India, Dec. 23 -- "Yet California has remained in some way impenetrable to me, a wearying enigma, as it has to many of us who were from there. We worry it, correct it and revise it, try and fail to define our relationship to it and its relationship to the rest of the country," wrote Joan Didion in one of the chapters of Where I Was From (2003).

Born on December 5, 1934, in Sacramento, California, the writer, who was an early flag bearer of the era of New Journalism in the United States, wrote this memoir, a reflection of the factual history of her birthplace, juxtaposed with its oral tradition. Deeply suspicious of every story she was ever told, she treated her subjects the same way she believed a snake must be treated: kept in the eyeli...