We have been on rebuild zooms with our architect since APRILLLLLL of last year and have been driving to our contractor’s office in San Pedro to select flooring, tile, cabinetry, and appliances since last OCTOBERRRRR. For months, we have been swapping out colors and sizes for ones we like better, but it’s been like building a home out of Monopoly money (which the good people at Zia Tile probably won’t accept), purely the concept of potential funds that could arrive or could be rejected, because our insurance approval still hadn’t come through. Things are still tenuous, because we had hoped we could start the rebuild back last fall, then in January, and now it looks like we won’t be breaking ground until beginning of May. All of this means our ALE funds may well run out for our current rental before our Altadena house is finished being built, but at least things are now finally, finally moving in the right direction.

Rowan making a wish outside the house the first time we took him back to see the land (after the debris was cleared away by the Army Corps of Engineers; we didn’t want him to have this memory stuck in his head for the rest of his childhood…)

3 weeks after the Eaton fire

My Altadena mom friend broke ground on her house last week and I reached out to ask her how it felt. She said that she had so much emotional adrenaline that after helping dig the first ceremonious shovel-fuls with her kids, she passed out afterwards at home for two hours and woke up feeling so confused. What a total headfuck this has all been. Her builders confirmed that the soil in Altadena is wonderful: rich, wet, and earthy.

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Something fun that I have routinely done my entire adult life is forget when I have hard-boiled eggs in a pot on the stove. The timer on the oven doesn’t work at this house and I always forget to set one on my phone, but to be fair I have done this in every house I’ve lived in. I set the eggs, feel unduly proud of myself for being anticipatory about my lunch and future kid snack needs, and then maybe 45 minutes later, I look up from working in my office, curious about the sounds of light gunshots coming from the other room. I was going to post a TW: Egg Horror Movie picture but it’s too gross to share.

But in our new home? Our new home will have a POT-FILLER (Okay, Nancy Meyers kitchen!) and a stove timer that works, I’ll simply never have this issue again. I won’t find pieces of exploded egg all over the ceiling and floor, another pot burnt to a crisp, having to open all the windows because the house is suddenly soaked in the rank smell of synthetic organofluorine chemical compounds!!!!!!!

I’d simply never be able to do that to a kitchen with this achingly beautiful Terra Rosa tile as the backsplash. In the new house, I’ll be made anew: Egg-timer-conscious. Swimming daily in my pool. Luxuriating on the mosaic bathroom tile floor. Hugging its arched doorways, grateful for their romantic, evocative shape. Each corner I’ll round, I’ll pinch myself, how lucky it is that we made it out alive, that we get to come back and watch it grow again, get to be custodians and watch our kids grow up, again, under its eaves. I’ll still be badgering Tyler about a third child (hm: some things won’t be different).

A vintage 1970s fit I scored on eBay that burned in the fire before I ever got the chance to wear it out of the house: deserves to be seen here, at least.

It’s been a weird in-between time. Something catastrophic happened, but now we have approval to move on ahead and go home, but around us, the world is full of very, very catastrophic things that are still happening: that have been happening a long time but that have gotten so, so much worse here at home, all around us. Every day, I feel the push and pull of California. I long to move back to England, long to pack it all in and move to a tiny island off of Greece, but then I think, what about my American Dream? When we moved to Santa Fe after the fire, I met a woman who had grown up in New Mexico. Trump had just done one of his thousands of unspeakably horrific things since he’d been in office, just a few months in at this point, and I said I wanted to get out of this country, to take my children and run. “I’ll never leave,” she said. “My people are here. My land is here. I’m not going anywhere.”

I thought I had never had such fealty to a place before, but I suppose that’s what I’m doing with Altadena. Part of me wanted to run, and did, temporarily, but now we are throwing all our exploded eggs into the basket of Altadena, rather than escaping Los Angeles due to climate change and egregious prices, like so many we know and love. California’s pull is too strong. My beautiful mountain landscape is there. My people are there - I loved and miss my Altadena community. My land is quite literally there. And so: we’re going home.

The mural I painted and the flowers I planted when I was so sick of strangely ceaseless months of gloomy weather in 2023 and needed bright colors to cheer me up.

I leave you with a little improv I actually didn’t end up using for my audition on a Big Doctor TV Show:

MISCELLANIA:

Speaking of disasters, I’m reading: Natural Disaster by Lisa Owens, a practically perfect novel that is going to be published in 3 months - you can pre-order your copy here!

I am currently OBSESSED with this song by blind Sierra Leonan kondi (thumb piano) player Sorie Konoma and American producer DJ Chief Boima. ENJOY. Play it loud. Dance around. Hug a dog. Kiss the inside of his ears and his cold little nose. Clean up the dog’s pee. Repeat.

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A-ha. So this is where she’s been getting it from.

I looked at Zoe, my neurotic neurons firing in split-seconds - would this be the moment she adopted the perspective that it was now also gross to kiss her own mother? A performative display of disgust while watching her parents share a peck here and there, sure, fine, but to now genuinely find the notion of kissing her OWN MOMMY distasteful? My lower back immediately began prickling with sweat.

Luckily, when I pulled away, the wwww’s still lingering on the other child’s rotten lips, Zoe rolled her eyes at her friend, shrugging.

Thank GOD.

Rowan hasn’t yet gone through the “ew” phase, but he is in general far more romantically-inclined than Zoe. To wit, the other night, when we were reading Percy Jackson in bed, the goddess Aphrodite arrived on the scene. The narrator referred to her as “the most beautiful woman you’ve ever seen,” and Rowan gasped in genuine offense.

“No way, mommy. That’s you.”

My heart grew ten sizes, angels chimed in unison, Apollo (?) suddenly descended into Rowan’s dimly-lit bedroom and played a ballad on an ancient lyre.

Now, I know that I’m not the most subjectively beautiful woman Rowan has ever seen, not by a long shot. The boy lives in Los Angeles, home of some of THE most beautiful women, possibly even the actual descendants of Aphrodite. Objectively, my features are far too asymmetrical to warrant the appellation. But beauty is not objective, is it? And my son is here to remind me of it, cuddling in bed, his warm, lanky body burrowed next to me. The book continued to describe Aphrodite’s stunning features, and he shook his head.

He said, quieter and quieter this time, “No, no, no. Mommy you are definitely more beautiful than Aphrodite. I just…” Now he was up close in my ear, his little breath hot: “I just have to whisper it because I don’t want to get cursed. You know. By Aphrodite.”

We’ve learned, over the past three books in the (marvelous) Percy Jackson series, how petty, vain, and vengeful the ancient Greek gods and goddesses were, and being the sensitive boy he is, he took heed. It’s okay. It’s our secret now, how beautiful I am. Aphrodite can’t get us.

Now, though, I fear the clock on my son’s romanticism is about to run out. That’s because I volunteered at his 3rd grade class valentine party, and made the extremely misguided decision to run a “Love Poem Writing Station,” which quickly became clear was The Most Preposterous Activity Any 8-Year Old Boy Had Ever Been Asked To Do!!!!!!!!!

Me before romanticism was brutally rebuffed by 25 boys in rumpled T-shirts.

“Think of someone you love - could be a family member, a pet, a friend, whoever! And write down some notes about what you love about them,” I sang out to the first round of 7 kids at my station. The girls immediately set to writing down detailed, lovely things they loved about their dog, mom, little sister, or, my favorite - their pet pig.

The boys?

Fucking YIKES, is the broad headline:

My son, thankfully, immediately got to work on a delightful acrostic about his puppy, RUDY. His best friend wrote an adorable valentine to his brother. One other little boy wrote a beautiful tribute to his mother:

This is the kind of thing I was looking for. I hailed it as a perfect work of art as I feverishly sorted through the printed-out Shakespearean sonnets and the Shel Silverstein and ee cummings poems I brought as examples, trying to explain to the others that this was not acceptable:

I urged them to come up with details, sense memories, but they just kept writing FART all over the scratch paper I had provided. I asked the child above (and about ten others) WHY he liked his parents - that saying he liked them wasn’t a valentine or a poem, that details are what makes the sentiment special. They couldn’t come up with a thing.

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”Okay,” I switched tactics. “Let’s say your mom has to go out of town for a week. What would you miss about her?”

“I don’t know.”

“Well, is she funny?”

“Not really.”

“Does she make really great cookies?”

“No.”

“Does she have a beautiful singing voice?”

“NO.”

“Is she smart?”

“I dunno.”

“Maybe she wears fun clothes, would you miss looking at her outfits?

“What?”

“How about when she reads to you, does she do the different voices really well???” I asked in increasingly high octaves, clearly grasping for things I’d hope my kids would say about me if pressed by a stranger in red and white striped pants.

“WHAT THE~~~????? Wait, do you still READ to Rowan at night????” the kid asked.

I stared, dumbfounded at the question. Can I remind you that these children are EIGHT and not EIGHTEEN???? I briefly considered if this was a good time to tell them what Rowan said to me while cuddled up during the Aphrodite part of Percy Jackson, but these children certainly weren’t treating me like I was Aphrodite.

“Go to the bathroom weird? Is your little brother a…baby…?” I queried, hoping a diaper was on the other side of this question.

“No, he’s 6.”

“O-kayyyy, well, regardless, this is a hate poem. We are writing LOVE poem. You can’t say “I love” before you write a bunch of things you clearly don’t like about the person. Then it’s not actually a valentine. Can you start over and write some things you like?”

He sighed, and added one sentence about the brother being funny, I think. I don’t know, I was too busy making a desperate face at one of the teachers while mouthing “What is GOING ON????”

“Oh, yeah,” she said blithely. “8 year old boys have a really hard time with sincerity.”

…I had no idea. Thank GOD.

One of these things is simply not like the other!!!!!

Does romanticism and sincerity and earnestness and affection somehow return in 4th grade boys or is it simply dead and gone for these children until….after…college???? Is this the beginning of toxic masculinity? It certainly felt like it, but there was a weird margin where maybe 10% of the boys seemed normal and affectionate and could pinpoint feelings, while the others either couldn’t, or wouldn’t. What is going on in these children’s homes, do they all have 15 year old older brothers, maybe???? I found the whole thing deeply disturbing, in addition to deeply funny, but only because they weren’t my children.

On my way out, while only mildly pouting that I hadn’t gotten a chance to get a cupcake before the snack station was cleared away, I pointed out the three boys that Rowan is allowed to be friends with based on their valentine-writing skills, and can only hope that he takes heed.

Other Fun Things!

-As good a time as any to refer to The American Male Age Ten, a beautiful essay by Susan Orlean that my friend Nereya told me about. This part made me cry:

“He is, at the moment, very content with his backyard. For most intents and purposes, it is as big as Wyoming. One day, certainly, he will grow and it will shrink, and it will become simply a suburban backyard and it won’t be big enough for him anymore. This will happen so fast that one night he will be in the backyard, believing it a perfect place, and by the next night he will have changed and the yard as he imagined it will be gone, and this era of his life will be behind him forever.”

-Ohmygod I loved this essay so much: My Illegal Revenge Pool

-At risk of recommending the Kate Berlant / Jacqueline Novak podcast two substacks in a row, I must, because this is a fascinating attempt at analyzing what happens when trolls come for your appearance in their latest episode, based on a Twitter troll writing “Probably the ugliest woman I’ve ever seen” under a picture of Kate Berlant.

-Meeting ANGIE from the Real Housewives of Salt Lake City at my husband’s premiere party at Sundance and talking to her about my favorite Greek island for truly QUITE A LONG TIME, she was so gracious and sweet, I love her so much, she is the real RHOSLC queen!!! More fun Sundance pics on my Instagram.

Her PR person gently pulling me away from her lol — nice try PR lady, I have more things to say about Greece

ENGROSSED!

-And lastly, the 3-hour epic film Magellan, starring Gabriel Garcia Bernal, that Janus Films must have paid $3 to market because I didn’t even HEAR of it until I read ‘s movie substack about it this week and I am the TARGET audience member for a historical film set on the high seas. I took myself to the last screening of it last night in Los Angeles, you must catch it when it inevitably comes to a streaming platform - an incredible, sweeping, horrifying, visually stunning film.

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Like, comment, and subscribe - you pressing that lil’ heart button helps more readers find me! Thank youuuu, my valentines. <3

One child was at Disneyland with his father, having a solo Daddy/Rowie day. I was not jealous and I didn’t ask no less than 14 times whether or not I could go with them. But that’s neither here nor there! My unspeakable transition into An Adult Woman Who Seriously Enjoys Going to Disneyland can be blamed on my friend Cat, who works for Disney and got me hooked on the stuff by taking me for free our first god knows how many times. Anyway!! Last night on Guardians of the Galaxy, a ride that has a regular wait time of nearly 2 hours, Tyler and Rowan got to ride it three times in A ROW, with no wait in between. The how’s and why’s are boring, but it happened, and Rowan was happy about it but it didn’t appear to be clocking, emotionally, how outrageous the happening was, not enough for Tyler’s standards, anyway.

You don’t understand, my husband urged his son. This NEVER happens. This will NEVER EVER HAPPEN AGAIN. This is serious, outrageous luck!!!!! Now, I won’t get into how absolutely asinine it is that it would be preposterous to go on a ride multiple times in a row after shelling out hundreds of dollars to be at an amusement park whose sole purpose is to amuse with rides, but alas, post-capitalist corporate greed, etc.

On the other side of town, I was hosting a playdate to appease the daughter Left Behind (she has had the opportunity to go to Disneyland 2x more than her brother in the last year, which as anyone with siblings or children knows, is unspeakable and unforgivable, hence Rowan and Tyler going it alone). I told the two smart, capable 7 year-olds girls under no uncertain terms to eat their ice cream snack AT the table, not to take it anywhere else in the house, and to UNDER NO circumstances “do experiments” or even enter the kitchen or pour or mix anything at all. I had to tape an audition in my office and I would be out in 20 minutes.

16 minutes later, Zoe pounded on my office door, sobbing and pouring blood out of her hand and all over the glass door and the floor. Like the climax of The Substance, but for kids.

WHAT HAPPENED?!!! I hollered, rushing to see the wound.

I DON’T WANT TO TELL YOU BECAUSE YOU’RE GOING TO BE MAD AT MEEEEEEEEE she wailed.

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I followed her to the bathroom, where a trail of blood had been shed all up the long hallway and all over the bathroom, an actual crime scene. Well, reader, she had sliced into her finger while cutting lemons using an enormous serrated bread knife “to do an experiment,” the very exact thing I told her not to do. As I was on my knees, mopping up the 451 blood splatters on the rented wood floors, urging her to apply pressure with the towel and not move, figuring out how to take two kids to urgent care and what to do with the puppy while we went, I remembered about that puppy and heard a slurping sound coming from the living room. The other child had taken her CHOCOLATE CHIP ice cream into the living room, the other expressly forbidden thing I said before retreating into my Now-Self-Tape-From-Hell, and Rudy had gotten ahold of it, slurping down every last bite of lethal theobromine. Well, now sweat spontaneously burst forth from my lower back and tears squeezed out of my eyes as I weighed whether or not to go to the VET or HUMAN URGENT CARE first. Obviously my daughter is more important than my dog, but at the end of the day, does ‘tis but a flesh wound take priority over a dog’s entire life? We’re supposed to have at least 12 more years with this guy!!!!!!!!

I took Zoe’s friend by her shoulders and plead with her: HOW MANY SPOONFULS OF YOUR CHOCOLATE CHIP ICE CREAM WAS REMAINING BEFORE YOU ABANDONED IT ON THE LIVING ROOM COFFEE TABLE????

Luckily, it was less than 2, so I figured he would probably live. Also luckily, our pediatrician is one of my best friend’s sister, and she had given me permission to text her outside of office hours. I sent her a picture of The Finger and she responded immediately and suggested I come to her house and she would glue the flap of skin back on, no stitches needed (probably).

We arrived, and after 20 minutes of absolute terror screaming from hell about having to wash her wound with soap before getting treated by the pediatricians at home finishing their DINNER, Zoe acquiesced and let me gently clean her flesh wound before calmly sitting in my lap, cheerful, even, as the doctor applied tapes and glues and tourniquets to her tormented finger.

I’m never going to use a knife AGAIN, she sniffled on the car ride home.

You have NO IDEA how lucky you are, I sang as we snaked down some dark side streets. If we weren’t friends with our pediatrician, we would have had to have spent HOURS waiting in an Urgent Care tonight!!!! You just got to sail into their house, interrupt their dinner, and get treated within MINUTES!!!!!!

I think we should go get a manicure when my bandage goes away, Zoe mused.

You think you should…be rewarded for what happened tonight? I clarified.

Yeah. You know. For being BRAVE!!! she pointed her non-bloody index finger in the air in chipper punctuation.

*

Things I’ve loved recently:

-Younga Park’s very funny and very relatable take-down of the varying levels of responsibility in her children on her substack

-The Ugly Stepsister, streaming on Hulu/Disney - an outrageously compelling body horror take on the Cinderella tale, from a wildly assured first-timer Norwegian director. Come for the folklore, stay for the rhinoplasty performed before the invention of anesthesia.

This twice-baked croissant from Fondry bakery in Highland Park, stuffed with almond-chestnut cream and threaded on top with chestnut puree yarn!!!!!!! Tyler did a little pirouette after his first bite.

“Now I start to realize that I will most likely only ever have one child. And I regret that. “One is better than none,” a stranger I confided in at a playgroup once told me, as we watched a room full of babies play. I repeat the phrase to myself often, as a talisman of my narrow escape from the annihilating power of my indecisiveness….

“What would you do if you could do whatever you wanted?” I asked a village acquaintance. A question imported from another planet, I realized as soon as it was out of my mouth. “I can’t let myself think like that,” she said. Only in this new light can I clearly see my obscene injury: I am luxuriously, painfully pierced by the problem of partiality, of the necessity of living only one life. But one is better than none.” -Hannah Black’s wonderful essay Mother, Maybe on the decision to have children, via Jessica Stanley’s wonderful Read.Look.Think. (subscribe here!)

-Marty Supreme!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Boy oh boy did I walk out of that movie grinning my ass off

-Kate Berlant’s story about her “run-in” with Leo at Nancy Silverton’s new diner on Larchmont had me gigglingggg on my car ride to the valley

-My new fruit look: banana blazer + apple tee from Fashion Brand Company seen here in the bathroom at our contractor’s office, after Tyler and I argued over how many colors to include in our Altadena rebuild kitchen (him: 2 / me: 7)

-Jad Abumrad’s incredible podcast about Fela Kuti for RadioLab!!!!

-My puppy!!!!!!!!! Bringing me more joy daily than I ever thought possible??? Look at how his ears blow in the wind:

Leave me a comment or press that heart button below, it makes my day (not as much as Rudy, but there are gradations to these things). And if you enjoy this newsletter, please share it! I’m almost to 1,000 subscribers!!

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At the news that Santa simply does not deliver live animals, Zoe cried and cried and I explained rather proudly that he will likely bring a toy bunny that is just as fun as a real bunny and she said she absolutely is not interested in a toy bunny, and then scrunched down in her seat, out of view in my rearview mirror, in abject misery.

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I figured the toy bunny thing would suffice, in the end, but yesterday, that’s right, on December 23rd, she announced:

“Okay, if I can’t have a bunny, I’m going to ask Santa for an American Girl Doll that looks like me.”

I whimpered that it’s probably far too late to ask Santa for something that specific and she insists no, Santa can do anything. He’s magic, after all. He’s got elves to help!

Reader, would you drive in a torrential rainstorm with neighborhoods just a few miles away under phone alert warnings of AN ACTUAL TORNADO to CENTURY CITY, arguably the furthest and most annoying neighborhood in Los Angeles to drive to, whose mall contains the worst parking lot in America, today on Christmas Eve to make her Christmas wish come true? Century City, home to the literal “Avenue of the Stars,” and a building inside which I once had to audition for representation at a Major Talent Agency and had to bring a scene partner with me, who, when we left the room, put his arm around my shoulder and said “Jesus, even I was sweating in there - that was the coldest room I’ve ever been in - they didn’t want you in there before you even sat DOWN.” Century City, home to the mall with the 6 EV chargers in the horrible soggy parking lot where I saw two grown men, each in leather jackets, scream at each other over time spent charging? Or would you give her the toy bunny and if and when she is inevitably upset, explain that if we can find the batteries, it can actually hop in a stiff sort of mechanical way?

I obviously drove to the Century City mall at 2pm on Christmas Eve and got the only (!) American Girl Doll that has a bob haircut.

After polling my beloved FB mom group over whether this was a sane choice, I received this response from my friend Hannah:

This is the type of culture I braved to get the doll:

Moms and dads, but of course mostly moms, are Santa, and I’d drive to Timbuktu to get this little creature who, dressed in gingerbread house pajamas and a mouth full of toothpaste, suddenly asks me, at 8:20pm on Christmas Eve: “Wait…have I been good this year?”

We wrapped all the presents when they went to bed and at 10 o’clock my son came out of his room because he couldn’t sleep because he was too excited and I tucked him in and I said “Can I tell you something? I think I got you too many presents this year,” and for a moment he looked beatific and then he immediately switched over to a zen-like placidity and he pulled my face to his and kissed me and said “The only present I need this Christmas is your love.”

“Oh wonderful,” I said, kissing him all over his warm little face, “then maybe I will send back some of these prese--”

“—Uh no, mommy, I mean your love is the BEST present, but I really would like the other presents too,” he quickly backpedaled.

Who would I, a mere mortal, be, to deny a possible whisper of Christmas magic to these truly magical little creatures????? Now tell me in the comments just how you are the Santa in the Itasca police department parking lot. May we all join e-hands and make a chain of giving beyond what’s sensical across this beautiful, wanting world.

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I came here to get a good head-start on a novel I’ve been wanting to write for a long time. I actually started it last year, but then of course, lost it in the fire, along with everything else. My thrice-published (!) novelist/photographer friend Victoria - seasoned with 5 residencies under her belt - gave me some advice on how to take advantage of the days here: set a word count goal per day and don’t leave the desk until you’ve hit it, and don’t be social (hard 4 me). I set a goal of 2,500-3,000 words per day and I’ve accomplished it every day, so far. I haven’t read any of it back (also Victoria’s advice) so who knows if it’s shit, it probably is, but at least it’s something to edit when I get back.

My little room overlooks the pre-school yard next door, which has been extremely adorable: about ten kids in full-body insulated jumpsuits, yelling at each other while wielding plastic shovels, or just silently sitting in a huge pile of leaves, just under my nose. My word count pace nicely matches the pace of their day: by the time they’re setting out the babies for their naps, I should be rounding the corner to about 1,000 words. You read that right - setting out the babies. Every day, around 11:45am, they wheel out 2 or 3 sleeping babies in strollers, put a light netting over them, and leave them on the front porch for their nap. The temperature outside right now is 37 degrees. In about an hour, the teachers will come outside, lift the babies out of the strollers, and bring them inside in the warmth to play for a little until they come outside again to play before parent pick-up. By the time the parents come to pick them up, if things are going well, I should be skating somewhere above 2,000 words.

Here is a video of the scene:

They may be hardy, but Swedish kids hoard sticks and rocks away from their crying friends, too - I’ve now seen it with my own eyes. So collective responsibility and social welfare isn’t baked in genetically, it’s taught. It can be learned!

My room is simple and small. I’ve brought a few pictures of my family, a cloud painting that Zoe made at school, and some books with me to turn to for inspiration: Dept. of Speculation and a Deborah Levy book go anywhere I go, my friend Emily Hunt’s new novel Dwelling, a book about Orca whales, my notebook, and Tove Jansson’s Notes from an Island, from the Moomin creator who built a tiny one-room cabin on a remote, UNINHABITED, tiny island when she was in her 40s with her girlfriend Tooti (!) and spent all summer and fall there for 30 YEARS. They usually slept in a tent outside, leaving the beds inside the cabin for her mother, or guests. These people are simply sturdier than we (me)!!!!!!

It’s been a hard time for Tyler, alone with the kids, again, all the way across the world there in Los Angeles, waking up as I’m settling in to make dinner. This year, so far, I’ve traveled for work almost every month, so this was a tough and long addition to the list that already includes South Africa, Austin, Miami, Dallas, London, Scotland, and Canada.

“Mother was The Woman the whole world had imagined to death. It proved very hard to re-negotiate the world’s nostalgic fantasy about our purpose in life. The trouble was that we too had all sorts of wild imaginings about what Mother should ‘be’ and were cursed with the desire to not be disappointing. We did not yet entirely understand that Mother, as imagined and politicized by the societal system, was a delusion. The world loved the delusion more than it loved the mother...If we felt guilty about everything most of the time, we were not sure what it was we had actually done wrong.” -Deborah Levy, Things I Don’t Want to Know

I knew I’d feel guilty for taking this time for myself, but mostly because it’s been such a weird, hard year for my family, and because I’ve had to be away from them so much for work. I sit here, writing, reminded of the maternal duties from which I’ve absconded by staring at tiny children all day. The irony isn’t lost on me!! But this was an opportunity that came to me so randomly, it was like the universe saying - HERE, THIS IS FOR YOU, YOU HAVE TO TAKE THIS.

When we moved back to LA from Santa Fe in July and had to furnish an entire empty home from nothing, a friend sent me a stranger’s Instagram story about an estate sale. I messaged him and by the time I arrived, essentially everything had sold except a chair (which I bought). We got to chatting, and he told me he was going to help run an artist’s residency on a Swedish island for fire victims - was I making any art about the fire, per chance? I hollered that I WAS writing about it, AND about islands, and he invited me on the spot. When I came home and told Tyler about it, he put his head in his hands: the weight of the world on his handsome, beleaguered little face.

“Yeah. You have to go,” he agreed, the resigned, acerbic agreement of a man who so badly doesn’t want to agree, it’s actually corroding his insides just to utter the words, a Herculean feat of strength just to nod his head from resting to up and down.

…And with that resounding endorsement??? Off I went!!!!!!!!

Artist at work! I’ll be taking that empty can of Pringles back to America with me because Sweden is so good at recycling, they don’t allow plastics into the country that they can’t recycle, unlike the majority of our crap that has to go right to a landfill because they’re made of “layered plastics.” Less than 1% (!!!!!!!) of Swedish refuse goes to landfill - the majority is recycled or burned for energy! In fact, they’re so efficient at managing their waste, THEY IMPORT from other countries to keep its waste-to-energy plants running. It’s almost like we could……..learn something from them??? (JK - obviously not under this administration!!!!!)

I head home on Wednesday, which I’m so, so happy to do, but it’s been a marvel to take a page from Virginia Woolf’s diary this month:

“I will cut adrift - I will sit on pavements and drink coffee - I will dream; I will take my mind out of its iron cage and let it swim - this fine October.”

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I met Jessica (and her lovely husband Jude) when she was pregnant with her first child about 12 years ago, and have watched her three beautiful, funny, creative, brave, lovely children grow up on Instagram ever since. I have long-been a reader of her newsletter, Read Look Think, which just migrated from Substack over to her website, and you can sign up here to receive it in your email. It’s a cherished mailbox gift whenever it arrives, a treasure trove of things to read, look at, and think about.

In 2022, Jessica published her first novel, A Great Hope, and this spring, she published her second, called Consider Yourself Kissed. Here is the wonderfully cheerful cover:

Interview:

KC: I loved Consider Yourself Kissed because I love reading about women who lose and find themselves in motherhood, and I love reading about women becoming the writers they knew they always were. The drama of motherhood is infinite, I could read about it for the rest of my life and never be satiated. There is a lot of very dark literature about how women lose themselves in motherhood and don’t or barely come back from the brink (which I have also inhaled), but Consider Yourself Kissed (CYK) takes an optimistic view of parenthood, if not politicians. Why and how did you come to marry the very literal political and personal with this, your second novel?

JS: I am so glad you loved the book! <3 I wanted to write a love story between a long-term couple that takes place over a decade. My goal was to make the love story as realistic as possible: with career complications, parental imperfections and illness, past life and relationship legacies, the stress of real political events in real life, and the pressure that comes with having kids and building a family. Judging by the feedback I’ve been getting, the motherhood stuff does seem to resonate with readers on a deep level. I tried to show the low, low, lows, the average and blah moments, and the highs of parenting. Ultimately the POV on parenting is optimistic, I agree, because Adam and Coralie have the capacity to be delighted by their children (who are delightful as well as hard).

KC: You did a tremendous amount of political research to write this book. What was that process for you, given it was recent history and was a harrowing period we also all experienced in recent but still cloudy, muddled memory?

JS: You know my favourite book is The Line of Beauty by Alan Hollinghurst and I know it’s one of yours too! It’s a beautiful, very romantic (in some ways) gay coming-of-age novel, which also contains heartbreak and devastation. Hollinghurst set the book in the London of the eighties, and brings in the real politics of the time by making a main character a Tory MP, and even making Margaret Thatcher appear at a party. I was so inspired by the way bringing in these ‘real’ elements turbocharged the emotions of the story. That made doing the research for, in my case, the Tory years, Brexit, even Covid, palatable and even noble (!!!), because it was all to help make the world of the book feel real and make Coralie and Adam more believable.

KC: What is your favorite part of the writing process, and what percent of writing a book is rooted in the experience of that favorite part?

JS: Man, I LOVE having my own world to go into. I love tuning out the outside world and making a whole new world up. I love inventing the houses especially, visualising them in great detail and thinking what would be in them. I had a lot of fun writing the book. When I look back on it I only remember the good parts – but I know my whatsapps are full of complaining and moaning.

KC: How do you know when something you are writing is BAD - and what does the feeling stir?

JS: God, the first beginning I did of the book was so so so so so bad – it was so bleak, joyless, paranoid, lonely. Reading it made me feel so hopeless – like, no one would ever want to be in the world of this book. I could feel all my performance anxiety gripping me and the writing showed it. But I just had to make a start, and starting turned into having fun, which turned into it being ‘good.’ No surprises, but the beginning was basically the only thing my agent made me change. She wanted something that included Zora, Adam’s little daughter. Adding her into a scene made it come alive!

SOMEONE recently learned how to Canva….! (Me)

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KC: What was the most challenging part of writing CYK?

JS: I think it was the existential element. What is the point of writing a book when so much is going wrong in the world? Am I wasting my time, am I asking readers to waste theirs? That was where my writer friends came into it. If that mood overtook me, they gave me support, and I would do the same for them. Elif Batuman (I admire her and her writing so much) has been talking about this in her essays and in her newsletters. I’m trying to get better at just ploughing through these existential doubts. But they are something I struggle with and I expect that won’t change.

KC: I have been loving all the pictures of you studying at the same library in which I began work on my Master’s thesis !! (the gorgeous UCL library). I know you went there for research as well, but would you recommend leaving sweatpants at home and taking oneself to a silent, beautiful room in a library somewhere to write? Do you force yourself to leave the house to write?

JS: You actually catch me on the cusp of a transition, haha! I had been working in that gorgeous library by using a guest pass that I paid for. That was mainly at the tail end of the academic year and over the long break. But now it’s autumn, the library is filled with students who belong there! Obviously! So it’s not working so well for me anymore. It gave me what I needed though.

KC: Are you a fast writer and a long reviser or do you take a long time churning something out to begin with? What’s the writing vs. rewriting process and timeline look like for you?

JS: It takes me forever to start something, years and years. I could read around it and think about it forever. Writing the first 5000 words is the worst and so painful. But once I have that, I can write a bit almost every day that I have time. So I suppose to some I would be considered a fast writer.

KC: God, that is comforting - I, too, take forever to start something. Do you adhere to any type of strict scheduling given you also have three children? Is school pickup o’clock the end of the writing day for you, etc? Do you have a word count you try to get to per day, etc?

I don’t have a schedule except that of course the children’s drop off and pick ups curtail everything!!

KC: I identify deeply with Coralie’s experience of her feeling a lack of readiness to write. Was this something personal to you, in your writing career, that you also assigned to the character of Coralie?

JS: Because of my boring career (all sorts of communications and advertising), which I took really seriously because I needed the money and stability, I didn’t start writing until I was thirty, and I didn’t publish my first book until I was forty. Consider Yourself Kissed came out when I was 43. I think most writers would like to get started sooner – I definitely would have. All of this to say… yes, I could definitely give life to the feelings of a character who always wanted to write but hasn’t… yet!

KC: You have a line that refers to Cora needing to be “exactly the right amount of alone” - this is such a visceral encounter with new motherhood. Never being alone enough, when alone it feeling not right, and above it all nothing feeling right enough to write. Did this sentiment curtail with time, for you?

JS: <3 Yes it gets heaps better. Every year easier and easier. Anyone with a child under (totally random figure being plucked out of nowhere here!) eight (???) should cut themselves major slack and know that life is going to get easier around the corner.

KC: I try to remind myself that even though she can technically brush her teeth by herself now (even though she doesn’t), Zoe is only 6, I still have little kids! Random figure of 8 years old feels right - things have felt SO much easier, lighter since Rowan turned 8.

I cried three times in this book, one I won’t give away. The other, when Adam takes Coralie to Florence Falls (!!), and then shortly thereafter, when she gives birth, and looks down at her child for the first time. Life! Birth! Making something out of the nothing-ness and everything-ness of love and dedication - you’ve done it five times! (3 children, 2 books!) This isn’t a question, just wanted to let you know how moving it was to read.

JS: Thank you <3 I never really cry in real life, or hardly ever anyway, so I really rely on books and films to help me shed tears!

KC: Can you tell me a little about the book you’re working on right now?

JS: I want it to be about going backstage into the lives of creative people – what the lives look like to outsiders, what they feel like on the inside. I want a book that feels like reading a Wikipedia Personal Life section!

KC: Ooooh, love! Okay, please name 5 of your favorite books, books you buy for friends and press into their hands, books you go back to again and again? (Proud to already know that our beloved Hollinghurst will be on this list)

JS: The Line of Beauty by Alan Hollinghurst!

Helen Garner’s diaries

The Pursuit of Love by Nancy Mitford

The Cazalet Chronicles by Elizabeth Jane Howard

Weird one, but I love The Diana Chronicles by Tina Brown and revisit often! An incredible deep dive on our favourite princess!

KC: And please, 3 books (that are already published) that you read recently and loved!

Naked Portrait by Rose Boyt (a memoir of posing for portraits by her father, the artist Lucien Freud)

This is going to sound weird, but I recently read ‘The Only Plane in the Sky’, an oral history of 9/11 – it was so, so fascinating and rich, I wouldn’t say I loved it exactly because of the subject matter, but I was very engrossed.

Sea of Tranquillity (and a reread of Station 11) by Emily St John Mandel! Beautiful, emotional, beautifully structured full-hearted writing.

Thank you, Jess!!!! Here is a picture of both of us a few months ago in London Fields, right in Hackney, where her beloved book was set. Order your copy here! And follow Jess on IG here and sign up for her wonderful newsletter here!

Thank you for reading! Soon I’ll be posting pictures from the beautiful Swedish island where I’ll be writing my book, you can follow along here. I hope to see the aurora borealis and accomplish an insane word count per day, given all other responsibilities will be over yonder, across an ocean. Let’s see how I do!

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“It went behind her suitcase and scurried away,” I told him.

“Well as long as your suitcase is zipped up you’ll be allright,” he advised her, from inside his Business Man Blazer.

Shirt I got at the St. Lawrence vintage market - obsessed with vaguely threatening, cumbersome text on a vintage tee!!!!!!!

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When I was in London a few weeks ago, I was exiting the British Museum with my family just as another family was leaving. The dad looked over at the book Rowan was reading, one he had just selected from my favorite Bloomsbury bookshop (Foyle’s!), and mentioned that his daughter had read the same book. Just then, his teenage son, with a nose ring, a lip ring, gauged ears, and a t-shirt that would fit a literal giant, looked over at me. This teenage boy looked right into my eyes and said, earnestly, “Did you enjoy yourself at the museum?”

It almost felt as though he was being sarcastic, but what was there to be sarcastic about? The actual Rosetta Stone? I don’t think so. Plus, his bright blue eyes shone nothing but Truth.

“…Yes!” I replied, confused. “It was wonderful, how about you?”

“Oh, yeah, we had an amazing time, what an incredible museum.”

I stopped walking. I stared at this teenager and said, “I’m sorry, but are you guys Canadian?”

The dad’s mouth hung open. “Yes, we are!!! Why????” he asked, laughing.

“Because an American teenage boy would never look an adult woman in the eye outside a museum and ask her if she enjoyed herself looking at historical artifacts!!!!!!” I basically screamed. Then we wished them goodbye and I grabbed Rowan by the shoulders and instructed him to be exactly like Gauged Ear Teenage Canadian Boy when he grows up — an effective approach to parenting, probably. Just pointing at other people and saying, wild-eyed, BE LIKE THAT.

Anyway, that’s all to say, I’ve been around some seriously lovely, warm, friendly people on these film shoots the last couple weeks. First in Scotland, then Canada. I’m not mad at 4 days in Edinburgh for one fitting and one shoot day, not mad at all. The last time I was in Edinburgh was 8 years ago, when Rowan was a baby. It was just after filming the Hebrides Islands episode of Islands Without Cars - right after I placed 33rd in the World Stone Skimming Competition, in fact (out of 100! Not bad!!!!!!!!), a competition which has just this week been WRACKED with controversy after it was infiltrated by CHEATERS who brought FAKE STONES - truly the lowest of the low, in a competition that raises funds for local charities.

This is what the competition looks like from afar - over an old slate quarry. And this was the lovely gentleman who was running the competition, who clearly took it very seriously - he built himself this Judging Box so that he couldn’t see who was throwing the stones and therefore would be more impartial!!!! How dare someone try to make a fool of this man / endeavor!!!!!!

Here I am, triumphant after placing 33rd!!!

Anyway, this time in Scotland, I had a nice chunk of time to explore on my own in between fittings and filming. of the wonderful substack You Get In Love and Then recommended I visit Golden Hare Books, where I temporarily bemoaned having read all the Claire Keegan books that have been published and then realized I HADN’T read Small Things Like These yet (it was on my bedside table, up next and waiting for me, when our house burned down), so I of course purchased that and immediately read it over a phenomenal meal at The Palmerston after a gorgeous walk through along the Water of Leith walkway and through Dean Village and Stockbridge Market.

On my last day, I had what is to be heretofore known as My Perfect Day. It began, of course, with an enormous raisin scone smothered in clotted cream and jam, the best scone I’ve ever had, in fact:

Then a long walk to and through the Edinburgh Castle, where at 1pm, atop the castle hill, they fire a gun. This is a daily tradition which began in 1861 as a way of alerting the ships in foggy weather to synchronize their maritime chronometers. The weather had been holding at that point, with a heavy, grey sky. At 1pm, the gun (which used to be a cannon) fired, shaking the ground beneath all of the hundreds of tourists and it was as though the clouds were shaken too, as like clockwork, the clouds unleashed a shower upon us all, sending us skirting into the Royal Jewels room, or to see truly the most bizarre museum display I’ve ever seen, a mirrored reflection of a corner of a room where a king was born? (lol).

Then, I walked to the Surgeon’s Hall Museum, my personal favorite of the trip, where I learned the absolutely DISGUSTING, torrid history of surgery. I have an intellectual kink for medical history, which is probably why The Knick is one of my favorite television series of all time. Did you know that surgery goes back 7,000 years, with skeletons showing proof of trepanation, or intentional perforation or removal of a piece of human skull bone to relieve pressure, drain blood, or treat head injuries, epilepsy, and mental illness - obviously extremely dangerous but actually many of these ancient skulls prove that healing occurred as a result! Or how about an early way to control pain before anesthesia or pain relief drugs were invented - MOORE’S COMPRESSOR, which was invented in 1780 and was a clamp that deadened sensations below the armpit. Sort of a shop class version of a doctor asking you to sit on your hand for awhile before operating on it. Hell!!!!!!!

Then, I walked all through the town to a tiny old cinema where they were screening THE GOLDEN SPURTLE, a documentary on - you guessed it - the World Porridge Making Championship, which occurs every year in a tiny town in Scotland. I’ll have you know that tears sprang to my eyes not once, not twice, but thrice in this documentary. It was PERFECT - a funny, warm-hearted, delightful, humanist romp through a tiny town and the competitors for the honor of best international porridge. It is, graciously, currently streaming on MUBI - watch!!!!!!!

(A spurtle is a 15th century Scottish kitchen tool used to stir porridge.)

Then, another perfect meal while finishing the Claire Keegan book and a drizzly walk home. I love traveling alone. I love that my job affords me the opportunity to step outside of caring for others every once in awhile (er, my husband would say way too often, and he’d be right!) and attend to every one of my whims in a new city. Although, I’m lucky - my costar asked if my husband in a million years would have gone to see The Golden Spurtle if he were in Scotland with me and I’m very lucky to say confidently that he would, he absolutely would.

That’s all for now. Comment if you:

a) think I’m judging American teen boys too harshly (haven’t really talked to any in about 20 years tbh!!!!)

b) would be interested in reading an entire substack dedicated to the revolting, marvelous array of tales I learned at the Surgeon Museum!!!!!!

Oh, and if you’d like to see the castle we filmed at, you can see it on my Instagram!

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My son crawled into bed with me to cuddle this morning and whispered When are we coming back here?

We’re here now, I pointed out. We’ve got several days left here!

I know, he curled his fingers around mine. But I want to make sure we come back here again. I love it. It’s magical.

My heart leapt. Everything I was hoping for! I knew it wouldn’t be an unmitigated disaster, to bring the ones I love to the places I love the most, but I did have a certain fear of, say, apathy. Like, okay, I’ve dragged you halfway across the world, momentarily destroyed your tiny brain with jetlag, and you think this place is…just ok? But luckily my kids are tiny versions of me, which means they are wholeheartedly enthusiastic about most everything I expose them to.

Like here, for example: excited about a stick.

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My mom brought me to London when I was almost the exact same age as Rowan, and it cast a spell over me for the rest of my life. Literature and music and the movies and especially our favorite comedies, AbFab and Monty Python and Fawlty Towers, sort of coalesced in my little growing brain and the world made sense for the first time. I saw beyond the dining room to the kitchen, where the stuff was really made, where everything I loved was birthed (medieval history, my collection of vintage skeleton keys, The Secret Garden, fairy tales, the list was endless). I can see this trip having the same effect on Rowan. His eyes widening at medieval armor at the Tower of London, having his little medieval knight figurines battle each other along the Thames afterwards in a quiet moment when he thought I wasn’t paying attention. Recognizing every visual reference to a Greek myth in Athens, and then casually regaling us with the entire corresponding mythological tale. For the littler Zoe, the inspiration is less clear, but she is enjoying the twice-daily ice cream of #vacationlife and petting every single cat we see on Hydra, while screaming OH MY GOD ANOTHER CAT at each successive cat (every 10 seconds on this island).

Gusts blow through the island in the afternoon, scattering bougainvillea like pink tutus pirouetting through the air. Kittens chase after them, batting the paper-thin skirts about in a demented display. A pink light hits the cliffs around 7pm, bathing the entire western face of the island in a lavish glow. One feels rich just to be here, stepping over the occasional donkey shit on perfectly smooth cobblestone lanes, inhaling this perfect pine-scented air, sea-salted hair tousled by the Aeolus winds, skin covered in a thin film of powdery white sodium souvenirs from swimming in the ocean all day, muscles taut from all the gentle uphill climbs. It’s an island where yacht-owners meet wide-eyed families, all converging for a perfectly salted feta at a table in the wide U-shaped port.

Get ready for the wow, our horse guide alerted us in broken English as we rounded a clifftop for a magnificent view over the entire island. More like Thank you for my new life motto!!!

More on Hydra soon, plus my guide to a prettay, prettayyy perfect week in London with kids.

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These notes are so adorable, they’re SO phonetic-based, I am giggling all day long at these things. They remind me of when I saw Desperado when I was 11 and my mom bought the soundtrack and we listened to it in the car ad nauseum and I memorized the Cancion del Mariachi phonetically. 15 years later, when I performed it for the Mexican sous chef at the restaurant I worked at, thinking I actually knew the song, he laughed, and laughed, slinging the towel from his shoulder and waving it in the air in front of his face, to ostensibly wipe away his tears. No, noooo, he hooted.

Soy in hombre muy ombrado, que medusque normehol

…was how I had memorized it (total gibberish). It is actually:

Soy un hombre muy honrado
Que me gusta lo mejor

But he was smiling, because - come on - the phonetic-based memorization of a child is the apex of cute!!!! Prop stylists could never even begin to get the cuteness of kids’ writing as cute as it actually is. Case in point:

WUT OR YOU WOCHEN: Los Angelese 6 year-old German (?) for WHAT ARE YOU WATCHING? This note was slipped underneath my bedroom door to my son because she was not allowed to watch TV today due to egregiously bad bedtime behavior the night before. She took it like a champ, an entire 12 hour day cooped up in a house with no TV, but I did find these littered beneath the door. (For the record, the answer was: total garbage but I couldn’t manage what he was watching AND paint with her, cook them 3 meals and multiple snacks and then clean up after all those things, do laundry and dishes, take the dog out, also try to meet my looming copywriting deadline in between her “PUPET ZHOWZ” with little to no narrative thread, and attend a mid-day commercial fitting.)

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She wrote a RULES NOTE for my friend who came to watch them so I could attend my fitting (at Universal Studios Costume House!).

"NO WATCHING TV AND NO OPENING THE DOOR” (for strangers, ostensibly). UBNEEN for OPENING. Helppppp, I CANNORRRRTTTT!!!!!

I’m astounded at how well Rowan has managed this surgery, because he is SUCH a wuss with pain (like me, so, no judgement there). But Day 3-5 is supposed to be where it gets seriously gnarly, so I’m withholding a full assessment til we get through the next few days. It’s bizarre to wake up 3 times in the middle of the night again to attend to him, fumbling around for my phone light just like when I was breastfeeding him 8 years ago. Only this time, I’m pouring Tylenol and Motrin into tiny plastic cups, holding it to his tiny mouth, encouraging his sleepy body to drink up and fall back asleep. Back then, I was genuinely excited when I would hear his little sounds in the middle of the night. I missed him so much when I was sleeping, I couldn’t wait to see his little bleary face at midnight, at 2, 3, 4 in the morning, hold his little hand while he chugged at my enormous tits (R.I.P.). Now, I wake him up, he sits up, a mewing zombie, slurps the meds, and lays right back down to sleep. Genius.

As usual, this is my way of trying to hold onto these feelings for a little longer. If I write it down, it will still exist, these miniature magic shows they put on for me every few hours of every day, the absolute constant parade of delights.

The wardrobe stylist today told me she doesn’t have any kids. Great! I exclaimed, thinking how nice it must be to not have every day be about other people, how much less cooking she has to do, or how enjoyable it must be to cook non-bland things, dishes beyond scrambled eggs and soup, how much more time she must have to herself.

But I really want them, even though I’m in my 40s. I’m still holding out hope, she said.

YES, I nodded along emphatically. That too, I hope that for her too. Because, the notes, you see, the notes that could be taped around her house. The privilege of getting to see a life, a brain, a heart unfold right in front of your very eyes, over years and years. I never want to stop marveling at it. It’s why I could truly have (adopt) 17 more children!!! But my husband says he’s TIRED!!!!!!!!! (I am, too.)

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Next post, I’ll elaborate on how I almost furnished an entire house in 2 weeks from essentially nothing (though, okay, we are all still sleeping on mattresses on the floor, which honestly isn’t as bad as I thought it would be, and yet of course still far more preferable to, say, camping, ever again).

In the meantime, I IMPLORE you to listen to this audiobook. I started it on the long drive back to LA from Santa Fe, and only got halfway through despite listening to it the entire time. This voice actor is PHENOMENAL, he brings this character to life so vividly, he’s so good I sent him a DM extolling his voice virtues!!!!

And finally, here, a picture of baby Rowan in a beret. If I know you in person, next time I see you I’d love to imitate the Australian woman who approached us at the Rodin museum, screeching that she’d never seen a BAY-BEE in a BEER-ETT before. It’s all I think of whenever anyone mentions or wears a beret, and it’s been 8 years. V. lasting impression.

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The other morning, I was trying to ascertain why the same new pair of shoes that I gave both Rowan and Zoe on the exact same day are ruined by Rowan, a massive hole gaping open at the toes, while Zoe’s are not.

“See, his are completely destroyed, whereas yours are just a little worn in,” I illustrated to Zoe, running my finger along her barely-weathered toe cap.

“Oh, right, because it’s like a warning, if you keep hitting the edge of the shoe, it’s going to get a hole,” she explained, eyes wide.

I clarified that I actually said worn in, not warnin’, and explained what worn in meant. But these things happen all the time, every other day I say something and they try and fit their understanding of the world around the new term. Like when Rowan said Santa Fe must be named so because it was so sandy here. Or when he described something strong as having staminal, presumably because animals have so much strength and power. It’s like watching etymology come alive before my very eyes, my brief foray into Linguistics 101 bright on a technicolor screen in front of me every day, instead of living in the sticky textbook pages that bored me juuuust enough that I never signed up for 102.

Other favorites: “It deserves them right!” (Rowan, a few weeks ago. He also calls things he makes that he’s proud of his “piece of resistance”s which — go off, gen alpha social justice king!)

Zoe calling tombstones gross stones, which, I mean, yeah, true.

My friend’s son mis-using swear words constantly, my favorite of which was “It’s gonna be dammit!”

Rowan’s little first-grade friend, upon learning I was allergic to the cats at a birthday party, ran up to tell me something cute that the cat had done. “Wait a minute,” he said, his eyes narrowing. “You’re not allergic to words about cats, are you?”

Last year, Rowan balked when I kissed him goodnight and made to leave the room.

Wait, why are you leaving cuddle time so early??? he clamored.

Because you’re not SETTLING. I had been trying to shh and calm his body for upwards of ten minutes and it wasn’t working.

Okay, okay, I promise, I’ll settle…hey Mommy? What even is ‘settle,’ anyway?

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Zoe humbling Tyler on Father’s Day by intending to write “Editor” but of course instead calling him an Idiot

The delightful aspects of parenting obviously far outweigh the infuriating ones, the exhausting ones, but even considering that, I’ll confess that we’ve really been through it these last few months. The Eaton fire and losing our home/community/school/city unleashed some underlying behavioral issues in one of my kids that has essentially completely taken over our lives for the past 6 months. We have succumbed to a new lifestyle regimen of therapy, revamping our parenting style to something highly un-intuitive but ultimately more effective, and slimming our daily routines down to the barest, most naked calendar, when we’re used to having 1-4 plans a day (the way I like it, the way I feel most alive!).

I don’t know how candid about it all to be because I want to respect my kid’s privacy, but it’s been really, really, really hard. Losing our home and all of our beloved treasures and life artifacts and their school and our community in the Eaton fire was an extraordinarily heartbreaking challenge, obviously, but the emotional fallout from all the resulting upheaval with our children has been much harder.

Through it all, Tyler and I have been trying to decide where to go next, what to do. We have an open road ahead - do we rebuild our beautiful home, or do we cut and run and try and start totally anew elsewhere? In the meantime, do we go back to LA, or do we stay in Santa Fe, or do we move to London, which is the only other place in the world I desperately want to live (again, having lived there while I got my Master’s there when I was 24)? Do we say fuck it and move to a beach in Mexico or an island off Greece for a year? We have the lack of ties, so to speak, to be able to do that now, while the kids are little enough. Our pros and cons lists are dizzying in their specificity and lengths. But the lack of certifiable job prospects abroad and, most of all, the worry that another big and cultural upheaval will completely upend our kids’ sense of balance, plus the reckoning that we really, genuinely, totally miss Los Angeles (thank you for that perspective, Santa Fe!), is seeing us move back there - whatever is left of it while Trump is having his hateful, vile way with it.

what to do, where to go……..

Last month, I was so desperate to finally just make this decision that I hired a psychic (my first time!). She asked me to silently meditate on what I wanted her to explore, so I visualized the fire burning our home, then bringing my family to London, then bringing them to Los Angeles. When I was done visualizing, I said, “Okay, I’m ready.”

She said:

“You’re burning through an extraordinary disappointment right now and you’re trying to choose between two very different places to take your family. One of which, they’ve never been to but you know intimately, and the other where you have many friends and everyone is involved in the kind of work you do.”

…..Oookay????? The fuck?????!!!!!!

Also: burning through a disappointment????? I’ve never heard that turn of phrase before! Obviously contact me if you want her information, because she then unleashed a 28 minute beautifully-worded guidance through what I should do and think about next for the optimal mental health of both me and my family.

All that said, after losing out on yet another house we thought we had in the bag, we just signed a lease on a house in LA for the next year. It’s unfurnished (eeeep!) so will be posting some fun design inspo soon. We leave Santa Fe in a month. I feel like I’ve barely been there the last couple months, having worked in Austin, Miami, LA, Dallas, and now, at this very moment, London, since April, so hoping to really soak up a New Mexico summer before we leave.

We’ll be okay, wherever we go. Here’s a full double rainbow I saw in Santa Fe, I pulled over to the side of the road to stare at it and yell WOW!!!!! a bunch of times.

…also I loved this NY Times article on why and how Finland is consistently rated the Happiest Country on Earth by !

…Oh! And my 5 FUN THINGS recommendation substack coming at you soon!

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This time, I want to pay homage to some of my favorite items that were donated to me after the fire, either by brands or my fellow fashion luvur friends who really *get* me.

80% of this closet was donated!!!!!!!!!!! (There’s no dresser at this rental home, hence the bras spilling over the edge of a basket.)

Going to start with these sneakers - someone left these on our friend’s doorstep for me I think maybe 4 days post-fire? And I wiped my tears and squealed like a kid when I saw them. I’m not a #SneakerHead but these are the coolest and most joyous ones I’ve ever laid eyes on, I love the little see-through mesh window on the sides, and they are SO comfortable, I (successfully) hiked up a South African mountain in them a week later!

They’re the Nike Waffle One Burnt Sunrise Mystic Hibiscus mesh running sneakers. It doesn’t appear that Nike makes these anymore but there are TONS of them on eBay, Poshmark, etc. Here I yam, wearing them on said Cape Town hike, and a picture of the mountain I am standing on (Lion’s Head).

Another beautiful shot of Cape Town, since we’re here: TABLE MOUNTAIN. One of the new 7 Wonders of the World! Production wouldn’t let me hike to the top of this one for fear of “over-exerting” myself the day before the shoot so I took this photo thanks to the funicular that goes to the top.

Back to clothes. Then there was this Yellow the Label chunky rainbow knit sweater, which, wow, this person knows me really well, this was another squeal while being pulled out of a donation bag.

My angel friend Kristina, who manages the Lisa Says Gah store in LA, dropped off a box of goodies from her store and among them was this Tyler McGillivary Fruit Basket dress. It’s so FUN I cannot wait til it stops SNOWING IN MAY in Santa FE (forreal) so that I can finally wear this dream. She also brought over this entire Italian food outfit, which you will have to pry off my cold, dead body in the next fire. Haha! Too dark??? I think it adds a sort of je ne sais quoi that this photo is blurry…

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Then (clockwise) we’ve got the best exercise pants I’ve ever put on my body from A Year and a Day, that lift the bum and elongate the leg (also wearing above in the Cape Town hike pic), a lightweight corduroy Big Bud Press sailor jacket (no longer made but can find many on resale sites), this very perfect, soft tank top from Jungmaven, and the best Samantha Pleet rainbow swimsuit!!

Now, I already had these BOOMER sandals that I scored for $50(!!!) brand new on my FB closet purge group (if you don’t belong to one of those, find or make one immediately), but my girl Dominique got them replaced for me so I’m a LaBucq stan forever. Yes they are crazy expensive when purchased retail but you will never take them off? This LESET pointelle cardigan, these MATE THE LABEL sweatpants, which, I really don’t know who I would be these last 3 months without these most perfect, comfortable, cool, cozy sweatpants that my husband has requested I at some point ever change out of no less than 45 times (sorry but not gonna until it’s above 50 degrees). And this INCREDIBLE L’AGENCE tuxedo jacket that will be a wardrobe staple forever and someday Zoe or Rowan will inherit ◡̈.

HONORABLE MENTIONS go to the forever items I scored at the OZMA/RUDY JUDE sample sale a couple weeks after the fire, which was like an Unofficial Altadena Reunion. I ran into so many friends who lost their houses/wardrobes there, and one woman came up to me and said, with solemnity, “I recognize you from coming into my restaurant with your kids all the time. You had the BEST wardrobe. I’m so sorry for all your lost CLOTHES,” and she hugged me and we both cried. T_T At the sale, I scored an OZMA Silk Noil Jersey Big Tee that I have lived in, as well as the Rudy Jude jacket I have worn everyday for 3 months and show truly no signs of stopping.

If your house also burned in a fire or even if it didn’t, I recommend this highly compelling book I just finished reading, about the eerie collapse of an apartment complex in Oslo. HABITAT by Catriona Shine shifts perspective between 7 neighbors as the building crumbles around them in mysterious and increasingly improbable ways and they all feel like they’re going insane, next to each other. I need this to be adapted into a TV series YESTERDAY.

I also just finished HUSBANDS by Holly Gramazio. My 7 year old is, for whatever reason, obsessed with the book’s conceit of a magical attic that pours out a different husband every time you send one back up, so now I’m re-reading it to him at night before bed? He’s been giggling a lot, I keep waiting for him to be bored of a non-kid-story but so far he’s loving it and I’m loving re-reading it 2 days after I finish it. And yeah, I deftly swap British terms for ones he’ll understand, nbd.

I have six books on deck, but are you reading something right now that you love? Holler about it in the comments!!!!

Oh! And a fun video that made me laugh. The laptop lollll.

Thanks for reading, and subscribing! Click the button below to upgrade your subscription to PAID to help support my writing. And if you haven’t yet, read my essay published in Romper about the fires.

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“Kira are you…okay?” she asked as she surveyed my combined racks of vintage dresses.

Never better, was obviously the answer. I had achieved a state of closet nirvana thanks to over 20 years of collecting vintage, small independent designers, scoring deals at sample sales and through my hyper-specific Northeast LA Mom Closet Purge group (where I have been awarded the designation of TOP CONTRIBUTOR, natch). I love clothes. My parents are both fans of the finer things in life and much to my husband’s “Savings-Minded” chagrin, passed that gene down to me.

After the Eaton Fire burned down our house, with quite literally everything we owned inside it other than the clothes on our backs, an unreal generosity was bestowed upon us (and every other fire victim we know) by our community. Every day, bags and boxes were dropped off at our friend’s doorstep, containing clothes and toys for us to help us get back on our feet. We wept at the generosity of friends and strangers alike as we came home teary and weary from countless meetings with insurance/fire/FEMA/schools/whatever the fuck, every single day.

Even with all this extraordinary generosity, there were some items of clothing that I simply didn’t want to live without. To me, these are the must-haves of my closet, the foundations of joy and sartorial compasses through which I can find my way in this PFL (Post-Fire Life). It is my hope that this roundup will be useful or interesting or helpful to other fire victims or other lovers of clothing.

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The first thing I panic-re-bought on January 10th was the Doen Petra cardigan. I had finally found the perfect cardigan, I wasn’t going to be apart from it through this hellish winter.

“A heap of broken images, where the sun beats,
And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief,
And the dry stone no sound of water… I will show you fear in a handful of dust.”
― T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land aka Los Angeles in the first quarter of 2025

Sometimes horrible things happen, and sometimes in the mostly strep-less beauty that was 2024 you get to introduce your daughter to New York City’s Russ and Daughters lox platter and then take this picture in the bathroom, wearing your brand-new favorite cardigan.

Doen of course doesn’t make it in this p e r f e c t color anymore, but I managed to score one online elsewhere.

I had a truly deranged (read: logical and all got constant use) amount of Doen items, which, terrifyingly, I had to catalog for property evaluation forms. Most of them, I bought for half or less the cost of retail from the MOM PURGE but…still. Gone, all gone. T_T The Marianne Dress is another must-have. You can find good prices for this one on Poshmark, etc! The fit on it is sooo nice and it’s just such a beautiful easy everyday yet easily dressed up dress. I live in this in hot hot LA summer days.

I asked my mom for this Alkemie necklace for my 30th birthday. She balked, insisting it would fall off and I would lose it (???) but I of course instead wore it near-daily for the last DECADE. Somehow, this small LA handmade jewelry brand still makes them, and I was just reunited with it yesterday. It’s different, it doesn’t have the feather on the other end now, but it’s the same idea, so, close enough.

Here I yam, 6 months pregnant with rowie, wearing it to a wedding.

This silk boxy shirt from Everlane is THE perfect blouse - comfortable, flattering, easy fit, comes in a nice array of colors. I’ve been wearing mine to auditions and in commercials for years, now. Total workhorse item! You can find tons of them in other colors and lower prices on Poshmark, like I did.

This is the type of shirt you hope to find vintage somewhere, perfectly worn in, but yet looks fresh. Pearl snap buttons!! I bought it from one of my girl ‘s closet purges a few years ago. This time around, I ordered it new from Sezane and had them embroider the word “altadena” on it. As Zoe’s little best friend Ruby would say about her stuffie, her toys, her drawing materials, and even her toothpaste: “It’s very special to me.”

The MAX shirt.

Then, this carousel of basics. Sorry but once you find the BEST exercise wear and the PERFECT underwear and bra that goes with every night look and sails you through every film shoot fitting with the perfect tits, well, you don’t want to let those things go so easy, do you??

Girlfriend Paloma workout bra, Pansy briefs, Intimissimi lace hipsters, and Pepper bra.

We mustn’t forget about the Tubular Shorts. Shorts so good, when we were working on a Try Guys shoot almost two years ago, I took my beloved friend Rachel aside and in a low tone, told her in no uncertain terms she HAD to tell me where she got the shorts. Shorts that are raised on the side of your thigh but go down further in the back so your ass is fully covered. Shorts so good I immediately re-purchased them days after the fire before Rachel came over that night and gave me HER PERSONAL PAIR because she knew how much I’d miss mine. Whatta pal!

Down to one pair of shoes, my immediate footwear purchase was a pair of Theory black boots that are no longer sold but I somehow found them on Poshmark in my size, and these perfect Hoff sneakers that took me on a six hour hike up and down Hydra’s mountainous terrain and left my feet feeling like they were on Cloud 9. They’ve got so many great colorways!

hey, also wearing the tubular shorts here in Greece!

I have so much more to share, but Substack is telling me it’s going to cut me off due to length?! (rude), so I’ll save art and housewares for another post. Honorable mentions go to Rudy Jude utility jeans (luckily I was wearing a pair the day of the fire), Charlotte Stone Lenu sandals, the best pilates/yoga suit of all time, Roucha drawstring denim jeans, my favorite ribbed knit tank, and anything by Samantha Pleet, whose most special designs I had worn to all my favorite and biggest life occasions (engagement, baby shower, Islands Without Cars shoots…).

Also, not shown above are some really amazing vintage pieces I had thought were lost to the annals of time but I was actually able to score again thanks to the magic of google image reverse search!!! Never underestimate the power of AI (to help you recover a 1960s quilted rhinestone mini-dress, which is the only thing it should be used for imo).

I cannot believe I found this one again!!!!!!!!!

Please, tell me in the comments, what’s the one (or more) things that you would without question re-order, if your house burned down with all your beloved stuff inside it? I want to know! Tell me about your treasures, even if they’re just your everyday treasures.

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I’ve become accustomed to breaking the news of my pending departure at the dinner table, usually met with tears and tiny fists pounding the table, hollers of NO!!!!! Mommy NO. JUST STAY!!!!! It’s kind of amazing to have such intense reactions to simply not being around to cook for them and play with them and cuddle them for a few days, but I’m learning that kid days are akin to dog years.

In 2024, I booked 11 commercials (25 avails, or “You’re on hold for the job because it’s down to you and one other person and oops, sorry, the other person actually booked it”), 2 TV shows, and 1 short film. Most of those shot outside of LA, because the film industry in LA is in serious crisis. I didn’t intend to become a 1980s Business Dad, but here I am, with a functional carry-on and a dopp kit (80s Business Dad terminology for toiletry bag) packed and ready to go at a moment’s notice!!!!

{Me, to my family}

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The potential eroticism of the liminal space that is the airport is so whisper-thin, any man-made breeze can blow it right over. The other day, I boarded the plane to Austin and sat in what I thought was my seat, as I always select the aisle option, when a handsome floppy-haired man I had noticed reading a Kazuo Ishiguro novel at the gate loomed large over me, darkening my phone screen with his shadow.

“Not to be a bitch, but that’s my seat,” he said in a weird, surly, nasal tone.

“Oh, sorry,” I fumbled, grabbing my stuff and scooting over to the window. “Yeah. You really are a bitch,” I said, which I meant to say in a warm, laughing tone but due to the flight attendant speaking over the loudspeaker at the same time and the whoosh of the air vents and me mumbling it, came off as what I can only describe as disturbed aggressive. It was out of my mouth too late and he wasn’t looking to see my smile, so we both had to sit in its aftermath next to each other for the next 2 hours, him somehow winning the whole bitch exchange.

I was pleasantly surprised to find that his breath smelled horrible when he exhaled next to me (-15 points) and further delighted to see him go so far as make the flight attendant go get him a cup of coffee even though it wasn’t on her cart, but on the cart at the other end of the plane (-10 points). I, the WPB (Weird Plane Bitch), on the other hand, said I didn’t need anything at all from her, as I had filled my water bottle pre-flight (saintly, +10 points). Two hours later, we disembarked without having acknowledged each other whatsoever.

After my fitting in Austin, I took myself to pilates and then to the movies (is there any greater, more beautiful freedom????) to see The Friend, an adaptation of the Sigrid Nunez novel I really enjoyed during Covid. I think it’s the only (good) movie for adults about a dog? There was a point in the movie where the woman behind me worried for the dog’s fate.

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NO!!!!! she cried out, and then we could all hear her sobbing, intaking huge heaves of breath. When it turned out to be okay, with the dog, at that point, she heaved out a sigh of relief. Why did they DO THAT TO US???? she tsked loudly to her (doubtless also dog-loving) partner. The credits rolled and the whole crowd was in sniffles, men and women to my left and right wiping their eyes with popcorn napkins. I went to the bathroom afterward to see if my eyeliner had run down my face the way I assumed it had (it had).

That movie is doing its job: convincing more people to get dogs, I heard a man say to his date. I disagree as to that purpose ascribed to the movie, but for the first time in my life I found myself aligning with the dog-reluctance of Naomi Watts's character. Every time we see a puppy on TV my kids cry out, why can’t we get a puppy? Or just a dog that will PLAY with us?? They love Mabel, but she’s almost 14 now, and has never fetched a thing in her life. I can’t imagine having to deal right now with more than I already am. Adding a dog who has behavioral issue or really does anything more than simply lie around all day?? There is just so, so much to do already, every day. The kicker is, before the holidays, Tyler and I had decided to get a puppy in January. The fire, shall we say, extinguished that life plan. If, however, anyone has tips on having an incontinent 14 year old spaniel, I’m all ears. These rugs are rented.

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A crush!!! What is she like? Is she funny??? I ask.

Yes.

And is she smart?

Very!

And what does she look like? What color is her hair? I prod, pushing the malleable boundaries of his memory.

Oh…it’s been so long since I’ve seen her…(Ed. note: he has been on spring break for 6 days) … I don’t remember…

It’s BROWN! Zoe shrieks. And she wears it in PONYTAILS, sometimes.

No she DOESN’T! admonishes Rowan.

Yes she DOES!!!!

Zoe, she’s MY girlfriend, and I know that she NEVER wears ponytails!!!!!

Whoa, whoa, let’s get back to what color her eyes are! I butt in, casually steering the boat back to the safer color train.

Zoe’s eyes well up with tears. She DOES wear ponytails, mommy!!!

Okay! I say. I am obviously more inclined to believe her, since this guy over here doesn’t even remember what color hair she has, and they’re about to get married.

So, he’s sort of tall? Kind of. With…hair? Yeah. And he wears t-shirts sometimes? Yeah. That’s it? Yes. I mean, he’s Preston, ya know? I like that guy.

And do you have a crush on anyone, Zoe?

She buries her head in her pillow and pretends like she’s not going to tell me. Three and a half seconds later, she pops up from the cotton sateen. Okay, okay. It’s Autumn. She whispers it. Her face is red.

AUTUMN’S NOT GAY, ZOE. Rowan hollers.

We don’t know that! I counter.

We do. Because I asked her. She’s just not gay. Rowan shrugs.

Okay, well, things can change over time, I soothe Zoe, who has had both boyfriends and girlfriends over her many wise years, mentally making a note to re-order our now-burned copy of It’s Not the Stork! when Zoe asks me how two boys who love each other could even have a baby, if they wanted to.

This led to her asking a hundred questions about whether or not it hurts to give birth, and what Rowan was like when he came out of me, and how big he was, to which I’m always keenly aware to immediately offer stories to Zoe about when she was a newborn lest she feel left out of these stories since I did not give birth to her and didn’t meet her until she was 2 weeks old. I told the story of what she was like when we picked her up from the NICU, how small she was when we brought her home, how perfect she was, how much she loved to cuddle. She gushes over this information every time. Awwww she says. I was soooOOOOO CUTE, wasn’t I?? I was so tiny! How big were my arms exactly???

I entertained all these questions and then put a neat bow on the crush conversation by instructing No kissing anyone until 8th grade, though, okay? Then I re-opened Smile, a book they have begged me to read to them no less than 75 times now.

We know, we know. But we can always kiss you, right? Rowan confirms, taking my cheeks between his still-tiny hands, giving me a juicy kiss.

Wonder if, when I’m away for work, if asked, if he can come up with my hair color. It’s just that we’ve shared so very many kisses. It’d only be fair.

There’s just too many hair colors, too many possiblities, I can’t possibly be on the hook for that, I imagine him saying.

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After losing our house in the Eaton fire, we shuttled between various rentals and friends’ houses, living in 4 places in the last 6 weeks. We carted around our donated things in tote bags and brand-new brand-donated suitcases (Beis, you have a FOREVER fan in me). Every day, I would wake up and apply to various schools, desperately trying to keep my kids with their equally fire-displaced friends to give them some sense of normalcy. I would then pore through rental listings, visit rentals, apply to astronomically-priced rentals, not get those rentals because we’re competing against thousands of other fire evacuees, feel despair about where we even belong now, attend miraculously generous and welcoming fire victim donation centers, and drive around in horrible LA traffic, something I’m less accustomed to now because among its 900 other magical features, Altadena does not have traffic.

After several weeks of this, we grew cold. My friend in Santa Fe sent me a beautiful rental listing there. I filmed a Nickelodeon show in New Mexico last year and said then that I couldn’t quite picture living there, but in this heartbroken headspace? I wanted all the space and quiet and peace and art and green chiles it could give me. The rental listing kept beckoning to me, but that was another hurdle - finding a school for the kids in New Mexico, having our insurance approve out-of-state ALE coverage, figuring out how to work remotely, and on, and on.

In the end, we made it work, deciding to move here for just under 6 months, until the summer, when the rental market hopefully calms down in Los Angeles, or we go somewhere else, who knows.

Last week, we packed up a rental Chrysler Pacifica with suitcases bursting with beautiful clothes, toys, and books that our wonderful, magical, munificent friends had donated to us, and we hit the open road. Just kidding. It took us 3 hours to get from LA to Claremont (a distance of 32 miles). It was as if Los Angeles was saying “Oh yeah, you think you’re gonna leave? FUCK YOU. Watch this.”

I drove in my electric car (great for cities, bad for road trips to high altitudes) and Tyler drove the Pacifica, and every step of the way I perseverated over what he was thinking there, in his van full of garbage bags stuffed with donated Squishmallows. It was my idea to spend a few months in Santa Fe, and though he of course joined the idea willingly, I knew it would take him actually being there to feel good about the decision.

Photo by my husband, who has finally gotten into to family photography right when his wife (me) is at peak trauma-haggard (not shown).

As we crossed out of Arizona and hit a snowy winterland, and the kids in the backseat looked up from their iPads for the first time in 5 hours to marvel at the white peaks, I wondered if he was shaking his head, thinking, What have I gotten myself into? This isn’t my topography. This isn’t home.

As we went a bit down in elevation and hit the high desert, with sandy mauve stretches of dust and rock, and a Simpsons-quality sky above, I wondered if he was crinkling his nose like he always does when he’s annoyed or displeased or trying to hold back laughter, or if he was calmly accepting our new reality, geopolitical or otherwise.

Just a classic codependent response to a new environment, I guess!!!! Which of course was all just projecting - what had I gotten ourselves into? What have I done to us, uprooting us for (just a few months!!) to a new land, with new (clean) air, snowy peaks, pine trees galore, where everything closes at 7???

Rowan looked around as we drove up what was to become our new street.

“It’s sandy. Which makes sense. Because it’s almost in the name of the city. SAND-y Fe.”

Before I clarified what Santa Fe meant (Holy Faith, but I definitely had to look that up, I figured it was Saint Iron? idk…#sciencegirlie I guess), I paused, as I always do when they say something wrong but cute and I want it to stick, just a little longer, because that means they will stay small, just a little longer. I imagine this is also why my parents kept referring to magazines as “mazagines” until I learned way too late, honestly, maybe in my teens, that it was the other way around. (Don’t worry, I still found my way to success in Adult Spelling Bees years later.)

(That’s us right there in the middle, a newborn Christmas tree, hoping to grow up and be taken to a beautiful house somewhere great.)

I played Beirut’s Santa Fe as we drove up the gravel road to our new home, welcomed by hanging ristras (bouquets of red chiles) at the door.

The future right now is a scary, sad, open road. It’s bigger than I can even begin to process, but hoping this sleepy, sunny town provides some of the peace we’re looking for right now. Everywhere we go, we hear the phrase “This is unprecedented.” The insurance companies, the lawyers we spoke to today regarding the mass torte lawsuit against the Altadena power company, our friends, the news, our family. What has happened to us and our community feels bizarre, too big, too scary, too abstract to get a handle on.

In her newsletter, Ann Friedman referred to the idea of “WHIMSY AS AMBITION,” and that’s my new mantra, going forward. I’ve taped it to my desk. Whenever I feel like crying and feeling completely hopeless, I’m turning back to this, which was a large undercurrent of my vibe anyway B.F. (Before Fire), and I need to get back to it. The happiness of my kids and my own sanity depend on it. Whimsy as ambition.

And whatever comes through the door
I'll see you face to face
All by your place

Sign me up, Santa Fe
And call your son
Sign me up, Santa Fe

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Rosanna whispered it like it was almost a secret. “Oh, Altadena. You’ve gotta discover Altadena. It’s LA’s best-kept secret. We love it here.”

I had lived in LA for a decade and knew absolutely nothing about this neighborhood, which was only 16 minutes from Highland Park. Many more trips to Side Pie and a brutal housing search a year later led us to offering on homes almost exclusively in Altadena. More and more of our friends and their families were moving there, there seemed to be a quiet drumbeat coming from that side of northeast LA. Every time we visited a house there, we fell more in love with the area. “It’s cooler there in the summers,” friends mused. “It’s a magical little place,” other friends confirmed, driving an hour each day just to take their kids to preschools there.

Finally, we found our house. It was a 1924 English Revival beauty who captivated us with her charm, her geometric magic attic portal, its multiple gables, its primary bedroom staircase, its enchanting, bright blue-painted pool, its peach and orange trees, its romantic Palladian windows, an afternoon golden light in the living room that harkened back to Renaissance-era Venice.

The day we got our keys (2022).

It wasn’t an easy start, but it became the most perfect home for us. And every day, we fell more in love with Altadena. When I split off from the 134 to the 210 West, on that magical heightened curve in the sky that signaled the end of LA traffic and the beginning of Altadena, dipping into a massive mountain bowl, I always exhaled a little romantic sigh of relief.

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My kids learned to ride bicycles in the parking lot near our house. We walked to the post office, where I would run into Rowan’s teachers — “Rowan told me you’re going to Hawaii next week - he mentioned that he loves the grilled cheese there?” (lol). We walked Rowan to kindergarten and first grade every morning, passing by the same senior citizens waving from their little balconies, walking their little dogs. Zoe and I could walk to her ballet class a couple blocks away. I hosted frequent mom drink-ups at the Rancho Bar, a 1953 dive bar completely unlike any other bar in LA, where you could easily get very drunk for under $20, play and lose at pool, where there were always some boisterous neighborly guys to buy you a round of drinks and then leave you alone, just happy you were there.

Could walk home with one slipper, even.

Altadena is being mass-mourned right now because it’s unlike any other pocket of Los Angeles. Each neighborhood in the vastness of LA has its own identity, but I’ve never heard anyone speak about another neighborhood with the quiet reverence that Altadena gets. Everyone gets a sort of dreamy look on their face when they talk about it, even the ones that didn’t live there. I’ve lived in Los Feliz, West Hollywood, Glendale, and Highland Park, but nowhere in LA has felt remotely as exceptional as Altadena. I’m not mythologizing, I mean it when I say it really finally felt like home in a sprawling, tough city that can often give the impression that it cares a whit for you. There’s a reason our local market had hats made with embroidery that read “Altadreama.”

Starbucks has been unsuccessfully trying to open in Altadena for the last decade but thanks to its status as an unincorporated town and its staunch town hall defenders against corporate entities, it was able to maintain an independent identity that championed Small Business above all else. Altadena’s Facebook page is called “Beautiful Altadena,” and every day there was someone championing another ‘Dena local - local French bakers who would deliver fresh baked bread to your door, local restaurants whose best dishes were championed, people with spectacular home gardens who opened their homes to their neighborhood twice a year just so that Altadenans could wander around their property, enjoying their foliage.

Every morning, I click on another piece of Altadena news and my eyes well up with tears, not just for my lost home, my lost treasures, my lost sense of security and safety, but for this wonderful neighborhood that welcomed us newcomers with all the warmth of a grandparent greeting you after weeks or months away. So much has been lost, nearly all of it.

I’m going to miss the best breakfast burrito in all of Los Angeles, served blocks from my front door at the now-decimated Amara Kitchen, where I would always, always run into someone I know. The day we moved into our house I ran to Amara to pick up some lunch and I ran into someone who didn’t even live in Altadena. I hugged him, overzealous. “I can’t believe I’m running into someone I know on my first day in this town!” I exclaimed. It made me feel like I was going to be okay, there.

I’m going to miss Altadena Hardware, which is a deranged thing to say for someone who doesn’t know how to fix anything, basically. When we got the keys for our house, our neighbors down the block came over to say hello. “You’re going to love it in Altadena. We have the best hardware store in America.”

I laughed. “What could that possibly mean?” I asked, imagining well-organized rows of nails.

“You’ll see. They’re incredible.”

On our multiple runs to the hardware store upon move-in, I discovered what they meant immediately. You couldn’t turn a corner without an employee asking how they could help you, then guiding you through every step of how to use or select that thing. Kids were welcomed. There was an air of friendly cheerfulness that I’ve never experienced in a place with so many foreign instruments. When mixing paint for me, they brought my kids over to the machine and told them everything about it, even let them press the buttons. I always walked out the door with her words in echoing in my head. “It really is the best hardware store in America.” The Orlandini family-owned shop created something so special there, I always walked away feeling confident in my nascent ability to sand/shellack/paint/fix. Here is their GoFundMe, if you’d like to contribute. It all burned down, and all those wonderful employees who had a home in that shop are now financially out to sea.

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I’m going to miss the local flower shop that let you print things for the post office next door for just a dollar, their little daughter playing in the back amongst her mom and dad’s flora.

I’m going to miss the RiteAid where my kids could get cheap ice cream and hear my voice talking to them through the speakers (a nice ongoing VO job I’ve had for the last couple years).

I’m going to miss the beautifully curated Minik Market, a tiny Turkish market that sold the best farm eggs I’ve ever tasted in my whole life. They just opened less than a year ago.

Hiking Eaton Canyon, being helped by a stranger (aka a new Altadena friend)

I’m going to miss seeing people casually ride horses around Altadena, like we were still in an 1870s cowboy town. I’m going to miss the classic French Toast at 69-year old Fox’s diner, up the street from us. The school where my daughter learned her letters and how to draw rainbows and stick-friends holding hands, up in flames, along with the chickens she chased around and petted every day at the school’s mountainside coop. The Eaton Canyon trails where I’d either hike with my kids or hike with other moms, agonizing about how horribly hard motherhood sometimes is.

9,500 structures, gone. Thousands of lives changed in an instant. It’s too much. Far too much.

Christmas Tree Lane was spared from the fire, somehow. A 104 year-old Christmas tradition, this kilometer-long stretch of oustretched cedar trees are lit with bulbs every December, cheerfully welcoming us home each winter night. Here are my children scootering down it, leaning into the wind and the euphoria that comes from letting go, letting the mountain take you where it will.

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“Oh, wow, are you going to make a snowman?” I asked the little girl.

“Yes…” she ventured shyly.

“Cool!” I exclaimed. “I wish we were going to see snow for Christmas, but it’s not snowing where we’re going. When you make your snowman, do you think we could be one of the three balls?” I gestured to my kids. “Like, in spirit? Maybe the head?”

“No,” she answered flatly.

“Okay, how about a stick, then? Can we be one of the arm sticks?”

“No,” she answered, bolder now, but not having fun with it - dead serious about the impossibility of me being the benevolent spirit inside a stick on the side of some frozen water in her future.

“Ooookayyyy…can we be the carrot?” I knew as I asked that was too big - if I couldn’t be an imaginary arm stick I certainly couldn’t be the nose. She, of course, shook her head. “Fine, can we be one of the small black circles that make up the mouth?”

She shook her head from side to side, unsmiling, looked right at me. “NO.”

“Wow, okay…” I said, leaning away from her as her mom whispered a half-hearted “Parker! How come they can’t be part of your snowman?”

“K, hate her,” I muttered in Tyler’s ear, a woman on the verge of 41, a mature wife, mother, and citizen of the world.

“Where are you going for the holidays?” I asked the other family that wasn’t now my mortal shuttle enemy.

“Turkey!” they proclaimed proudly. “And you?”

“We are going to the opposite of Turkey,” I replied. “South Carolina.”

“I can’t wait to go fishing with Papa,” Rowan said wistfully, looking like a beautiful, small-scale lesbian in his vest, free PRIDE t-shirt he got at the farmer’s market, sharp new haircut, and single earring he got while tagging along with Zoe when she got her ears pierced last week.

“Rowan, it’s winter, there won’t be any fishing on this visit,” I reminded him for the 47th time.

“Oh yeahhhh.” Kids can somehow remember every detail of what you said and what they did when they were pre-verbal, and yet nothing of what you told them yesterday. It’s so bizarre.

Last week, I went to teach Zoe’s kindergarten class about Chanukah. I told them the basic story, sang the prayer in Hebrew as I drew candles on a dry-erase board menorah and they all pretended to sing along, and read them this really beautiful, almost melancholic, meditative book Hanukkah in Alaska before I handed out latkes topped with jam. They sat, rapt with attention as I read the book, and gobbled up the latkes fiendishly. Three girls yelled CAN YOU GIVE MY MOM THIS RECIPE!?!!! and I told them yes, they came from a box in the freezer aisle at Trader Joe’s.

I stole this photo from the kindergarten newsletter, where the images always look like they were taken on a broken camera in 1992.

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One girl raised her hand and when I called on her, she yelled “I WISH I COULD CELEBRATE HALLIKAH. I LOVE HALLIKAH!!!!” I giggled while saying she was welcome to celebrate it. She shook her head sort of sadly, like, no, that’s not going to happen. No Hallikah in my house. When I first started my Chanukah presentation, that same girl had raised her hand and, a propos of nothing, and shouted out “YOU ARE THE BEST MOM FOR ZOE, YOU ARE THE PERFECT MOM FOR EXACTLY HER.” I have no idea where it came from, but it was so weirdly moving!

On their way out to morning recess, a little boy with two missing front top teeth came up to me. He had played it cool at first, told me he didn’t want a latke, but when he saw all the other kids inhaling them he raised his hand and told me he changed his mind. He approached, his backpack hanging off his little arm, ready for his exit.

“Hey. You did double good today. Thanks, Zoe’s mom.” He gave me a thumbs up while sustaining eye contact.

I instinctively put my hand over my heart in delight. DOUBLE GOOD?! May we all strive for that exact report card this holiday season. Proud to be on that list!!! And okay, fine, I hope that Parker is out there in Boston, making a double good snowman. And you know what? She can’t stop me, I’m in the spirit of that stick arm, giving her a branch’ed thumb-up.

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Gift Guide for Me ‘n’ You:

Clockwise from top left!

1. This is the perfect bag. I’m not a “bag girl” (I’d always rather have a new dress and just wear the same bag for 5-7 years), but this is the perfect bag for my next decade. Compact, easy shape, now that I have kids over 5 and no longer need to cart around a backpack full of wipes/bandaids/multiple snacks/water/drawing materials on a daily basis! Black is more practical but this pistachio cream color is calling meeeee…. Sezane, $435

2. Like bags, I like to affix earrings to my head and only change them out once a season for a party. These are fantastic every-day chubby hoops that have personality and are sleek and low-profile yet glint-y enough to go with everything. Otiumberg, $175

3. I’ve coveted these kick-flares long enough! The time is nigh! Easy elastic for everyday, yet with a tailored look that work for dressier affairs. It was with glee that I spotted them on my always-chic friend Rachel the other night as we walked to our cars after dinner. THESE ARE IN MY OPEN TABS RIGHT NOW, I screeched, as she did a little pirouette in them under the late-night drizzle. Donni Kick Flares, $184.

4. This coat is Edwardian meets medieval meets modern Parisienne girlie, all 3 things I aspire to be at once. I usually buy my coats vintage for less than $75 on eBay or on my FB mom closet purge group but I can’t find a worthy dupe for this one so just putting this coat out there as the Platonic Ideal! Doen Watson Coat, can’t even type how much it is, too gross, but want it!!!!!

5. I’ve heard nothing but incredible reviews of Orbital by Samantha Harvey. “Winner of the Booker Prize 2024, Orbital snapshots one day in the lives of six women and men traveling through space. Selected for one of the last space station missions of its kind before the program is dismantled, these astronauts and cosmonauts--from America, Russia, Italy, Britain, and Japan--have left their lives behind to travel at a speed of over seventeen thousand miles an hour as the earth reels below.” I have a strange aversion to sci-fi and a strong affinity for space, but this one seems like it’ll straddle that finicky astral divide perfectly!

6. A few other books on my read-list:

   The Hypocrite by Jo Hamya

   Family Happiness by Laurie Colwin

   Tom Lake by Ann Patchett

   The Husbands by Holly Gramazio

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Clockwise from top left!

1. The time has come. Rowan is 7, and the world has colluded to inform me that it’s nigh time he learn how whittle wood. I agree with this sentiment, and actually he probably would have been ready for one of these 5 years ago but obviously wouldn’t have been trusted even with a butter knife back then. The amount of times I’ve had to say “No, you can’t bring that stick into the house, even though it is an extremely special one,” numbers in the thousands at this point. He forgot a rock that he found at a park once when he was 2 and he screamed the entire 15 minute ride home “ROCCCKYYYYYYYYYYY!!!!” The tiny man loves his tangible natural elements. Opinel, $17

2. My 7th grade teacher took 15 minutes out of every day for us to all learn how to juggle. It’s provided endless entertainment to my kids and even (almost) got me a couple acting jobs. Time for them to learn! These are cute and old-tymey. Juggling balls, $22

3. My friend is hand-painting your own pet onto necklaces, and she’s really good at it!!! These are cute and delicate, a little ceramic pendant portrait. I’m thinking of getting my kids a little Mabel to wear around their neck. Or maybe for me. Maybe the mini-Mabel is for meeeee?! Pet necklace, $62.

4. These lil’ cloud hairclips are CUTE! Zoe’s hair has almost grown back after chopping it all off in the middle of her TK class one full year ago!!!! Clips, $8

5. This might be me, but if I were a kid I’d be OBSESSED with pretending to be a librarian of my own domain and stamping my name into all my books. Personal Library Embosser $46

6. These digital cameras without screens are great, they encourage little budding photographers without noodling them with the disgusting immediate gratification we get from our phone cameras. Camp Snap, $60

7. I’ll never stop recommending the best kids book series of all time. I recently was Mystery Reader in Zoe’s class and read this to the kids and they were all falling over on the floor laughing. It’s just so clever and funny and cute and delightful for parents as well as kids (unlike, say, sorry, but Dog Man, which…I can’t even bring myself to read that with Rowan, I’m out). Dory Fantasmagory starter set, $29

8. Who doesn’t love a novelty candle? My kids blow their gasket when we get a new TAPERED candle (“Mommy, WOWWWW!!! Did we make that one????” … “No, I told you 75 times already, we already used the one candle you made at the Waldorf Holiday fair 14 months ago”). Anyway, get them A FARFALLE candle, $20.

Hope this helps make shopping for your friends or your family or the kids in your life a little easier this year. But if it gives you an idea for something you want to get yourself? Just as good, my friend. Just as good.

Also, if you want to upgrade to paid, I’m offering a December birthday special! Get 50% off the price of a year to this substack for just about $24! Happy birthday to me!!

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Not really, I laughed.

Well, do you easily find things wrong with other people and things, then?

Oh. Well…yes, absolutely. I’m Jewish! It’s in my bones. Though there is a passage in the Torah that reads “when a person seeks to find fault in his fellow man, it is proof that the fault is actually within him,” so hey, maybe I DO need glasses……..

Here’s someone I don’t find fault in, though: Australian novelist Victoria Hannan. Ever since we met because of our *~blogs~* when we were both living in London in 2008, I have been an enormous fan of her writing. There is a placid depth to her writing, a compelling assuredness that wraps its arms around you and shows you the way, and a seriousness that is still extremely funny. She had a TinyLetter where she just wrote about different swims she took, all over the world, and it was my favorite thing and everytime I see her (every 2 years?) I beg her to start it up again, but she just shakes her head, smirking at me. (So you’re sayin’ there’s a chance….!)

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WRITING PROCESS: how do you force yourself to sit down and write? In that: how do you avoid inevitable distractions, and how do you write on days that you work your 9-5 job?

I have to be emotionally ready for it and very intentional. When I start on a project, it's with a spreadsheet of how many words I plan to write each day to get a first draft written as quickly as possible. Having a 9-5 job where you can write at work helps. Having a 9-5 job that is so boring you're compelled to write just to make it through the day is even better. On the days when I'm busy with work work, I still make sure to take the 30 minutes of my lunch break to write. Write 500 words a day and in four months, you'll have a novel!

How did the ideas for your books come to you - were they characters or plotlines first, or just a mood, or...? 

It's a bit of everything which I realise is not helpful! This new book was originally going to be about the painter Agnes Martin so I spent a long time reading about her life and thinking about what could compel someone to disappear into the desert. But writing about a historical figure involves so much research and I don't really enjoy properly researching things I think because I'm lazy (except when it comes to holidays I want to take which I'll talk about in a minute). Writing about a real person also feels quite stressful because Martin is so beloved and who the HELL did I think I was being the person to write about her? So I thought it would be easier to make someone up and send them to the desert instead.

Tell me about this new book that you’re writing and why you chose to set it in the ugliest place on earth (Las Vegas lol) which is, truly unbeknownst to me but somehow knownst to you all the way in Australia, just adjacent to one of the most beautiful places on earth (according to you/your photos)???

I had been to Vegas once (for one night) before I had the idea for this novel and I hated it there. I also hate magic and fireworks and bright lights and casinos and kitsch and tack. So when I was thinking about where in the desert I would send my character, Vegas seemed like a good challenge. I wanted to write about a person out of their comfort zone learning to find beauty in places you might not think it possible for it to exist. 

Photo from Vic’s IG.

I've always felt drawn to America's deserts. And when I started researching Vegas, I realised that around it were some incredible state parks like Valley of Fires and Red Rock Canyon. And also that you can get to the West Rim of the Grand Canyon in two hours! It was an interesting juxtaposition to explore: the fakeness and monumentality of Vegas versus the beauty and monumentality of the nature surrounding it.

Photo from Vic’s IG.

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Did you or did you not tell me that you threw an entire novel away???? Talk to me about that. 

Three whole manuscripts, to be exact! The first two were just for practice. I didn't believe in the idea but I just wanted to prove that I could sustain a voice and an idea for that many words. The third was actually okay but it didn't feel very me. It wasn't the novel with which I wanted to go out into the world. I think it having written these three novels that I didn't like helped me realise that Kokomo was worth pursuing.

How do you know when something you are writing is BAD - what does the feeling stir? 

It's a feeling of dread deep down in your stomach, a dull ache at the base of your skull. I'll talk about this in my next answer but I generally don't read what I've written until I've finished a draft. Which is also why I've thrown out a couple of manuscripts - it wasn't until I got to the end of it that I realised it was a real piece of shit.

Are you a fast writer and a long reviser or do you take a long time churning something out to begin with? What's the writing vs. rewriting process and timeline look like for you?

Once I get going, I write really fast. I wrote my most recent draft (about 59,500 words) in two months. And that's while working full-time. Previously, I've written a whole draft at a four week residency. I work best when I have words on the page to edit then I'll spend up to a year revising and re-writing, pulling apart and putting back together. It's likely that no one will see a manuscript until I'm onto my third re-write. This is not necessarily the best or right way to work though! I know writers who labour over every sentence in the first draft.

Whatever gets the words on the page for you is the right way to write.

Talk to me about doing press for your book, which to me sounds like the most terrifying aspect of being a published author. Interviewers want to cull themes and motifs and symbology, but the writers I know don't necessarily write with all that at top of mind. Or maybe you do? 

Press for your book is a rollercoaster ride. It's a true honour to have your work read deeply and understood by someone, who then asks really pertinent and interesting questions about it. But then there are interviews that are so bad that they make you want to round up every copy of your book and set them on fire. In the first interview I did about Marshmallow (a book about how five friends deal with a tragic death), the interviewer's own mother had recently died and so that's all she wanted to talk about. She even asked me if I wanted to "tell the listeners how [your] mum died". I absolutely did not want to talk about that but I was caught so off guard that I explained the trajectory of her cancer. It was awful.

Do you have themes that you want to get across in each novel, or do you tend to find ways to add literary devices in on the revision round? 

In Australia there are a few grants each year that every writer in the country applies for. And for those grant applications, you have to distill your novel into themes to explain what it's about. So I will often have a good idea of what the novel is really about before and while I'm writing it. 

Often, however, those literary devices will find their own way in there without you noticing. Other times they're deliberate and you have to find ways to subtly weave them in.

In one interview about Kokomo, I had an interviewer mention a motif that kept popping up in the novel and I had to pretend I'd done it on purpose. I didn't even realise it was there....

Did the grief you were encountering in your life mirror the grief you were writing in Marshmallow, or did one come first and the other follow? Can you tell us about the process of going on a tour of discussing the grief in your life and the book after publishing? 

I had a draft of Marshmallow written before my mum died but it changed quite significantly afterwards. I kept a diary in the notes app on my phone in the last few weeks of her life which ended up being incredibly helpful when I went to start writing a new draft a few months later. 

I found the process of writing about grief helped me understand my grief better and work through it. However, I hadn't taken into consideration that the book would come out almost two years after mum died and that I'd be forced to re-visit the state of mind I was in when I wrote it and to spend a few months talking about and hearing other people's stories of grief. I got some wonderful feedback from some people who told me it helped them feel less alone, but the whole process made me feel awful and if I could go back in time, I don't think I'd do it again. Or I'd write the book but I wouldn't publish it.

Tell me five of your favorite books, please.

Commonwealth - Ann Patchett

The Secret History - Donna Tartt

The Great Believers - Rebecca Makkai

Hot Milk - Deborah Levy (Ed. note: Also one of my favorites!!)

The Pisces - Melissa Broder

Recently read and loved:

Kairos  - Jenny Erpenbeck

Headshot - Rita Bullwinkle

The Burgess Boys - Elizabeth Strout

Thank you for reading and obviously also falling deeply in love with my dear one, my Victoria, who lightly suggested my kids refer to her as Uncle as “Aunt” wasn’t the vibe she was going for, and which they heartily took on. You can order Kokomo here and her most recent novel, Marshmallow here.

You can also follow Victoria on Instagram here, where she hardly ever posts, which is of course very irritating to me because I would like to see the inside of her brain and days manifested on my feed hourly, if I had my druthers. She takes breathtakingly beautiful photographs.

This is from a TinyLetter she sent out in January of 2020, which feels weirdly prescient and foreboding, given what was just to come:

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The role of the parent is to coach a nervous system to cope with being human in the world. Easier said than done given there’s about 45 reasons an hour for the modern adult nervous system’s fire alarm to go off *gestures around at everything.*

And so, in light of this nail-biter of a day, here a few delightful moments to inhale in between feverishly refreshing your news source for ballot counts.

My kids started at a new school this year, but Rowan’s old classmates still invite him to their birthday parties, which makes him feel very loved. One of his old pals raced up to me at the party and stopped just short of throwing his arms around me. I think he loves me because I taught improv to Rowan’s class a couple times and all the boys especially loooooved it, falling all over themselves to outdo each other with their bodies and their vocal chords. No different than my class at UCB in 2010, really.

HELLO!!!!!! this long-haired 7 year old yelled at me, so excited.

Get over here! So good to see you! I exclaimed, enfolding him into a big hug.

Yeah, you might have noticed I have a new hat this year, he straightened, pointing to the vintage mariner hat he sported over his long, uncombed hair. I’m laughing just typing it. “You might have noticed I have a new hat.” lol.

…Aaaand you ALSO might have noticed that I’m taller now, aaand that I’m a pretty great speller now. What an update!

This is the kid who, at a birthday party last year in first grade, started absolutely sobbing when it was time to light their friend’s birthday candles. What’s going on, buddy??? I asked him, holding his shoulders. Are you okay?

He looked at me through sobs, gasping for breath. My mom isn’t here yet and she LOVES birthday cake and she CAN’T MISS CAKE. He wiped the snot cascading out of his nose on his sleeve. It took everything in me not to laugh.

That is…unbelievably sweet. Here, what’s her number? We can call her and see how far away she is, maybe she’ll be here in time for cake. He was crying too hard to talk so I left her a voicemail. Hi…your son is…very, very upset that you might not get here in time to get a slice of cake…?

I can’t believe I didn’t get to take that kid home that day. Rowan could have cared LESS if I ever saw a piece of cake again, despite having made it very clear his entire life until that point how much I love cake!!!!!!!!!! I had to meet this woman! How did she impress so clearly upon her son the importance of her also getting a slice of any cake he had access to???????? When she finally arrived, I basically fell over myself to get at the answer to this riddle.

“I really have no idea,” she said. “He’s just always been obsessed with me having one of whatever he has.”

Zoe thinks tombstones are called “gross stones” and I’m certainly not going to be the one to disavow her of this concept. Or in the words of Zoe: “I shoulda didn’t tell you that.”

This is a letter I found that my great-grandmother sent to my mom, enclosing some money for me - whatever the precious granddaughter needs - NO CANDY!!!!!!! And then signed it from her and her husband, remarking as a post-script: HE SLEEPS ALL THE TIME. hahaha.

Today, we should be making history by electing this country’s first female president. I’ve been thinking a lot about this piece by Audre Lorde.

“I have recently learned about Planaria, a small animal species that self-reproduces and regenerates. You cut off a piece of these simple creatures, and they grow a new piece altogether. Once the piece has been cut off there is an electric charge which goes out in the shape of what is to be regrown, this diagram is then filled by the fat of regenerating tissue—do you hear what this means? Until we can conceive the shape of what has not yet been we cannot fill it. Until we can feel beyond what we have been given, what we have found, what we have been told is right and so forth, until we can feel a need and desire for what does not exist, how can we decide over a future or even think of providing it? This is the function of poetry. This is the function of dreaming. Our ideas follow our needs and desires, our ideas follow vision.”

–Audre Lorde

Today, an electric charge goes out in the shape of what is to be regrown. Hopefully the right shape is set alight.

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