Horizontal and Vertical Themes in Joan Didion's Memoir “Where I Was From”
Abstract
The paper analyzes Where I Was From, by Californian journalist and novelist Joan Didion, as well as a number of autobiographical essays and interviews. Published in 2003, the book is a complex and challenging text, pardy a memoir of her family's pioneer past and partly a reassessment of the history of California. It is a kind of bookend to Didion's earlier musings on her native state and it investigates horizontal themes (the pioneers' crossing of the American continent as well as the author's personal crossings, that is, her recurrent moves back and forth between California and New York) and vertical themes (the role of the federal government as the main cause for social and political change in California from the Gold Rush to the present). Such horizontal and vertical themes, intersecting both Didion's life and her books, emerge here through the description of her ambivalent, often painful, relationship with a set of specific Western ideas that over the years she has come to reject, and through an endearing recollection of her family past, including her women ancestors.
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