Where I Was From, like many of Joan Didion’s work, portrays a precarious balancing act. It manages to be coincidentally profoundly intimate and considerably political. The book acts both as a memoir and an examination of the big issues that define the author’s hometown, the state of California. Didion exposes what she believes to be the very heart of the California myth, the divorce between the devoted belief of the state’s citizens in their individual freedom and self-determination and its nearly total reliance on government handouts in the form of subsidies and tax relief. In describing many individual Californians, including the earlier stage of herself, she allows the reader to perceive the warping of internal logic that allows these people to continue insisting they are free and self-determined, in spite of the prevailing evidence to the contrary that California has its own problems and flaws.