Where I Was From, Too

An Illustrated Retrospective Love Letter to California: I tried babe, I really tried.

I awake this morning at 3 am and quickly become aware of a burning sensation in my chest. It takes only a few moments to identify it: grief.

I am (again) about half-way through Joan Didion’s Where I Was From, a book the Baltimore Sun (on the back cover) describes as “An arresting amalgam of memoir and historical timeline.” It’s a dense book about California, difficult in ways that other JD works are not. I tried reading it before, many years ago, when I myself lived where she was from (namely, Sacramento). The prose is closely packed. In previous reading attempts, it felt too dense, too packed, too close to penetrate. Now that I’ve relocated to Arizona, Joan’s labor of love doesn’t feel too close anymore. It feels, in fact, much, much too far away.