sonar ear, her radar eye" — and has in her quite long life (she's 70 this year) written five novels and six non-fictions works.

This latest would seem to be her most personal project. It's subtitled "a memoir", but as one might expect, the "personal", while pivotal, is oblique. It's opaque to the point that some reviewers have responded as if this book was simply about California, where she grew up — an exploration of the myth of the Golden State, which Didion reveals was never as golden as its inhabitants, her younger self included, often took it to be.

Following the death of her mother in 2001, she is compelled to seek "the point" of the place she was born in, and in which her forbears have lived for a remarkably long time.

Her great-great-great-great-great-grandmother was born in 1766 and began the long voyage west; a slightly more recent ancestor continued the journey with the infamous Donner-Reed party which was reduced to cannibalism when it was trapped in the Sierra Nevada in 1846-47. Didion seeks to understand the character of those people who jettisoned all in their tough journeying and arrived to find their fortune in the new place.

She deals emphatically with romanticism: Californians like to say the place has changed in the post-war years, but the way Didion comes to see it, the folly and recklessness of the original settlers led directly to today's California: first mortgaged to the railways, then the aerospace industry, always dependent on the federal government.

Challenging and stimulating, a tribute to history's on-going resonance.

* Flamingo, $34.99