From the launch pad

musenla's ex libris  inspired my beginning this book journal. in it she mentions recently finishing jeffrey eugenides' Middlesex ,  a book i loved.  it's been too long since i read it to presume to write a review, but no one else i know has read it.  a little journal-to-journal book chat would be fun.  

the book i just finished is joan didion's Where I Was From,  a meditation on her deep California roots, CA "native" mythology in general, the myth of the crossing, the passage, the abandonment of so much in order to arrive on the golden shores.  and then the destruction of much of what was golden about those shores. ultimately, abandonment is what it's about.  the last section deals mainly with her mother's death, a rite of passage for most women, a crossing into ultimate adulthood, a mutual abandonment.  although my mother died over 20 years ago, didion's words about what we feel when our parents die resonate strongly:  "who will look out for me now, who will remember me as I was, who will know what happens to me now, where will I be from."  i think didion's mother's death has unmoored her from her own personal mythology, and led her to investigate the idiosyncratic CA ideals of individuality and freedom, coupled with the state's extreme reliance on the largesse of such institutions as the Southern Pacific Railroad and the federal government.  she sees "who will remember me as i was?"  as a major question for the long-vanished idealized CA, a golden dream that no longer is sure who will look out for it,  looking for the answer to "who will know what happens to me now?"   Californians may hope to have found an answer in the election of their new governor, but i think the only truth to be realized, for each of us, lies in this poignant sentence ending a passage of didion's trying to cope with a box of her mother's small possessions:  "There is no real way to deal with everything we lose."