Joan Didion (2003) Where I Was From.

Joan Didion sounds French but was, of course, from California. End of ‘a memoir’. Where I Was From is an interrogation of self and American society. It’s not so much as nature versus nurture. More a realisation of something universal. Like Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, or when Rabbie Burns turns over mouse’s nest with his plough in a field in Ayr in November 1785. He penned a poem To A Mouse. Reality is sometimes too much and too tragic for simplistic answers.

‘My mother died on May 15^th, 2001, in Monterey, two weeks short of her ninety-first birthday,’ Didion tells us.

‘What difference does it make?’ where the words her mother uttered to end questions like ‘What class do we belong to?’

‘The present only toucheth thee,’ Burns tells the mouse, while bemoaning man’s ability to look backward and forward in ‘fear’.   

Didion’s grandfather stopped a car to kill a rattlesnake he’d seen lurking by the side of the road. It was the Californian way. Self-reliance and autonomy, but also civic duty.

Women in the family were tough. Didion begins with her great-great-great-great grandmother, Elisabeth Scott born in 1766. Aged 16 she married an eighteen-year old veteran of Revolution. Hiding in caves with eleven of her children during Indian fighting. Swimming across rivers with a child sheltered in her arms.

Women in her family were pragmatic. ‘They tended to accommodate any means in pursuit of an uncertain end…When they could not think what to do they moved another one thousand miles, set up another garden: beans and squash and sweet-peas from seeds carried from the last place. The past could be jettisoned, children buried and parents left behind, but seed got carried.’

Joan Didion admits to the same strength or failings. ‘When my father died I kept moving. When my mother died I could not.’

She could admit fragility. The California she remembered is not one that exists. As a twelve-year old she believed in good luck and bad luck. Like in a Jack London story the miner about to give up who strikes gold. The farmer on a dusty patch of farmland who suddenly drowns in fourteen-million barrels of crude luck.

‘Put out your campfire, kill the rattlesnake and watch the money pour in.’

In the post-war boom that was a self-evident fact that every girl and boy believe in. They’d created their own mythic corner of the Garden of Eden, The Golden State and they were dealing with the snakes. If their birth right was squandered, it was because they had forsaken their ancestors’ frontier spirit.

Joan Didion, unlike her mother, gets to choose between myth and reality. She looks backwards and forwards without fear. She notes the railroads created some of the richest men in history and helped create what Mark Twain called ‘The Gilded Age’. Their collective wealth came from government grants. Indian land was made not by just adding some water as in the mythic version, but the government’s connivance in genocide and creation of dams and reservoirs in creating a distributional system, which is now breaking down as the planet overheats. Defence contracts, billions upon billions of dollars, helped to create new cities and homes. Many of them purchased with help from the GI-Bill, which also paid for education.

‘Keep California Green and Golden’ was the state’s fire-watch motto when she was a girl.

She uses the case of the Lakewood ‘Spur’ as an example of not what happens when the rot sets in, because that would reinforce the belief there was a mythic age, but what happens when much older high school ‘jocks’ aged around eighteen in Lakewood were arrested in March 1993 for raping and molesting minors—girls under fourteen—which became a nationwide scandal.

Lakewood residents fall into a familiar line. The media ae found culpable. ‘They blow it out of proportion a lot,’ a Spur parent told the author. This meme theme was repeated on the Jane Whitney chat show in which a rapist doubled-down on his belief he’d done nothing much wrong.  

Self-autonomy and narcissistic, grandiose self-belief: if the government, and its institutions, would just wither and die everything in the Garden would be rosy, not just in Lakewood. Didion asks questions that are especially relevant with the moron’s moron, draft-dodging, thieving, non-tax paying, rapist and former 45^th President of the disUnited States with the fifty-fifty chance of winning the next Presidential election and leading an equally disunited world to Armageddon.

‘What does it cost to create and maintain an artificial ownership class?

‘Who pays?

‘Who benefits?

‘What happens when that class stops being useful?

‘What does it mean to drop back below the line?’

Didion’s memoir is a primer. Answers in the ballot box next year. It’s not good versus evil. There’s nothing good about such a contest. Read on.