Disconnections

Where I Was From turns out to be a complex title, for this is by no means a conventional autobiography, but an accounting of an exceptional sensibility. It describes the “where” Joan Didion’s distinctive novelistic prose came from, and also suggests its problems. Novelist Thomas Mallon recently described it as “one of the most recognizable—and brilliant—literary styles to emerge in America during the past four decades,” and said Didion is so “famously distrustful of abstraction” that she likes to put “skeptical quotation marks . . . around all but the commonest nouns.”

The “I” of the title refers to the sensibility in Didion’s first novel, Run River (1963), both in its narrative discontinuities and its facticity. It may be that we should say “Didion’s,” to remind ourselves that this is but one of a great many Didions, perhaps more factually designated by a number than by the generalization of a noun. Writing in National Review, the astute Guy Davenport commented on Run River. “She knows the particular . . . desolation of soul that would seem to be built into hotel rooms, the rat’s maze of six-lane traffic in cities. This awful confusion is reflected in practically all writing, but Miss Didion’s version is distinguished by her terrifying sense of what has been lost and how irreparable the damage is.”

About the Author

Jeffrey Hart

Jeffrey Hart is a contributor to National Review.

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Where I Was From turns out to be a complex title, for this is by no means a conventional autobiography, but an accounting of an exceptional sensibility. It describes the “where” Joan Didion’s distinctive novelistic prose came from, and also suggests its problems. Novelist Thomas Mallon recently described it as “one of the most recognizable—and brilliant—literary styles to emerge in America during the past four decades,” and said Didion is so “famously distrustful of abstraction” that she likes to put “skeptical quotation marks . . . around all but the commonest nouns.”

The “I” of the title refers to the sensibility in Didion’s first novel, Run River (1963), both in its narrative discontinuities and its facticity. It may be that we should say “Didion’s,” to remind ourselves that this is but one of a great many Didions, perhaps more factually designated by a number than by the generalization of a noun. Writing in National Review, the astute Guy Davenport commented on Run River. “She knows the particular . . . desolation of soul that would seem to be built into hotel rooms, the rat’s maze of six-lane traffic in cities. This awful confusion is reflected in practically all writing, but Miss Didion’s version is distinguished by her terrifying sense of what has been lost and how irreparable the damage is.”