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Article: Disconnections.(Where I Was From)(Book Review)
- Article from:
- National Review
- Article date:
- December 22, 2003
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 2003 National Review, Inc. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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Where I Was From, by Joan Didion (Knopf, 240 pp., $23)
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 ...