A memoir of the history of a family and the history of a country from one of the most renowned American writers of the century. In this book, Joan Didion reassesses parts of her life, her work, her own history and America's. The memoir, in Didion's words, represents an exploration into my own confusions about the place and the way in which I grew up, misapprehensions and misunderstandings so much a part of who I became that I can still to this day confront them only obliquely. frontier from the birth of her great-great-great-great-great-grandmother in Virginia in 1766 to the death of her mother on the edge of the Pacific in 2001; of how the wagon-train stories of hardship and abandonment and endurance created a culture in which survival would seem the sole virtue. recklessness in the very grain of the California settlement led to the California we know today - a state mortgaged first to the railroad, then to the aerospace industry, and overwhelmingly to the federal government, a dependent colony of those political and corporate owners who fly in for the annual encampment of the Bohemian Club. She shows California's startling contradictions in its - and in America's - core values and her unerring sense of America and its spirit, her acute interpretation of its institutions and literature, and her incisive questioning of the stories make this a provocative tour de force.