What could be better than growing up in California? You wake up, pick fresh oranges from your front yard for your breakfast juice, wave at Brad and Angelina on your way out the door, and ride your surfboard to class. You never wear shoes, are tan all year long, get a convertible for your sixteenth birthday, and have no worries beyond hanging out and staying mellow. For many folks east of the Sierra Nevadas, the California lifestyle is made up of images of the thin slice of the state they see on reality TV and hear about in Katy Perry songs.

In truth, the state is vast and diverse, and there are as many versions of a California childhood as there are California children. One of those kids grew up to be James Franco, who both perpetuates and pokes fun at the stereotypical California stoner-surfer in movies like Pineapple Express. In his new memoir, A California Childhood, Franco writes about growing up in Palo Alto, where Steve Jobs’s daughter was in his high school class and computer programmers, not Hollywood stars, were considered royalty. For more California dreaming, check out these memoirs of growing up in The Golden State.

The Woman Warrior by Maxine Hong Kingston

As the daughter of Chinese immigrants growing up in Stockton, California, Maxine Hong Kingston had to make sense of a double set of strangers -- the Caucasian culture that surrounded her, which her parents did their best to ignore, deeming all non-Chinese people “ghosts,” and the Chinese ancestors of her parents’ memories and stories. Kingston spent afternoons in her parents’ steamy laundry, surrounded by the hot smells of other peoples’ clothes and the equally pungent words of her mother’s “talk stories,” which she had to translate into her own experience in order to make sense of where she came from, and the world in which she was growing up.

Funny in Farsi by Firoozeh Dumas

When Firoozeh Dumas was seven, her family moved from Iran to Whittier, a Southern California town which includes among its claims to fame the alma mater of President Richard Nixon. In this collection of vignettes, Dumas describes growing up the daughter of an engineer with limited English in a place where her classmates believed in their inalienable right to eat hot dogs, watch Bob Hope, and endlessly obsess over obtaining the perfect tan. Try as they might to assimilate, the family was constantly stymied by their adopted home, even when their daughter tried to translate Hope’s jokes into Farsi. As an outsider, Dumas is able to observe and skewer California culture with an astute and affectionate eye.

Where I Was From by Joan Didion

This book, part memoir, part reportage, is like a bucket of cold water thrown in the face of all the California dreamers who believe their state to be a gentle haven from the cruel realities of the East. In a series of scorching essays, Didion describes where she was from as a brutal, self- interested, bigoted, amoral land where early settlers did whatever it took to get by, and modern residents do whatever it takes to get ahead. Though Didion lives in New York, these pieces prove that she remains deeply affected by the state where she was born and grew up, and continues to engage with what it means to be a Californian, while remaining unable to entirely grasp the meaning of the state itself.

Oh, the Glory of It All by Sean Wilsey

San Francisco, despite its reputation as a cosmopolitan city, is at heart a small town. It’s even smaller if you are part of the social circle that lives atop the city’s famous hills, with views of its equally famous bridges and bay. Sean Wilsey grew up in that circle, with all the attendant privileges, including regular lifts from his father in a helicopter and parties with former Black Panthers. But life hobnobbing in Nob Hill came to an end when his father left his mother for her best friend, and Wilsey’s mother reinvented herself as a globe-hopping peace activist. In this memoir, we see all the nuts and kooks that call the city by the bay home, including Wilsey’s own parents, and how the permissiveness and incestuousness of the town may have enabled the dissolution of his family.